I'm torn on this one. I think it's very well designed (no surprise, considering the designer) and is certainly a solid entry in the compendium. I enjoy the story and the depiction of the Colossus during its height. There's just a few little things that leave me from giving it a 5 - mostly around objectives that could be tweaked to avoid soft locks and some of the false bug reports that have popped up on this one in the past. So I'll stick with a 4, even though it's more like a 4.5 in my heart.

Pretty fun campaign. Nice story, a nice bit of variety to the missions and flight craft. :ots of room to chase high scores with a couple missions including capitals that you don't explicitly need to destroy to pass.

I found the last mission to be a bit slow to wrap up as I hit a point where all the fighters were destroyed; we took out the capital ships, and we just had a few platforms to take out. I defanged them but it still took a while of just holding the trigger down and for AI to come and help out with the final destruction. But all in all a great compilation of missions!

There are a few issues here and there with this one. It seems that some "side-quests" such as disabling and capturing certain craft are incomplete. The jury is out on M6, as using a tractor beam may prove effective in slowing down the first escaping shuttle (future note to self).

The overall scenario, storyline and the setup of the craft, including the capital ships seems purposeful enough. There is a lot of action in all the levels (easy, Medium, Hard and HS chasing). Unfortunately if you decide to HS chase this one is going to take a loooooooooooong time. Punishingly long, with missions taking over two hours to complete. That's the price of HS-chasing...

Having said that, I always try to review based on flying the battles like a regular Joe. I believe people will like this one overall. Flew it for the first time as a TCIB battle and it took me 2 days to complete it. Note to self: easily 10 hours worth of flying.

That last mission certainly had some challenge to it, but overall not a bad series of missions!

Pretty fun battle. Maybe a little heavy on the number of capital starships you have to destroy, but you have help for the most part so it's not too bad. Missions are all different and they worked very well - only encountered an issue on missions 6 as described in the bugs, but my second playthrough all went well.

My biggest gripe is that if you are playing with the Tie Fighter Collector's CD-Rom version, because there are so many capital starships, the graphics glitch out and they are invisible fairly regularly.

For mission #6, I was able to get the two shuttles captured. By clearing the large asteroid of turrets and immediately catching the first escort shuttle in your tractor beam, you can delay it's escape to hyperspace long enough for the gunboats to disable it.

I had fun with this one. It had an interesting storyline, and the final mission was enjoyable.

Parts of the underlying narrative are silly dross but this battle is excellent nonetheless : straightforward and effective mechanical design with substantial narrative work underpinning it.

My fifty-eighth battle in the TIE Corps.

Very good and versitile battle. Epic big battles that are lots of fun. Some missions are a bit long, but that's ok.

This is a fantastic battle. Cannot recommend enough.

A TC classic. :D

Awesome battle and it went really quickly, due to it being tremendously fun! I recommend this battle as one to definitely play. Well done!

Excellent plot, and fun missions up until that last one. Mission 6 was a bit too long... it's enjoyable for the first 25 minutes, boring after 35, and incredibly annoying when you lose the mission after 45 minutes. Otherwise, there's lots of fun to be had in this battle. Recommended.

Truly one of the best battles in the compendium.

A top class battle.

Very good battle.

Amazing battle. Probably the best I have ever flown. People complaining in other reviews about extremely minor details just shows how well polished this battle was. This battle sets a new standard to which new battles should be constructed.

A truly amazing battle, some of the reasons for giving this a 3 or 4 are rubbish... it's made for TIE95, people. To all those who rated it below a 5: if you don't like it, I'd like to see YOU beat it

No way as good as the hype. This battle is fairly good, however with a bit of planning could have been much better. Drake says he went for realism, however Mon Cals will stay in a supplie area while they are systematically wiped from existance by 1 Missile boat. Make the Craft leave the area after 12 mins, make it so that if they are destroyed you fail the mission. The objectives weren't to sit around killing everything after the battle was done, however it was far to easy to do so. This made the battle last hours and hours. Some of the missions were rather odd, and the last mission I had numerous problems with the ATR's being destroyed by the Asteriod they were docking with. There were elements in this that made it fun and for me a TIE 95 user the first 2 missions went smoothly and were great fun and I was expecting this to continue. (mixed in with the fun was a slice of difficulty). To Get your wing men to enter you must destroy the satalite asap. This was a good idea and seemed to work fairly well. there was a bit of a challenge keeping the T/D's alive and also disabling the Craft in time to stop them entering hyperspace but this in all was well done, why couldn't this rush to stop things happening have happened in the final 3 missions I don't know. overall if your just going to fly this mission for primary goals and not for score it's not a bad battle. however it becomes far to long and tedious because the mission deginer was trying to add too much realism for the player and didn't think about realism in the orders of the AI.

