Yeah, Starlancer needed to be moddable, or it needed expansions.
Venom, I agree with you completely on the ship maps, but that's it. I liked the fact that you had to be under thrust to turn (don't ask me why, I just did).
I don't care about wingman AI, becuase wingman AI always sucks. Even the FS2 wingmen are useless unless you watch them all the time and keep giving them orders. I assume that any wingmen out there are useless, and work from there.
As for the difficulty level, the whole game was too easy. I played it on the highest difficulty and I owned all. I must have hit 300 kills before mission 15. There was only mission that was truly 'hard' and that was the second to last.
Mission design, however, is where I thought the game shone. There are lots of missions shooting down torps, but there's also classics, like the raid on the Advanced Warp Gate asteroid (shades of Starwars), and the two missions where you have to steal fuel cells. Then there was the raid on the Czar. That mission was awesome.

But the best mission, the mission that had me sweating bullets, was the battle between the Pukov and the Yamato. I had to pry my hands of the stick after that mission. I was sweating and breathing shallowly and my heart was pounding. I felt abused. It was excellent. I can't think of another single mission in any other game that I enjoyed so much (the last battle at Capella in FS2 comes close).
And of course, the best part of the game was that it was so much like World War 2 in space. The setting, the personalities, and the events gave the whole thing a rather epic scale. That really appeals to me.
The game is not without its problems, but its still my second favorite space combat sim. Freespace was my favorite until Starlancer and Starlancer was beat out by Iwar2.
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--Mik
http://www.404error.comruhkferret on ICQ/AIM