Originally posted by mikhael
Best space combat engine, bar non. Freespace is a great game but overshadowed by several others on the combat end of things. Tachyon comes to mind, as does Starlancer. Freespace comes in about fourth.
never played at iwar, but about combat I don't see much differences between fs2 and tachyon or starlancer. They all are sons of the same father (wing commander), each with his weak and strong points and a similar gameplay.
Tachyon was interesting, with his "inertial" button, and I liked the weapon management (weapons that ARE different in what they do, and not different just because their graphic aspect), but a sucking AI, sucking and useless capital ships, and the lack of strategy variety make it very poor about the combat action. Oh, you DO many many different things, but those differences are related to the plot of the game (save the sistin chapel, dock with certain bases, etc), they aren't different tactic situations. It was just too arcade. I consider it many times worse than FS2 about combat, still it was a funny game
Starlancer was more interesting instead, I liked it a lot, and it was pretty similar to FS2 but improoved in some points. It had a "standard" ship management, AI not that bad, and missions well designed in the strategic side. It had some flaws, nonetheless, mainly a low variety of (well done) strategic situations (intercept bombers/torpedoes, make torpedoes runs, supremacy, destroy specific targets) which make the missions sometimes too linear about combat tactics, and ships were sometimes unbalanced.
I name two other games instead
Allegiance, which I discovered these days. It has a semi-realistic inertial physic, which make the dogfight interesting (and the clouds of proximity mines that you can release are incredibly funny in dogfights...example: I was winning a duel, when the opponent run away through a space tunnel, I followed him but run into his mines at the end of the tunnel:/),
you can choose between ships that are completely different about stats, loadouts and therefore role, giving the greatest variety of strategic roles you can play that I've never seen.
And being multiplayer team based, the strategy is monstrousily important, obviously.
Xvt:BOP
I know it's old, but I still have to find a better mission based combat spacesim than Balance of Power. The AI is stupid, designed to perform very simple actions, but is extremely efficent in the few things it does.
It is the hardest space sim I've ever played, and you must find the right strategy to win. I remember I lost many missions althought I made dozens and dozens of kills, only because I followed a wrong strategy, when I won the same missions making few kills but playing with the right tactics.
In the missions you usually had many different strategic situations, and you had to modify your tactics continuosly to face the different situations. It was really incredible if you like those kind of things, althought sometimes the difficulty was just insane.
Also, I really loved the dogfights in those old SW games, where more than quantity, it is important the quality because ships fire less and are much weaker.
