[Bubbacub]

I played through all of WiH a few years ago on medium difficulty. There were definitely some tough missions that took multiple tries, but none that seemed impossible.

I've totally hit a wall at Darkest Hour on the most recent version. Did something change about the mission? I turned the difficulty down to easy, and there's still always one last torpedo that wipes out Rheza Station even when I can nab all the bombers.

[Bubbacub]

Maybe 15 failures in a row now. Best I've done is keep the station at 1% health after the bombers are done, then a single beam hit from the Valerie kills it. 

[Bubbacub]

I think the biggest problem is that the last wing of Artemis bombers is able to launch torpedoes immediately after jumping in. The station drops to around 50% no matter what, and then there's zero margin for any hits from the Boanerges.

[Bubbacub]

Actually I'm not sure where that torpedo barrage is coming from. It happens at the same time as the last Artemis wing jumping in but I can't see where it's coming from. Maybe it's supposed to be the SSM strike? But it happens before the SWACS jump in so it's out of sequence for the mission. I've tried this mission at least 20 times on the easiest difficulty, gonna give up now.

[FrikgFeek]

Are you sure it's the Artemis bombers? They jump in near the start of the mission, the ones that jump in later are the Boanerges ones and they come in after the AWACS strike.
The Artemis bombers also aren't attacking the Rheza, they go after the Vatican instead.

[Bubbacub]

The torpedo wave appears at the same time as the Artemis bombers but it's not launched by them. It must be a scripting bug, they appear out of nowhere and are IDed as friendly, tagged as "Warhammer." Really hard to intercept since they're friendly, can't target them with B.

[FrikgFeek]

Well, Warhammers are UEF torps so they should be friendly. However they shouldn't ever be hitting the Rheza, I guess they're launched by the Vatican at the nearby Deimos but somehow missing?

After some testing I can confirm that the mission is ****ed up, the Rheza kill is being credited to Omega 2, a friendly Uriel. Actually, it looks like the entire damn Uriel wing is hitting Rheza for whatever reason. Since the mission itself hasn't changed for over 3 years(and it was totally doable back then) this must be due to an engine change. I'll look into it a bit more and report back.

[Mito [PL]]

It's worth noting that BPC did get a couple updates since then, but since I'm not at my computer I can't verify if the mission file is in fact untouched for that long.

Also, which FSO build are you guys playing on? That info might help a bit.

[Darius]

That mission has not been touched for 4 years.

[tomimaki]

Wild guess. Could this make it harder?
https://github.com/scp-fs2open/fs2open.github.com/pull/2201

[Bubbacub]

Well, glad it's not just me. Is there anything I can do to skip the mission? I'd like to keep going with the campaign.

[Nightmare]

If you die 5 times in a row the game asks you whether you want to skip to the next mission.

[Mito [PL]]

It depends on how much cheaty do you want to be, but generally if you use the built in cheats you can do a couple things to make this mission playable before it gets rebalanced and updated, without skipping it (there's some dialogue that you might want or not want to listen to).

Using cheats, you could just make Rheza invulnerable when it starts taking a pounding, kill the AWACS wing as soon as it arrives, make yourself invulnerable so you can give the AWACS the boot close and personal, there's a lot of possibilities.

[Bubbacub]

Cool, thanks! Had to cheat to finish one more BP2 mission, but I just completed BP3 without a hitch. Happy to playtest missions for balance if they get tweaked.

[Mito [PL]]

Could you tell which one was the other mission? We'd like to know it because then community members can take a peek and maybe tweak the difficulty a bit. Or locate some sneaky bug.

[Bubbacub]

Aristeia, I can never keep the Indus alive. I watched a video playthrough of somebody using an older build, and I'm not really doing anything differently. I could just be a crappy pilot, but the Indus goes really quickly after the Medea jumps in.

[ehkodiak]

Glad I found this thread - yes, Darkest Hour is currently impossible for me too - had to cheat to get through it. Everything else seems fine.

[Renegade Paladin]

I got Darkest Hour on my second try on my playthrough last week.  Utilize your wingmen efficiently and you can do it.