Saving Dr. Severin—Are they serious?

DangerousCook

Rear Admiral
First of all, if you are not in the mood for a (probably) unoriginal topic full of complaining and ranting then you should stop reading now!

I've been playing through WC3 for the first time in a long time, and it is a fantastic experience. I think that it's in all likelihood the best game of the entire series, and I can see myself playing it again even once I've completed this run...

BUT

Why in the name of all things holy did they design the last mission of Disc 3 (the first Excalibur/first atmospheric mission) the way they did? It is such a terrible, terrible mission—it's counterintuitive, un-fun, and illogically difficult. From a design standpoint, it's gotta be the worst mission of the game.

To start things off, you're flying the mission alone. Sure, you get an Excalibur out of the deal, but as far as I can tell you are given absolutely no explanation why you have to go solo on this one. I would've been happy with a Hellcat-flying redshirt...anything!

The Darkets are obviously fine, but once you get planetside you're introduced to the Ekapshis. Up to this point, there have been no fighters with as high a likelihood of crashing into you. Their tactics involve A.) swarming and making your Excal actually feel sub-par or B.) trying to coax you into crashing. Now don't get me wrong, I think the Kilrathi tactics are actually pretty smart, and it's one of the many things I appreciate about this game, but this mission defines Kilrathi tactics at their most annoying.

Also, since you've entered the atmosphere, any power adjustments you made at the beginning of the mission (say the common reduction of Damage Repair) are completely reset, so if you want to restore those settings you need to do it while being shot at.

Now let's say you die at this point, which is by no means a bold assumption. The mission actually restarts in the atmosphere. It's as if the designers are saying "we know that we made this mission uber-ridiculously hard—hmm, let's make a concession to the player so that he doesn't actually go through with shooting himself in the face."

In the event that you get through the Ekapshis at given nav point, you have to assume you're golden, right? But wait, the designers decided arbitrarily that they needed to trick you this mission. Sure, your autopilot may come on, but if you actually do so and leave distant tanks (in the form of orange blips that cannot be targeted and are not in visual range) alive, you will lose the mission.

Which brings us to the tanks. You can't target them! This means you can't determine if they're in gun range, and you have to aim at these small annoying specs that are shooting you en masse. Do I need to mention that the Excalibur's gun capacitors drain quickly enough as it is?

So great, you've somehow eliminated the first set of tanks. Time to autopilot. But guess what? You (by some fluke of nature) arrive at the next nav point dead in the middle of surrounding tank fire. It's like Blair took a nap during auto, which apparently is also just the worst autopilot system ever made.

So we've got no wingman, fighters that try luring you into crashing (or simply just crash into you), resetting of your Power allocations, false autopilot signals, targets that are vital to mission success that you...can't target, an autopilot system that sends you into the middle of enemy fire, and finally a mission that when failed for any number of reasons (death, ejecting, autopiloting when they...tell you to) loses you the entire game. No "losing path" that you can avoid or fight your way out of, no...you just lose.

I'm fine with making a mission hard, but this one does it in all the wrong ways. It deprives you of a wingman, it tries to trick you, makes it illogically harder to hit vital targets etc. etc. etc. Just make the mission harder in the ways that the other missions are hard, I say.

Yes, this is a ton of complaining, but I otherwise love this game. I just found this mission so appalling in its design. I'm curious to hear if anyone agrees or disagrees. Thanks.
 
Dude, I never had that much trouble pulling off that mission. What difficulty level are you playing it on?
 
I've been playing the game on Hard. I compromised and Rookied through this particular mission just to get through it, though. It's not so much the difficulty that bothers me, it's the nature of the difficulty and the fact that there isn't anything enjoyable about the mission for me.
 
Some of the stuff you're talking about is caused by technical limitations. Ground and Space components of missions are actually separate missions as far as the game is concerned, so it resets your power allocation and restarts you on the entrance to the atmosphere for that reason.

And, yeah, this mission just isn't that hard (I'm a terrible judge of difficulty for most people, though, I think, partly because I play on Nightmare and partly because I've played the game so many times my tactics are born out of experience rather than instinct). I mean especially since you've just got through Alcor 1 to get here, with twice as many enemies and a weaker fighter, I don't think anything's particularly hard about Alcor 4. Ekapshi are nice opponents for the Excalibur to prevent things getting too easy, and I don't know why you think that diving for the ground is somehow an invalid evasion tactic. You have an altimeter, there's no excuse for crashing.

It'd be nice to be able to target the tanks, and I really don't know why you can target some ground installations and not others (answer: the only ground installations you can target are immobile, ones you need to fire missile weapons at, and are probably secretly ships), but the fact that the autopilot light comes on when you've destroyed all the red dots is nothing new, it happens in every space mission. I think it's fairly reasonable to assume that since your orders are to provide cover for the extraction, that you need to kill all the tanks or the mission will fail. I also think it was a reasonable assumption on the part of the designers that most players try to kill everything at a nav point unless explicitly told not to.

In other words, I don't think much of this is particularly unfair and you're making mountains out of molehills. Yeah, you can't target some of the enemies and you don't have a wingman, those are bit annoying, but the idea is that Confed just doesn't have combat-ready Excaliburs right now and nothing else the Victory carries can do combat maneuvering in atmosphere. Plot could have been different, but it would have been pretty easy with two Excaliburs.

If you don't enjoy dogfighting Ekapshis in the Excalibur, though, I recommend not bothering to finish the game, you won't like it. Actually, I wonder how you got this far without getting bored, to be honest.
 