This battle is really good. The briefings were nice, and there were some really cool effects, like that fleet exiting hyperspace in Mission 3, and also the "self-made" fighter base. I'm sure Drake put much time into this. Still, I agree with Ender (astonishing enough! :P). This battle is good, very good, but it doesn't deserve this hype. The plotline was good, but became very ridiculous towards the ending. During the last briefing, I waited for a gag all the time to save it, but there simply wasn't one. That was meant honest. LOL! And some craft attacking friendly craft, crashing or not completing their mission for no apparent reason can't be excused by "it's made for TIE95". TIE-Disk and TIE-CD are still supported game platforms, period. The "best battle ever", as some people call this one, would run smoothly on *all* the platforms, not just on one. Apart from the bugs mentioned above, some of the missions even let my computer crash. And as most of the missions take a lot of time, that's annoying. Another point that wasn't mentioned before is that this battle always puts the player into a wrong craft. Many cap ships to kill? You get a T/A. Heavy dogfighting? You get a MIS. Some craft to disable? No way that you get a craft with ion cannons. You have wingmen assigned to that job. And they arrive just in time to watch their targets entering hyperspace. There are less frustrating ways to raise the difficulty level. The Calamari docking operation was ridiculous. That mission, as a free mission, would have got a clear 1 from me. A platform, three Mon Cals, three Frigates. We send ONE ATR and a HANDFUL of fighters to dock with a non-disabled Cal Cruiser? WHY THE HECK? If the rebels were such braindead idiots as this mission wants to tell us, we would have to kill ourselves for having lost the battle of Endor. :P Again, the battle was, overall, good. Therefore the 4 is deserved. I especially admire all the nice "tricks". But they aren't the primary thing I look for in a battle. Ascension is very worth playing, but don't expect it to be flawless - it isn't.

The best battle I've ever played . The plot was great.

This battle is the best I've flown so far, it rocks! Specially the Briefings are just great! Everybody who likes an excellent plot should fly this one.

This one has to be (one of?) the greatest EH battle I've ever played to date. The plot was interesting although in the later missions it became a little silly. The missions looked professional, and the briefings were even better. However a rating of 5 would indicate a perfect battle, but this is ALMOST perfect. There are some typos, some bugs, the battle was too easy, even on the hard difficulty setting, and some messages (at least one!)appear when they really shouldn't. I'd give it a 4 and a half, but I'm afraid I have to round it down.

I most strongly disagree with CM Ender mBind here. This battle truly rivals TC 184 / mirror universe battles in terms of complexity and storyline. The storyline is good for a short story with its complexity and the gameplay is hazardous enough at times to drive a pilot to insanity. And I may calim I am not a beginner, yes ? It is FUN to fly and it is as FUN and exciting to read the briefings !! I motion for a sequel :)

This is a good battle and I especially enjoyed mission 2 and the container platform. However, the plot was a bit confusing and the missions were far too easy.

This battle rivals my old favorite, Mirror Universe, for holding my interest and overall excellent design. I would wholeheartedly recommend this battle to anyone who has a bit of time on their hands. You won’t be disappointed. I give it a 4.9 (rounded up to a 5 for the purposes of the EH review scale)(Note: My full review is more detailed. If you'd like a copy, I'd be happy to e-mail it to you. However, here without the line breaks it just looks sloppy :) )

Although not perfect, this battle was thoroughly enjoyable and rather technically complex. Technical errors were minimal (albeit still present) and the briefings were superb. Although there were a few problems, the battle was sufficiently enjoyable to deserve a 5 in my opinion.

This would be best described as an "EPIC BATTLE." All the missions brought something different to the table and were fun and creative in their own respects. [I especially enjoyed mission 2... a nice, fastpasted mineracing mission ;)] But, I wouldn't reccomend this battle to anyone who's looking for "quick fchg" points, cuz it DOES take some time to complete...but the well thought out story-line is worth it.

I normally do not rate other members creations but I flew this Battle at the urgeing of its creator so this is my review. Mission briefings were great except they needed more information about what is actully involved in the completeion of the mission. The use of the containers in the creation of the bases was an excellent idea and well executed. The actual flight portion of the battle was not as impressive as I expected it to be. All in all I liked Ascension.But I can only rate it a 4.

This battle can be finished, what more can you ask from a TIE battle? The bug which is present in TIE-FCHG 2 is also present in Mission 1, but at least here it is not related to primary goals. In mission where shuttles are located in the hangar I couldn't waste time inspecting them because at least one TRN would be (self?)destroyed very early in the mission. Anyway, those shuttles move out during the mission, and can be inspected later.

Overall impression when I play each mission: "Holy cow, Batman!". All the missions were extremely well done, and the amount of tactical planning I had to do is staggering in the more complicated missions. Just one major sore point though, which is mission 2. Please consider some of us still playing on TIE Disk; and instead of using containers as platforms, why not just make it a regular platform? That mission crashed my comp. several times. It majorly pissed me off when it crashed after I'm more than halfway finished. And I know it's this mission because TIE behaved well in other missions.

A very nice battle! Switching between roles so often was kinda confusing, but the uh..."interesting" plot made up for it. The use of containers to make a platform was creative but confusing, giving this battle a 4 overall.

