Description
This mission is an intense dogfight. You have to clear out NTF installations and cruisers but there is a suprise involved. The installations are ohh shall we say enhanced. so beware!!!!

Storyline:
In this mission Alpha wing must assist in an attack on three modified Arcadia installations at the Polaris jump node. There’s your usual one-line Command briefing, though this one has command animations in one of the stages. The briefing is fairly informative, but could’ve been expanded a little more – for example, what about preliminary reports from scouts or past engagements? All of the icons match up, but they’re rather cluttered on the briefing screen. There are only a few messages during the mission, and there’s a single debriefing stage, only dealing with complete success. I also spotted several spelling errors.

Balance:
This mission leans very heavily towards beam combat between the GTVA fleet and the installations, which are armed to the teeth. However, there are plenty of fighters guarding the installations and the bombers do actually play a role – I found that if the bombers stopped attacking, the friendly capital ships would all die, like a bunch of lemmings, as they attacked the bases. You’ll have to help out by dealing with the bases quickly, with Helios torpedoes or disarming them. The loadout for the bombers is a bit heavy, I think, though at least the author has removed ships and weapons from the loadout – in particular extra Helios bombs.

Design:
Design is only very basic here. There are no directives – in fact, the only events other than those to free beams on the capital ships are for the destruction of a couple of them or three other messages, which are chained, not listed. The beam-free events could’ve all been taken down into a couple of events, but then there would only have been seven events. Oh well, at least there are some waypoint paths used to direct the fleet quite well, and the background is okay. The mission is very flat, with all the action taking place on the XZ plane – in fact, Alpha wing are the only ones raised off it at all. The fighters also all face in one direction. This isn’t so much of a problem as capital ships facing one way only, as I’ve seen in other missions. The use of Alt-names is a nice touch, along with weapon fits to accompany them.

Gameplay:
This makes quite a good bombing mission, as thereÂ’s a lot to destroy, plus a feeling that youÂ’re making a difference by bombing, but thatÂ’s about it. The sheer size of the targets and distances between them means that the mission takes about as long as a normal one would to complete, though the installations are very easy to destroy when youÂ’re not chased by fighters. Cyclops bombs would perhaps have been a better choice. The mission is a little disjointed, as you spend quite a while moving between the bases with nothing to do and there are very few messages. However, the other ships taking on other targets make you feel like youÂ’re part of a bigger picture.

Other Thoughts:
This mission might be better if it were made smaller and more difficult – for example, using only one enemy installation. It would also be quite a surprise to think itÂ’s an Arcadia and have it burst to life and destroy a friendly capital shipÂ