After playing the other atmospheric missions, it's clear that flying solo is just a part of the game (maybe it was too complicated to have a wingman from a programming perspective?)

For the record, I never actually crashed into the ground (though several Ekapshis have crashed into me), I just don't like the fact that I had to avoid that while slowing down to not hit fighters and also watch Ekapshis evade my fire by literally flying through the hills and stuff.

Like every fighter, beating the Ekapshis is a matter of figuring out a good strategy against them so that was something I had to get used to. Don't think I ever said their evasion tactics were invalid (in fact I complimented Kilrathi tactics), just annoyed me as I said above.

I think difficulty of missions can be a pretty relative thing overall (with exceptions course), and maybe this mission just bugs me personally.

As I said, I love this game and think it's probably the best, so it shouldn't be a surprise that I got this far (I'm at Kilrah now). Just happens to be the one mission I can't really stand.
 
One tip for atmospheric combat is to switch to using only your quad Tachyon guns and not full guns. The Reaper Cannons seem to be weakened in atmosphere, so you are wasting power firing them.
 
I really didn't get the reason for atmospheric missions. Sure, the final mission, fine I guess. But obviously the game engine was never really designed to handle atmospherics - as evidenced by setting your throttle to zero, and obviously the AI couldn't navigate correctly without smacking into it - hence no wingmen.

My biggest issue is the spacecraft design - The Kilrathi have atmospheric-specific fighters, why not Confed? WC1 & 2 at least hinted at craft capable of atmospheric flight, & you saw them landing & taking off in atmosphere through cutscenes. But I sure as hell don't remember any wings on an excalibur! Some anti-gravity thing? Fuel tanks full of helium? Strings hanging from space? We'll never know.

Thats my big gripe about atmospheric missions. Seemingly pointless, and obviously shoehorned into the game.
 
Even the final mission's "Trench run" was a bit over the top for me. And as for the amospheric flightmodel, well, it was "weird". Never had this big a problem with the mission though.
 
I really didn't get the reason for atmospheric missions. Sure, the final mission, fine I guess. But obviously the game engine was never really designed to handle atmospherics - as evidenced by setting your throttle to zero, and obviously the AI couldn't navigate correctly without smacking into it - hence no wingmen.

My biggest issue is the spacecraft design - The Kilrathi have atmospheric-specific fighters, why not Confed? WC1 & 2 at least hinted at craft capable of atmospheric flight, & you saw them landing & taking off in atmosphere through cutscenes. But I sure as hell don't remember any wings on an excalibur! Some anti-gravity thing? Fuel tanks full of helium? Strings hanging from space? We'll never know.

Thats my big gripe about atmospheric missions. Seemingly pointless, and obviously shoehorned into the game.
Well, first up, you need to consider the fact that the fans wanted atmospheric missions. It's something people had been asking about, and something people were genuinely excited about at the time. Later on, the absence of atmospheric missions in WCP is something a lot of people complained about.

It goes without saying, atmospheric missions were relatively poorly developed in WC3, but I do not think this is because they were tacked on - rather, I would imagine it's because they didn't want these missions to dominate the game. Could they have done better? Could the creators of Strike Commander have presented more interesting atmospheric missions using a modified version of the same game engine? I guess probably yes :). They chose not to, because atmospheric missions are just a small part of a big game, and should neither distract players from the space combat, nor should they be significantly different gameplay-wise. I don't think it would have been a big deal for Origin to implement gravity - it must have been a conscious decision to keep things gravity-free, in order to keep the gameplay more or less the same. There was no guarantee that a Wing Commander fan would also be a flight sim fan.

Finally, in regards to the Kilrathi having atmospheric craft, while Confed does not. We see other fighters, both Confed and Kilrathi, flying in the atmosphere - it is logical to assume that when the manual refers to the Ekapshi as an atmospheric fighter, what it actually means is that this is a fighter specifically designed for atmospheric flight (can an Ekapshi fly in space? We don't know). All things considered, it is reasonable to assume that Confed may also have dedicated atmospheric fighters somewhere out there... but we should not expect to see them onboard a carrier, for exactly the same reason that today, we do not see an F-16 flying off an aircraft carrier. If the US were to launch a carrier-based strike against some random country tomorrow, that strike would not include any F-16s - but would this in any way suggest that the US does not have F-16s at all?
 
But obviously the game engine was never really designed to handle atmospherics - as evidenced by setting your throttle to zero, and obviously the AI couldn't navigate correctly without smacking into it - hence no wingmen.

All this tells us is that Wing Commander craft capable of atmospheric flight will switch to hover mode or whatever when throttled down... It's not like most of those designs are particularly aerodynamic anyway.
 
I suppose we did see them landing in hangar bays in a VTOL-like manner... fair enough. And good point about Air Force vs. Navy fighters (f-16s, carriers etc. etc.).

Strike Commander! Why didn't we see more physics from that game in WC3!? Especially as the WC3 engine was derived from Strike Commander anyway! Ha! Never thought of that - imagine a game where you play as a Confed Ground Assault specialist squadron, doing MOSTLY atmospherics missions... with Strike Commander physics (which were simple, but so fun) Repleetah, any other contested planet... the mind boggles! Ah well. We have what we have... The fact that we are all here talking about it just reinforces how, overall, the game kicks ass.
 
I never thought the mission was hard at all, but there was one thing that pissed me off to no end. As I recall, you have to destroy the ground installations in order to beat the mission, but the autopilot will let you fly on by without taking them out. So, you are like me and see the auto pilot light up and assume it's all good, fly on your way, and before you know it you're in Proxima having your guts ripped out by Thrakhath wondering what the hell just happened!
 
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