Description
The Barnard's Star Colonies have declared their independence and the GTVA aren't happy. The GTD Britannia has been ordered to put down the rebellion and face the small colonial fleet. Problem is, you're fighting for the colonies!

Storyline:
This mission recreates the beginning of the American war of Independence in FS2 mission format. Unfortunately, there's no Command briefing explaining just why the Barnard's Star colonies wish to secede from the GTVA and so the briefing throws you right into it. Once you're into the mission you'll only find a few messages anyway – though spelling and grammar are excellent throughout. The debriefing's also fairly comprehensive, though there's nothing to cover early departure (and no RTB directive, for that matter).

Balance:
As I died for the fifth time, I thought that this was too hard. The player is put in a Ulysses against some very vicious Hercules MkIIs and the Minutemen transports and freighters are attacked by a wing of Artemis bombers with Tornado missiles. Needless to say, they don't last long. Completing this mission is very difficult, and not in the challenging way – in the frustrating way. When you factor in the design problems, it becomes near impossible.

Design:
A little simple in the design stakes, with chained message strings, not send-message-list used and only a few other events, mostly for beam-frees and the few messages. In fact, some of the events don't need to be chained at all, or don't use the 'chain' function, just 'is-event-true'. All the directives work though. However, I was able to break the mission fairly easily – when the GTD Britannia attacks, it doesn't always hit the Lexington right away and destroy it as it should – in fact, I saw it totally miss and hit the Concord the first time. This prevents the departure of the Minutemen, who are quickly overrun. The Minutemen are also not beam-protected, and I've seen them annihilated before by the beams of the Britannia.

Gameplay:
Well, I said that the balance made it a frustrating mission to play, so I'll say it again here. It may be the case that this is an accurate historical recreation of the state the American rebels found themselves in, but realism doesn't make a good mission. Things that add to the frustration are occasions when the Britannia actually destroys the transports with beam cannons – which you'd be hard pressed to prevent.

Other Thoughts:
The fire-beam s-exp almost always hits its target unless the ship is moving very quickly, so that would be a better choice with which to destroy the Lexington.