[crazy_dave]

Since you brought up the American Civil War:  wasn't it eventually Grant's and Sherman's aggressive actions that convinced the South to surrender?  McClellan's more timid actions in the earlier parts of the war I've heard argued extended the war by a year or two.

Tactics versus strategy

McClellan was tactically/operationally timid, but strategically the Peninsular campaign was designed to knock out the South in one blow by taking Richmond, forcing the government to flee or surrender and capturing much of the centralized control of the Southern states. McClellan's failure to do so despite the golden opportunities he had lengthened the war. In fairness to McClellan while he was poor General in many respects, he was a gifted military organizer and trainer. His designs for the D.C. defense works were practically impregnable and his training of the Army of Potomac was superb. However, he couldn't bring himself to sacrifice those men when necessary to achieve the tactical victories necessary to achieve the decisive blow he sought. A more aggressive general might have failed anyway, but with him it was assured. Grant and Sherman would not have made those mistakes.

When Grant took command, a single decisive blow was no longer seen as an option. Grant and Sherman were tactically/operationally aggressive, but continued the envelopment of the South, then destroying infrastructure and armies, reducing the South's capability to continue the war instead of going for one decisive victory that would itself force the capitulation of the South. Strategic attrition should not be confused with timidity.

[CT27]

Concerning the previous post of mine General Battuta disagreed with:  I didn't mean to imply the UEF was winning the overall war.  What I meant to say was that for an organization that's outnumbered/outgunned, the UEF is doing relatively well (taking Neptune and the Carthage and that logistics vessel in R1 for instance).  The tide is still overall against them for now.

My apologies General.

[Buckshee Rounds]

Concerning the previous post of mine General Battuta disagreed with:  I didn't mean to imply the UEF was winning the overall war.  What I meant to say was that for an organization that's outnumbered/outgunned, the UEF is doing relatively well (taking Neptune and the Carthage and that logistics vessel in R1 for instance).  The tide is still overall against them for now.

My apologies General.

They shouldn't have to 'take' Neptune they should've kept it in the first place. Taking back what should never have been lost in the first place is hardly a victory. The UEF had a whole infrastructure and military-industrial complex to work with and three sufficiently large fleets to defend it, all in a single system - meaning near instantaneous travel to any point in Sol as I understand it. They had a whole scary bomber corps they held back and left the job of parrying the Tevs to just a single fleet (which already had standing commitments i.e. suppressing the Gefs). 1st Fleet (which has hardly any standing commitments) literally just sat on their hands and watched Severanti march through the node, they should've sent the GTVA packing the moment they stepped foot in Sol.

Really, the UEF brought this on themselves. Once the GTVA gained a foothold it was all over for them.

On a sidenote - why not merge this with the discussion thread, mods?

[General Battuta]

Holding back the bomber corps was the best decision the UEF ever made.

[Crybertrance]

Since, you know, its the single thing that's preventing Steele from conducting a single decisive attack on Earth.

[Buckshee Rounds]

But if they had used it when it was needed they would've been able to turn the node into a chokepoint.

[General Battuta]

Oh, as in the first hours of the war? Yeah, there's no question that that was a moment for aggressive action.

[Pred the Penguin]

That probably would have required more strategic foresight than the UEF had at the time?

[MatthTheGeek]

It's easy to say that in hindsight, but they just didn't have the intel to take that decision. Especially after they just lost a Karuna through massive beam fire.

Intelligence can win or loose wars. It's not just about assets.

[Klaustrophobia]

- Technical issues
I didn't check any of these, but you could probably consider me 'no issues.'  Nothing prevented me from playing, but I did get stutter in Her Finest Hour when the ordinance started flying after kicking off the attack.  It also kept stuttering after everything calmed down, so that was kinda weird.  I got the same stutter earlier in the campaign also, but I can't recall exactly where.  Opening cutscene maybe?  Also, unsure if this is a tech issue or not, but in Her Finest Hour the artillery didn't seem to lock up anything but the mjolnirs.  I never ordered them to shoot the Carthage, so I don't know if that worked or not, but they would not attack the minelayers or corvettes.   My first thought was maybe range, but all those are closer than the beam cannons aren't they?

- I read most of the material in the dreamscape
Very much enjoyed this dynamic.  I did take notice of the distance to each ship, but it didn't particularly bother me.  I have two minor critiques this section.  The situation map is a bit overbearing and makes the text hard to read (I'll take this opportunity to say this was in general true for ANY mission in which there was a lot of text, and I think that the dialogue needs to go back to the top so we can be facing things and still read).  I would move it further away or make it less bright or something.  The second is the one-liners.  They should be sequential instead of random, so we don't have to spam the fire button and be flooded with the same messages over and over before we get to the new ones.  I probably missed a few due to this.

