Yay, I just beat it. This is the first time I've beat "Retail" FreeSpace in years.
Just in case you don't know the names, or don't know what the little marks on them mean:
Rank: Commander
Badges:
- Ace
- Double Ace
- Advanced Pilot Wings
Everything else (in reading order):
- Conspicuous Galantry x2
- Vasudan Alliance
- Distinguished Flying Cross x3
- Commendation Medal x2
- Galatea Survivor
- Legion of Merit
- Meritorious Unit x2
- Medal of Honor
- Galactic Service
- Military Defense
- Good Conduct x3
- Distinguished Service Cross
As for how I beat that mission I was stuck on, I put the Ursas in gamma wing, and took out enemy fighters and the two Leo bombers with a fighter. I can't remember which, though; I tried so many times with so many different setups, and I didn't really stop to think about which one was the winner.
Then I got stuck on Clash of the Titans. Well, not stuck, but I wanted to accomplish the secondary objective, so I kept restarting. The final one or two tries I made I ended up using an exploit:
I think I was in a Valkyrie, but it might have been a Hercules... I tried both approaches at least once. I armed myself with Banshee (to take down those pesky fighters and bombers) and Disruptor (to take out the more dangerous of the turrets on the SD Tantalus). Well, though it was unintentional (the first time, anyway), it turns out the combination works nicely for disabling Nephilim. And because I could order my wingmen to ignore the disabled and de-turreted Nephilim, the Tantalus never deployed additional waves. (Of course then I ended up doing it again, because I forgot to take out the Tantalus' engines, and it jumped out with 3 health, denying me the satisfaction of having eliminated it (not that Command cared, though)... whatever)
The final mission (and of course, the one before it) were fairly straight-forward. I flew a Herc, armed with Prometheus in the 4-gun primary bank, and Banshee in the 2-gun primary bank. I would have loaded it with 2x Banshee but the lower energy drain of the Prom made me choose otherwise. Conveniently enough (because I hadn't thought about it in advance), that also was better in the final mission, because then the Banshee's superb damage against shields would have been for naught. Oddly, although I figured remembering to conserve missiles in the previous mission would be important (having noticed that even then there was no support ship available), in the final mission the full of hornets (60) wasn't all that useful... probably because the lack of shields meant a smaller profile for the missiles to hit.
Edit: Holy crap! I just checked on the wiki, and it looks like aside from Triple Ace and the ranks between what I have and Admiral, I got every single medal playing on Medium. Also, I uploaded a shot of the pilot stats listing (stitched together since it wouldn't fit on one page):
