Description
A Terran Destroyer, about to jump in a secret operation's staging area, is being pursued by unknown Shivan Forces. Ensure its safety and the operation's secrecy by destroying all Shivans and defending Task Force Cassius, assembled to attack the Polaris system.

Storyline:
Ah, a very good storyline here. After the destruction of the Lucifer, the Shivans are very angry, and redouble their attacks. The Vasudans are angry with the Terrans for enraging the Shivans, and things look grim. Your mission is to defend a Terran destroyer which is under attack from Shivan forces, and escort it to a rendezvous with several other ships, which are forming an attack group. Once formed, this attack group will jump to the Polaris system and commence a surprise attack on the Shivans and hopefully draw some pressure off of the front lines. Whew, that's a lot of explaining. This story is perpetuated through the mission with myriad messages, complete with sound (yay!). I do have a couple of gripes though. Just how many destroyers does the GTA have? If it has enough to spare SIX for a covert attack (plus a few cruisers here and there), they must have quite a production schedule at the GTA shipyards. Also, successful completion of the mission leads to a red-alert, meaning no debriefing (which is a bit confusing).

Balance:
Balance is a bit erratic in this mission, since it starts out pretty easy, but suddenly at the end it is much more difficult. You will probably die at the end the first time you play this mission, since you are unprepared for what happens, and don't plan ahead accordingly. This can be very frustrating, considering that it takes a good 20 minutes to get to the second part (!). Defending the Kobiyashi isn't too difficult if you issue proper orders to your wingmen, and the hostile destroyer is not really a threat, since Epsilon wing (ursas) will toast it pretty quickly if you tell them to. Enemy fighters and bombers will take their toll on you, though, and you'll be pretty low on hull strength by the time you have to start defending Ironhold installation. Overall, not especially hard or easy, but very frustrating when you have to restart a mission that can easily top half an hour of gameplay because you weren't prepared for the second part of the action.

Design:
Design is excellent overall, and were it not for the incredible length of this mission and the immense number of large ships, would rate a higher score. As I said before, there are SIX friendly Orions, plus an installation, PLUS a hostile destroyer, PLUS a handful of cruisers. Fortunately, they are spread out, and are separated by entry delays so you don't have all that mess on your screen at once, but it still managed to bog down my 366MHz, 64 ram, 12 meg voodoo2 system pretty badly in a couple of places. Besides that, there are very few technical errors, mainly a few misspellings here and there. There are many events, but most of them are for messages or directives (This is not a bad thing, we don't see enough use of messages or directives.). Oddly enough, there were a few events that didn't do anything. They weren't used for directives or for chaining, they were just empty events. It doesn't detract from the mission, but it is very strange. Otherwise, design is very professional. Ships are creatively named and use all three axes, weapon choices are well thought out for ai ships, and events worked properly.

Gameplay:
Unfortunately, despite the good ratings in other departments, I quickly became bored with this mission. After playing for 20 minutes, only to be surprised and killed by a Shivan attack force, I didn't particularly want to reload the mission and play through all that again. I did, however (See how devoted I am to you?), and managed to complete the mission with 20% hull in approximately 30-35 minutes of gametime. By the end, I just wanted command to tell me to leave, because I was pretty sick of it. If the mission had ended when the Kobiyashi made it to Ironhold station, it would have been just about right. The additional 10 minutes spent defending Ironhold is just too much.

Other Thoughts:
I noticed a very odd incident while playing this mission the second time through. I had accidentally disabled and enemy bomber, and decided to tell everyone to ignore it in an attempt to break the mission. Strangely enough, after all other hostiles were destroyed, I targeted the disabled bomber and watched as its hull strength rapidly dropped, even though no one was shooting it. It self-destructed right in front of me and the mission continued. Wierd.