- I sanitized the Gefs in 'Nothing is True'
With barely a second thought.  Partly because I knew ahead of time this was the plan, partly because they were enemy agents engaged in underhanded subterfuge with Steele.
But mostly -- and this applies to all decisions/feelings in the campaign -- for whatever reason I didn't ever emotionally connect in this act.  I was AWARE of the moral dilemmas and tough choices, but never FELT any of them.  It never felt like more than a video game to me, which wasn't necessarily true of AoA and WiH acts 1 and 2.  I was floored when the GTVA attacked at the end of AoA, and actually felt a bit angry when the GTVA attacked civilians in WiH, and hopeless at the end of Delenda Est.  In act 3, every decision I made was as a gamer completing an objective.  I needed to kill the Gefs to ensure they didn't leak about the ruse, so I did.   I can't explain this.  It's definitely not that the writing wasn't up to scratch.  Maybe it was the non-standard gameplay bringing my focus back to the fact that it was a video game. 
 
- I believed the Ridwan pilots had to die
At the time anyway.  See above.  I did feel bad about it, but the line about them "dying usefully" was actually very reassuring.  However, now having time to think back on it and read others' thoughts as well, I do think that they maybe didn't have to die.  Could have possibly quarantined them, and I don't think it was necessary for their wreckage to sell the story.  In fact, it was a little risky.  I would be worried about the Tevs assuming it was an attack, not defense.


- Those wingmen were not my favorite people
 I didn't actually check this.  I was pretty well indifferent to my wingmen.  All I can really remember about them was that Falconer didn't like me and didn't seem like a very ... natural?  character (crazy murderer and enjoyed it, but knew she was and shouldn't).  I knew Kovacs existed, and the last one whose name I never even fully remembered (Vid-something) was an amateur shrink and at one point revealed being a serial killer.  I was barely aware of them as wingmen in missions also.  I mostly felt like I was flying alone, and occasionally remembered "oh yeah, I can have the other guys kill this target while I do something else."


- I had no trouble pulling off the assassination
Also didn't actually select this one, but I was able to complete the mission rather easily.  I did have a bit of trouble, but that was from me putzing around the first time and not mission difficulty, so I feel I fall into the spirit of this answer.

- I used the sensor flashbang during the assassination
 In my successful run, I wasted the transport with my shrikes (THANK YOU for the "too close" warning, I definitely would have caught myself in the blast thinking of paveways) and sidhe, then popped off the flashbang and afterburned away.  I COMPLETELY forgot about the decoy and the coasting out thing.  I would have used the decoy, but who knows how successfully.  I could have sworn I got shot a few times in the seconds after opening fire until I popped the flash bang, and maybe even a glancing blow after it wore off, but the debriefing said I never took fire.

 
- I hacked a Mjolnir during the assassination
  My first attempt on this mission I did this, more out of the curiosity of finding all options than as my actual plan.  I hacked it before identifying the transport.  I had no idea this was going to reveal me and let the patrols absolutely waste me.  However reading the other responses, it seems I'm supposed to be able to hack it without being detected, or at least not locked up completely.  Did I miss something?  The patrols were on me with radar lock immediately.  I think the hack completed right as I blew up.  I didn't try this again for the next attempt because of this. 

- I destroyed the Gef reactor in 'One Future'
It wasn't my plan, but my capture transport was killed.  I destroyed the MacDuff and I THOUGHT all the fighters and called in the transport.  That is when I noticed the sentry guns around the habitat and thought I better clear those for the transport.  While I was doing this, fighters killed my transport.  Turned around just in time to see it explode.  I still have no idea where those came from, because the only blips on my radar when I called it in were in front of me, and I never saw any fighters come from the asteroid and pass me on their way to the transport.

- 'One Future' didn't change my earlier decision about the Gef pilots
Not applicable. 
   
- I loved flying the Custos-X
The first time, I HATED it.  Absolutely despised flying a cap ship.  Completely floundered trying to work the weapons and fly the damn thing at the same time, while the mission was under a time crunch and kept throwing **** at me and not giving me a chance to acclimate to the controls and added responsibility.  Extreme task overload.  There was no warm-up period.  A few sentences in the briefing that really only conveyed to me "press the arrow keys to do stuff to the turrets" was all I had to go on.  I cursed and swore at the mission design, and when I blew up I ragequit until the next day.  At some point relatively early in the next playthrough, I figured it out and managed to fly it effectively.  From that point on, I enjoyed it.  "Love" is perhaps too strong a word, but I'm glad I got to fly it.  I still think getting thrown in the deep end and learning by failure is bad design, but I'm less irate about it now.
   
