Question about final Prophecy Mission

D

Dervish

Spaceman
After Dekker says he can't take down tower seven, that Blair is coming, and we need to go back for refueling, what then? Do we have to destroy every fighter until the coast is clear and then auto-pilot back, or fly away from the fray? I'm only asking because it seems the enemy fighter waves are unlimited, and I can't seem to find a nav point to return to. I'm sure a lot of aces here have beaten this mission many times :)
 
I believe that after you get that message (Blair is coming) that the enemy fighter waves stop being unlimited. Kill what's left and then autopilot back to the refueling point.

(They'll be unlimited *again* when you return to take out the last tower... so don't focus on fighters after this.)
 
That mission was made much too easy. In a Vampire, there's nothing that can even touch you until your afterburner fuel runs out, so after Blair got the shield down, I tried to see how many more waves I could take out. Unfortunately, after a time your wingmen spontaneously combust and you suddenly lose the mission. Heck - I wanted to SEE the entire enemy fleet come through the wormhole and fight it.

The only real challenges in the entire game are some of the simulator missions where you have to protect the Midway or survive ten minutes against unlimited waves of fighters, but choosing the Piranha.
 
I recently played the Midway Defence simulator mission again - this time using the Piranha. No matter how fast I killed the Vaktoths, there'd still be some on the other side of the Midway torpedoing the vital components. Silly wingmen just seem to go for the Dralthi. Of course, using the Wasp (as you might in a real defence mission), it was easy.
 
I hate missions that are difficult not because of real gameplay challenges, but because you have to react to (badly) scripted stuff in the EXACT SAME MANNER the dev decided. So, instead of flying like a god and dogfighting like DEATH, you have to run back and forth trying to guess WTF you are supposed to do.

that is the major sin of Starlancer to me, every fucking mission had you aborting an honest to god dog fight to react to some fucking puzzle. You always had to replay the missions, not because you didn't fly well enough the first time, but because it is better to know what will happen beforehand.
 
I think, though, that real life would be more like that.

"Sarge, we killed all the enemy soldiers with skill. None of us even took a hit! But the President was still killed. Seems we didn't predict that the enemy might use soldiers to draw our attention, then send in a covert team to kill the President while we were occupied. I think I'll just go over here and hit the Reality Reset button so we can try again with the knowledge of what's going to happen."
 
You missed my point.
the problem is not facing unexpected situations, is when you have to guess what the developer wanted you to do, i.e. there is just ONE single way to solve the situation.

Not only that, when I load a space fighter game to play, I want to dogfight, shoot other fighters and bombers and strike cap ships. I don't want to deal with half-assed puzzle missions that can only be won by one "right" strategy.

Wing Commander 1 opened up many options on how to finish several missions... You could choose the order you visited the nav points, you could just fly to the nav point instead of hitting the autopilot (sometimes you had a better chance if you didn't autopilot)... It was fun.

In starlancer you never get more than 2 minutes of dogfight, they always have some lame "final fantasy final boss first appearance in the start of the game" trick, you never just fly and kill. boring.
 
Am I the only one who didn't have problems with the scripted parts of Starlancer? The only probs I had had been difficulty related or had been to get some secondaries right (ok, those had been scripting probs in some cases.)
 
Looking back, the final mission of Prophecy is all too easy, especially when you know what's going to happen.

Not to further change the subject, but Starlancer has been mentioned a couple of times. How's the acting there? Is it worth picking up if you're a big fan of Wing Commander?
 
Ed, in that respect, you're right. It is a space-war sim, not a Zelda game. I agree there. But still, in the missions where that stuff happens, it's usually a setup to where you already know you're gonna have to do more than just fly and shoot.

"Casey, there's a cluster of enemy ships waaaaay out in one direction. You and your wing all fly out there, leaving us behind to fend for ourselves if something goes wrong, and dogfight mindlessly, not paying attention to the space around your carrier, okay?"

Then, a moment later, "Oh! Oh! Casey! Enemy ships have appeared from the other direction, but you're fifty thousand klicks out, and you've already used your booster pack, so you'll have to afterburn back here in order to barely have time to shoot down the fatal torpedo and then scramble like mad to keep the bombers from getting more shots at us! Hurry!"
 
Personally, I'd call it decently sound tactics on the part of the Nephilim. The only thing they could have done better was to initiate both attacks at once (crossed the T), but then what would be the fun in losing a carrier every time you played the mission? :D

C-ya
 
The problem with Starlancer is that it isn't a sim, it's a "beat the system" puzzle game. You didn't have to be a good pilot to win, but rather to figure out what actions you had to take in which order on a heavly scripted mission. It's totally different than a sim like WC where you can try different strategies to accomplish mission objectives instead of some random arbitrary sequence of actions.

It's not like you had to "follow orders" on Starlancer, that's a shallow argument. You had to do arbitrary random things or else a cloaked bomber squad would show up and destroy your carrier, as punishment for not doing what the programmers wanted in the correct order. If you perform the puzzle actions on the correct sequence, this squadron doesn't even show up. They are there not representing the enemy waiting for a chance to strike, but rather as a game cheat against the player to force him to play the mission on an predetermined way, which takes all the fun of it.
 
Sounds like the old Dragon's Lair series, for requiring scripted actions, anyway. It doesn't sound very appealing.
 
Starlancer's not a horrible game, but it definitely plays different than the Wing Commander games; after all, it *is* called Starlancer, not Wing Commander 6 (regardless of the fact the the Roberts-es worked on it). If you've seen the Wing Commander movie, you've got a pretty good idea of how the game feels; it's very dark in space, with lots of browns, grays, etc. The plot's not bad, but there aren't any WC3/WC4-style between-missions cutscenes. Rather, all of the plot is developed through news briefings that you can choose to watch or not watch in your barracks or through in-mission com chatter. Personally, I prefer Wing Commander's style of character development; I never really *felt* anything for the characters in Starlancer.
 
I tried playing it (and I'm about to give it another chance), but I always get kinda pissed with the mission design.

And I completelly agree with how Delance explained it... He said what I tried to say before.

I like the game's "atmosphere" and design, and the flight engine is great. The only problem I see is the mission design.
 
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