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Pro Tips to Make You an Ace!

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Iain Baker:

Combat - Escort Missions

•   Friendly flack guns are also annoying when trying to protect allied ships. Try to defend these ships from outside their flack envelope to avoid being friendly fired.

•   Friendly flack is also much less effective at intercepting inbound bombs than you might think, so don’t rely on it doing so.

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•   You can add and remove ships from your escort list. You may want to do this manually if the mission does not assign them automatically.

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•   If you have more ships to escort than you have fighters to spare you will need to prioritise which ships need the closest escort. The priority in descending order (most vulnerable to least) is roughly as follows;


•   Hospital ships, gas miners, science cruisers and AWACS ships are particularly vulnerable to fighters and medium bombers so make sure they are protected.

•   Light cruisers are a little less vulnerable to fighters, but they remain a threat if there are a lot of them. Medium bombers are still a major threat.

•   Heavy cruisers are less vulnerable to fighters than light cruisers due to their higher HP but have much the same point defences.

•   Corvettes are highly resistant to fighters and due to their numerous point defences, they can look after themselves. Medium and heavy bombers remain a threat.

•   Destroyers can largely ignore fighters, and medium bombers are only a medium threat. Heavy bombers remain a threat, however, and due to the usually mission-critical nature of destroyers, they will need to be given top priority when heavy bombers show up.

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•   If you have multiple vulnerable ships to escort and multiple fighters under your command, try to provide escorts to as many of them as possible. This is most easily done by assigning a wing to protect each ship.

•   Assigning individual fighters to ships is also possible but takes longer to organise.

•   Be prepared to reassign escorts at a moment’s notice as required

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•   If protecting a long convoy with more ships than you have fighters / wings consider protecting the lead and rearmost ships with you protecting the middle.

•   If you have a third wing assign them to protect the middle of the convoy.

•   If you have a wing of slow fighters or bombers, get them to protect the middle of the convoy so they are not too far from either end if you need to reposition them.

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•   Try not to get between two warring capships - aka the ‘threat axis’ - as you could easily get skewered by beam fire from both sides.

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Iain Baker:
Further Reading

FS1 Game manual
http://cdn.akamai.steamstatic.com/steam/apps/273600/manuals/freespace_manual.pdf?t=1399407627


Detailed stats of the various FS1 and FS2 era weapons
https://wiki.hard-light.net/index.php/Weapon_Comparison_(FS1)
https://wiki.hard-light.net/index.php/Weapon_Comparison_(FS2)


Detailed info about FS2 era fighter and bomber weapons
https://the-spoiler.com/ACTION/Volition/freespace.2.1/weap.htm


FreeSpace Tactics (For Descent: FreeSpace and presumably other FS1 era mods)
http://www.yourturn.ca/freespace/FS-Tactics.htm


Guide to using hotkeys
https://www.g4li.org/descent-freespace/hotkeys.html

NB - it is inadvisable to rebind a campaign's hotkeys as many campaigns use them for campaign-specific features or mission-specific events

Farkas:
Very neatly organized and collected information, thank you, Iain! I've tried a couple of time with joystick (don't have separate throttle sitck), but mainly did the playthroughs with mouse, due to the precision. I mean, I could try out the auto aim for the stick, after I swallow my pride... :lol:
But it's easy to be an Ace, just go very easy or easy mode, because Alpha 1 is the Doomguy/Doomslayer of FreeSpace :D

Iain Baker:

--- Quote from: Farkas on April 06, 2022, 03:54:00 pm ---Very neatly organized and collected information, thank you, Iain! I've tried a couple of time with joystick (don't have separate throttle sitck), but mainly did the playthroughs with mouse, due to the precision. I mean, I could try out the auto aim for the stick, after I swallow my pride... :lol:
But it's easy to be an Ace, just go very easy or easy mode, because Alpha 1 is the Doomguy/Doomslayer of FreeSpace :D

--- End quote ---

Using a small degree of auto-aim if using a joystick isn’t cheating, it’s just compensating for the inherent imprecision of the control interface. Same thing console FPS games do to compensate for joypad thumb sticks being less precise than mouse and keyboard. That’s my story anyway and I’m sticking to it 😜

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