wonderful mod!!

marcomads

Rear Admiral
I just started playing this mod, since i recently started to read the Fleet Action novel so i think it does make sense.

I really want to thank all the people who spent their time in creating this game... it's amazing the level of details you put into it, the intriguing story, the characters, everything in " Wing Commander fashion" :)

At first it wasn’t easy to adapt coming from WCP and SO experience since Standoff is so different from a tactical point of view, the ships are very fragile, you have to dodge a lot around and try to stay alive other than kill things… let’s say i had to go back to the academy and learn to fly from scratch!

Now I’m about to finish Episode 2 and having great fun. I only got very frustrated in Episode 1 mission “Storming the Rock”. It seems like “luck” is much more important than how well you fly there! You can have more than half your wingmen to eject in the first minute of battle as well as just 1-2 of them with almost the same probability with the mission turning into impossible or cakewalk respectively…
With such large number of ships I guess this is inevitable and it also adds to realism somehow… so i’m not complaining about it!!

Really a great work
 
Thanks for your comments ! We're always happy to hear about people playing our game. Feel free to post more of your impressions as you play through the game, we love getting both critical and positive feedback :)

As you may have read already, Standoff has mission branching and you may like to play through those alternate missions when you're done with your first playthrough. We've had lots of fun creating those loosing path missions !
 
Hey! Just finished playing Sirius mission 2 (Torpedo Delivery) and knocked down the first of those Hakagas!!
What a battle men... not the most difficult so far but definitely the most funny to fly!!

I tried first in Xbow and Sabre because i wanted those torpedoes to throw at the big-fat-mama but then i realized that i could be of much more use to my wingmen in a Rapier and i went for it! right choice it turned out to be :)
 
Depends what you're going for. My general belief is that it's easier to win the mission in the Rapier, just about, but if you want a clean sweep of kills (the Hakaga and both Snakeirs) then you're much better off going for the Crossbow because the Vision engine AI is still terrible at taking the right approach angles for torpedo strikes.

Of course if you *do* kill all three Kilrathi carriers in this mission then you end up running into more Snakeirs than Fleet Action says the Kilrathi brought with them. Pesky last-minute reinforcements...
 
Depends what you're going for. My general belief is that it's easier to win the mission in the Rapier, just about, but if you want a clean sweep of kills (the Hakaga and both Snakeirs) then you're much better off going for the Crossbow because the Vision engine AI is still terrible at taking the right approach angles for torpedo strikes.
Also, because if you choose the Rapier, the Kilrathi are more aggressive towards the bombers. We specifically designed the mission to be harder to get a clean sweep in a Rapier, as otherwise there'd be no point in taking the Crossbow.

Of course if you *do* kill all three Kilrathi carriers in this mission then you end up running into more Snakeirs than Fleet Action says the Kilrathi brought with them. Pesky last-minute reinforcements...
It's been years since I looked at any of these numbers, but I'm almost completely certain the number of Snakeirs is completely by the book. You can, however, meet more Snakeirs than FA had in the final battle, if you destroy instead of damaging the Tarvakh (the first Hakaga we meet). If you recall, in the book, the Tarvakh is damaged, and Prince Thrakhath orders it to withdraw, with two carriers for escort. By destroying the Tarvakh, you allow the two carriers to continue with the fleet.

(on a sidenote, it's actually a rather interesting question - why did Thrakhath issue that order in the book? It seems odd for him to "play it safe" like that)
 
(on a sidenote, it's actually a rather interesting question - why did Thrakhath issue that order in the book? It seems odd for him to "play it safe" like that)

i can answer to this since i just finished reading Fleet Action myself :)

The reason is that after the battle of Sirius he lost a lot of fighters (kind of 600) so he had much more empty room in the carriers than fighters to fill it and he decided to send two older carriers back but almost empty of fighters.


As far as the number of Snakeirs is concerned: according to FA there was a total of 4 old carriers and 5 Hakagas in the main fleet (one was destroyed in Sirius, two of them were sent back with the first damaged supercarrier and the last one surviving the battle together with the last supercarrier). In this mod you face a total of 6 in the winning path (1 in Warsaw, 2 in Sirius and 3 in Sol)
 
The reason is that after the battle of Sirius he lost a lot of fighters (kind of 600) so he had much more empty room in the carriers than fighters to fill it and he decided to send two older carriers back but almost empty of fighters.
Right you are. Isn't it ironic, then, that he ultimately lost so many fighters in Sol because he had no carrier to land them on? :) But I guess he didn't see the need to hang on to them even as decoys (especially as decoys, given his attitude).

As far as the number of Snakeirs is concerned: according to FA there was a total of 4 old carriers and 5 Hakagas in the main fleet (one was destroyed in Sirius, two of them were sent back with the first damaged supercarrier and the last one surviving the battle together with the last supercarrier). In this mod you face a total of 6 in the winning path (1 in Warsaw, 2 in Sirius and 3 in Sol)
Hmm. Well, as I said, I haven't looked at Fleet Action in years, so I'll have to take your word for it. It seems strange still, because we were pretty careful about these numbers. But maybe at some point some confusion slipped in. Oh, well, two more carriers to shoot at is always good :).
 
You face an extra carrier because you made this assumption:
You can, however, meet more Snakeirs than FA had in the final battle, if you destroy instead of damaging the Tarvakh (the first Hakaga we meet). If you recall, in the book, the Tarvakh is damaged, and Prince Thrakhath orders it to withdraw, with two carriers for escort. By destroying the Tarvakh, you allow the two carriers to continue with the fleet.

So if you destroy the Tar'vakh, there's an extra carrier present in, I think, Wild Weasel. However, you didn't check for the destruction of the Tar'vakh and both of the Snakeirs that would have withdrawn with it as escorts. So the extra carrier still shows up, and you end up facing six instead of five (and since you can destroy all six, you know they're different ships).

As for
(on a sidenote, it's actually a rather interesting question - why did Thrakhath issue that order in the book? It seems odd for him to "play it safe" like that)

Well, it's been impressed on Thrakhath by the Emperor and Jukaga - and I think he says it himself in an internal monologue - that the Hakaga fleet will be needed to fight the Mantu, so the Kilrathi cannot afford heavy losses against the Terrans - and overall, he's very cautious throughout Fleet Action, so it fits with most of his decisions. There's also the factor that marcomads points out - Kilrathi fighter losses are murderous, so they don't actually need that many flight decks at Earth. Remember that it's a lack of fighters (and pilots), not capital ships, that holds the Kilrathi back - they have ten carriers in reserve they can't use because they've got nobody to fly off them. Maybe this explains why Kilrathi pilots actually appear to eject in WC3, despite what we're told in earlier games.
 
End Run notes how, just like the IJN, the Kilrathi wash pilots out of the training program for even minor errors. They also conduct live fire training, which certainly helped "thin the herd" when they needed to be cranking out pilots ASAP.
 
So if you destroy the Tar'vakh, there's an extra carrier present in, I think, Wild Weasel. However, you didn't check for the destruction of the Tar'vakh and both of the Snakeirs that would have withdrawn with it as escorts. So the extra carrier still shows up, and you end up facing six instead of five (and since you can destroy all six, you know they're different ships).
No, that's not it. There's a mission in Episode 5 (Wild Weasel? Could be the name, I don't remember any more...) where you either face one Snakeir, or three. The other two are the Tarvakh's escorts, and they only ever show up in this one mission.
 
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