[Akalabeth Angel]

Eh I usually  just play medium or sometimes I play Hard. Insane might be doable but I've never bothered.
I'm less concerned about "achieving all the objectives" or getting a good score than simply playing through the story.

Freespace is first and foremost a story to me, not a point total.

[General Battuta]

The argument can be made, however, that the story can only fully be experienced when the player isn't cushioned by unrealistic damage buffers and AI handicaps. The Shivans in FS2, for example, seem much more formidable on Insane, and it kinda demolishes the 'zomg Alpha 1 is teh jesus' syndrome.

[Akalabeth Angel]

The argument can be made, however, that the story can only fully be experienced when the player isn't cushioned by unrealistic damage buffers and AI handicaps. The Shivans in FS2, for example, seem much more formidable on Insane, and it kinda demolishes the 'zomg Alpha 1 is teh jesus' syndrome.

Alpha 1 is the jesus syndrome is due to the incompetence of the wingman moreso than the lethality of the Shivans.

He's only remarkable because all of his friends keep dying when he does not. If a person actually finished a mission with more friends in tow it wouldn't seem that remarkable (ie see Into the Lions Den for competent wingmen who make A1 feel like a regular bloke).

[General Battuta]

Exactly the point: on Insane, your wingmates will save your life and you'll probably end up dying nearly as much as them.

[Androgeos Exeunt]

Exactly the point: on Insane, your wingmates will save your life and you'll probably end up dying nearly as much as them.

I usually die faster on Insane than any of my wingmen. It happened once, when I forgot to type www.freespace2.com.

[Mr_Blastman]

Okay--lets try this.  Anyone beat the FS 2 vanilla campaign on Hard or Insane in one life?

[General Battuta]

Never dying?

Hrm. I didn't die for a while, but it would take QuantumDelta-level skillz to pull it off. I believe it has been done more than once, though.

[Mr_Blastman]

Lets up the ante even further--using a joystick, NOT a mouse to aim.

[General Battuta]

**** that. I play keyboard only!

[eliex]

I once found the ease of keyboard-only play dubious, but after a few key binds, it's an interesting change from a keyboard-mouse combination. 

[Androgeos Exeunt]

**** that. I play keyboard only!

* Androgeos Exeunt salutes General Battuta.

AYE SIR!!!

[Rodo]

I use the keyboard as well.. my only complain is not being able to asign the roll left-right commands to the 1 and 3 keys on the numpad.

[stuart133]

**** that. I play keyboard only!

A Keyboard??? Urrrrgh *shivers*
How can you use a keyboard, the only way to do it is with a joystick. 

[General Battuta]

Never needed a joystick. Had one back home, but it just felt kind of imprecise.

[Narwhal]

I only play in Insane / Joystick now. Even User-made campaigns.

It takes me, sometimes, an awful number of tries. Retail is not so hard, FS 1 as seen by SF-Junky was a tad (a lot) harder.
I have just finished the ST:R level in which you escort a group of 3 Science Vessels. I also finished PI like this, except I only had a mouse back then, and that I had to lower the difficulty (to hard or average, can't remember) on 2 levels (the one where you must take as much guns as possible on some big thing, and the final one.)

[TopAce]

Same here. I've spent so much time on keyboard to bother with a joystick already.

As for the thread: I play the main campaign and playtest on Medium, but I play user-made campaigns on Easy or Very Easy. I'm playing to have fun, not to get humiliated by dozens of faceless computer-controlled enemies who hit me whenever some mathematical probability calculation called "Accuracy" in the ai.tbl returns a sufficiently high number. The AI can afford to die in lots of the cases, but it's enough for the player to die once for the AI players to win. Then it starts all over again. It's inherently unfair.

So in a word: I'm not a masochist, and I don't understand those players who love virtual humiliation by multiple infallible computerized opponents.

[Narwhal]

Two reasons for high difficulty :

i. Immersion. I am frustratred to see that I am so better than other pilots in "normal", so I feel like i am cheating, AND I breaks my suspension of belief. Arguably, I should stop at "Hard" on User Made campaigns, since at this level I pass with some ease but I still feel there is a resistance in front of me. But for some reason, I don't do it.

ii. Duration. Without Insane difficulty, I would finish most campaigns in a couple days.

[Mr_Blastman]

I would think playing keyboard only would make the game rather easy--as you don't have to fight the controls so much and you can be so precise with ease.  On medium I find it well, kinda on the easy side as well, once you get to hard or higher the enemies start to get pretty crazy challenging to hit at times.

The only thing that bugs me about FS 2's campaign vs. FS 1's is the enemies are total missile whores in part two.

[tinfoil]

Why play on Insane? It's so much more fun to dogfight in a bomber on easy.

[Thaeris]

For the longest time I played only with keyboard/mouse. I've got a joystick now, but I still need the mouse for long-range shots. The problem is the stick's too noisy to be set to zero-deadzone effectively... despite the Logitech software that will let me tweak the joystick settings directly.

...If there would be one neat piece of hardware to have for FS... it would be a custom-configured external numpad. Slave all the comm functions to it and you'd have a much easier time! It would be quite cool to build a full-scale FS cockpit console; makes me think of a thread a while back where they were putting FS in a VR environment... can't remember which one it was though...