- I was overwhelmed by 'Her Finest Hour'
 Similar to the Custos.  In the deep end, trial by fire, task overload.  It took a couple of playthroughs to figure out just what the F**k was going on.  Then a few more of trial-and-error strategy wise.  This to me was the bigger annoyance.  I read the briefing carefully (several times by the end) and paid as much attention to the wall of text as possible in-mission, including pausing frequently to read the message log.  I did my absolute best to actually form a strategy and execute it to the best of my ability, and really enjoyed that aspect of it.  But what it ended up as felt like trial-and-error until you find "the trick."  I completed all the objectives I reasonably could and followed the prompts.  The one thing I did NOT do was rely on my wingmen's invincibility as a crutch.  I wouldn't send them after cruisers or stuff in the sentry gun screen, because they SHOULD get vaporized attacking these targets.  This meant that I didn't kill the minelayers, because my artillery wouldn't target them (see top of post).

 While I enjoyed the real-time strategy feeling behind the mission, doing it from the cockpit of a fighter with the comms menu was rather aggravating.   After the break-in runs, it was reasonable and for the most part enjoyable (similar feelings to the Custos mission), up to the point of actually calling the attack.  Then all hell broke loose.  Trying to direct that traffic was a godawful nightmare.  When you've got ten wings flying 5 different roles in a full on fleet battle, management just becomes impossible.  The first time I got this far, I was actually calling shots with which wings I called in when, and trying to actually give them targets.  This was way too slow and I thought I was getting my fighters mauled because they were trickling in instead of massing an attack.  The Carthage escaped, but I was rather surprised in the debrief to be congratulated on keeping the fighters alive (I didn't think I did).  The next time I got to the attack stage, I called in everything before trying to organize the attack.  That fell apart quickly.  I ended up just having to C-3-2 the Carthage and put artillery in free fire.  It worked, but I lost most of my fighters.  We needed to know that the reinforcements come in where you are.  They might already, but they also need initial orders, and the player to know what those are specifically before calling them in.  A coordinated attack is impossible from the comms menu.

- I took the Carthage's surrender
 Purely tactical decision.  I thought about the tech available to analyze, and even considered that given the rapid and miraculous repairs that seem to occur in the BP universe, it might even be put to use in some capacity for the UEF.  I considered the fact that blowing the ship up might be a big morale shock to the GTVA, particularly civilians, but that would need to be one uninterrupted attack, not after a cease fire and offered surrender.  That didn't seem like it would do anything but turn more civs to the GTVA's side.  I had also already learned form the briefing or dreamscape or somewhere that Steele was already rolling to hard for it to be the political victory anymore.  Morality factored ever so slightly in that I wasn't going to kill 10,000 crew without it giving a tactical advantage.  The comment about 10,000 prisoners did make me think a bit.
   

- Placing turrets was tricky during 'Eyes in the Storm'
The arrow keys didn't work well at all.  At one point I found myself unable to get unstuck from one of the platforms in a group, and finally gave up and deployed to that one even though it wasn't the exact one I wanted.  I eventually discovered that the numpad keys worked much better, but I kept naturally returning to the arrow keys anyway.  I never did figure out how to deploy the ECM and repair pods, and this drove me crazy.  All else aside, I didn't really like the tower defense style gameplay.

   
- I wasn't bothered by 'Universal Truth'
 It was a very good setup and great for revealing info, but it didn't creep me out in the slightest like 'Ken' did in act 1.  Again, it was just completing the objectives of the game to me.


- I escaped 'Universal Truth' with my mind intact
   I can follow instructions   I ran when ken told me to, didn't wander aimlessly, and didn't turn around.  hell, i didn't even use rear view in case that set it off.
To be honest, I thought this aspect of the mission might have been too easy.  Until I thought about all the extra nodes and the fact you might be able to do something with them, I didn't think it was even possible to go insane (except by choosing so).  I probed all the nodes as far as possible, and didn't seem threatened.  I never got the sense I was "reaching" too far like it warned me about in the briefing.  Maybe you could make it a little more tricky so that you have to actually be careful when probing for extra info in a future release?  More temptation to stray off along the way?  (This is what the extra nodes were for I'm guessing?  Never even thought about it at the time, just went for ken in the middle.  I actually thought they were there to make an arrow.

- I recognize the necessity of the Fedayeen
    Don't really have anything to add to this.  Except the thought that they seem to be so good at what they do that the UEF might be thrashing the GTVA if they were unleashed for the whole war.

- I have supported the UEF, and still do
The GTVA's reasons aren't completely asinine to me anymore, but still unjustified to me.  They are still the cause of the whole damn mess.  No matter how I look at this, I can't see how the GTVA is doing anything positive by going to war.  They've got no idea what's going on with the Shivans and Vishnans.  They just see something going on that they don't understand/like, and their response is "KILL IT!"  NO ONE involved with the whole nagari mess has any way of knowing what the absolute truth is.  Everyone's view is colored by the whoever is guiding them in the nagari world.  You've got only their word they are who they say they are.  The one thing that DOES seem to be more or less agreed upon is that aggression and destruction is the catalyst for calling the shivans/pissing off the vishnans into not caring about humans anymore.  Conquering the UEF isn't going to help even if this doesn't doesn't put the shivans in full on purge mode.


- Humanity has a chance!
  this probably wouldn't be a three part story otherwise.

[Drogoth]

- I have supported the UEF, and still do
The GTVA's reasons aren't completely asinine to me anymore, but still unjustified to me.  They are still the cause of the whole damn mess.  No matter how I look at this, I can't see how the GTVA is doing anything positive by going to war.  They've got no idea what's going on with the Shivans and Vishnans.  They just see something going on that they don't understand/like, and their response is "KILL IT!"  NO ONE involved with the whole nagari mess has any way of knowing what the absolute truth is.  Everyone's view is colored by the whoever is guiding them in the nagari world.  You've got only their word they are who they say they are.  The one thing that DOES seem to be more or less agreed upon is that aggression and destruction is the catalyst for calling the shivans/pissing off the vishnans into not caring about humans anymore.  Conquering the UEF isn't going to help even if this doesn't doesn't put the shivans in full on purge mode.

Full Disclosure, I was already a Tev Supporter, but your point here about how no one has the absolute truth and that views are colored by whoever is guiding them and what not - that actually had the opposite effect on me.

That strengthened my support for the GTVA.

We know that the the Beis, and the Elders are influenced by Vishans. Noemi by the Shivan's (or a Shivan proxy). Ditto for the HoL and perhaps Khonsu although Khonsu's influencer may be vishanan, who knows.

As far as I'm aware, the Security Council is clean, and they seem to be the only ones. They may be cold, calculating sons of *****es, but they saw a threat, and they took a course of action they deemed most likely to save humanity. Maybe it was a flawed but it was at least their own.

Keep in mind the reality the GTVA lived in, especially post Capella. Everything they do is informed by one basic imperative: survival. They don't trust anyone outside of the alliance.

Even if they knew that the Vishnans would spare them if there was no war, would they trust them? Would you? What guarantee would the Security Council have that the Vishnans would follow through on the agreement? The Elders may have bought it, but I don't think the security council ever would. Not after Capella.

My impression is that the Security Council hasn't given up on being able to survive the Shivans. Maybe they're wrong - but I can't fault them for having that faith in humanity. And so I understand where the motivation for the war came from. The UEF represented an unforgivable security threat. For a variety of reasons, some that were already apparent, and some that weren't yet clear but no less real.

[General Battuta]

The wingmen in M21 can get knocked out of action, they're not precisely invincible. They can get temporarily vinced.

[Klaustrophobia]

how about the artillery targeting thing?  am i not supposed to be able to target the cruisers and corvettes, or is something wrong?

[General Battuta]

That's pretty odd, yeah. The artillery system breaks down completely part way through the mission for no discernable reason, but I've never heard of it failing to add the cruisers or corvettes as targets.

[Klaustrophobia]

maybe it's just i never tried targeting them before that.  i left them in free-fire until the awacs were down, and then had them go after the mjolnirs first. 

[Crybertrance]

maybe it's just i never tried targeting them before that.  i left them in free-fire until the awacs were down, and then had them go after the mjolnirs first.

Yup, maybe its that. I've had no trouble targeting the Cruisers and Corvettes (even can target the Tankers).

[Klaustrophobia]

so can they actually shoot at things before the awacs coverage is cleared?  the briefing and dialogue led me to believe no.

[General Battuta]

They're able to use torpedoes but they're saving ammo on the mass drivers until they have cleaner targeting solutions.

[Crybertrance]

I think that should be made clearer in the briefing. However, that being said, the Artillery clearly fires a Torpedo salvo just a few seconds into the mission, that should be an enough clue that the AWACS ins't messing up the Torps.

[Klaustrophobia]

I think that should be made clearer in the briefing. However, that being said, the Artillery clearly fires a Torpedo salvo just a few seconds into the mission, that should be an enough clue that the AWACS ins't messing up the Torps.

if you are looking at them.  i was busy reading text, issuing orders, or worrying about the karuna.