Well, it was a good battle. The plot was good. Combat was...abundant. Nut it started going bad at the level with the three cruisers. If a lone Assault Transport can board a fully functioning CRS, then couldn't a squadron of Missile Boats be able to blow them up? I felt this would have made some sense to cripple the Rebel fleet in the sector to make the invasion easier. Also, in the last level, there was an abundance of fighters ramming just about everything that wasn't Imperial. I'm not sure, but I don't think that's standard Imperial proceedure. Overall, these two things greatly affected my rating of this battle.

It was really a good battle. Now the usually go and kill the rebles type ting, well a little, but I had other points to it too. I would suggest this batle to anyone in the TIE Corps.

Nice going, Drake

Wow! Excellent battle! I´m new in the Tie Corps so I don´t have much experience but I think it has a good storyline and the missions are great.

this is the 150th battle I have flown and I can fairly Easly say that this is the Best so far but K2 is 2nd, Good work drake

A very good battle, I haven't got a lot of experience in TC battles yet but for what I've played so far I am very impressed with this battle. The story was well thought out, the breifings were great (with just perhaps a little too much info, but hey, too much is much better then not enough), it really brought the story to life and provifed enough information about the story. The battles were great, it's not just you vs the galaxy. It was a team effort and in the large battles the, how shall I put it? Confusion of battle? well you know what I mean, it was captured very well in this battle. I was mad at first that i didn't get all of the kills but then I realised that it was made that way, so the high pointers out there can't get these impossible scorces. Great battle. The only bad thing I have to say is that in the battles were a ion cannon is needed, you don't have one. It gets really annoying not to have a ion but oh well, that's life.

I can only say I was highly disappointed with this, and its creator really. This "greatest" battle features starships that seem to have fighterorders, or just don't move or do anything at all, rebel fighters attacking rebel starships and their buddies the Andrevians, Andrevians returning the favour, ATRs smashing into their targets, fleet smashing into the player at hypering in, enemy fighters just ignoring you and other such stuff you wouldn't expect from a battle rated this high. Then the gameplay: The briefings look wonderful (beautifull even, smashing!) if very fuzzy on what's actually going on, but don't give you any clue of what you're really supposed to do or what the storyline really is, or at least I couldn't bring up the enthousiasm to actually follow it - luckily there's the inflight Goals page. But that don't really matter as the Player is of no importance at all in this battle: you can beat the last mission by not firing once and just switching it to 4x time, which saves you endless warhead dodging and strafing (outside this battle: when will creators finally give enough ordnance to do a mission?) of when you do get involved. Who is of concequence in this battle then? Drake of course! I got pretty much annoyed with the egotripping involved. His name and email all over the briefings, which already elaborate on his greatness and "Credits" in the last debrief to top it off. Ok, we saw your name on the readme already - you can be proud of your creation but you can also push it... in this case I feel its an unwelcome intrusion in the SW atmosphere. To be honest though, and truthfully Beef's review made me realize that, it is an above average battle, which hence deserves a 4 (not a 1)... but its by far not the best ever made and if so - not the best that ever will be made... Oh and that "vertical mission"? Its a pretty useless concept in space where there is no such thing as vertical or horizontal. You'll only notice it in the 3D mode of the map, the rest will seem just as normal. I stopped doing this stuff because of it. Real 3D is the way to go:)

Been a long time coming and it's finally here. The single most complex, technical, story-driven battle I have ever made. Now I am notoriously critical of my own work, famously voting TC-171 (Rated 4.7) a three and FCHG#2 (Rated 4.9) a four. This one definently, without question gets a five on my part. You have the Training Officer, Mell to thank for this battle, he forced me to make it. And I am now glad I did. Another IS-PR for my growing collection. Features to look out for in this battle is a unique Rebel fighter base in mission two, and a boarding operation in mission five that will raise some eyebrows. Mission six is one of a kind though, as far as I am aware, it is the first 'vertical' mission in the history of the Tiecorps. You want a battle that will shock, tease, excite and surprise you then look no further than this one because I don't think I can do any better. (Additional: Please be fair with your ratings. I can take critiscm. If someone says 'you tried too hard making the plotline mysterious' I can take that. What I won't accept are reviews to 'Kill the hype'. I didn't hype it up, others did. You want to give it a rating then that's fine by me as long as you give me a GOOD reason why)

No doubt that this is a good battle, but it doesn't deserve a 5 in my opinion (and I'm not lowering the rating because of outside decisions or events. People need to give missions the ratings they deserve and not go around saying, "Well, so-and-so was bothering me" or "This battle is over-rated so I'll make up the difference with an extra low score!" Sorry about the rant). Back to the mission: there are a lot of things I want to point out about this battle, so I'll go through the missions. M1--possibly the coolest breifing map I've seen! The lines tracing the ships' path...spiffy. However, the mission was rather average. M2--The new platform was interesting and obviously took some time and skill to create. Also, it was challenging to fly around it to get at the TRNs without crashing. But the fact that this platform is made of containers simply doesn't work. It has no weapons aboard and it just looks like a bunch of containers rather than a single station. That said, this mission was still the best of the lot. It was small, but very intense. It had great use of a minefield, and its compactness keeps the pilot on his toes avoiding crashes. M3--the fleet exiting hyperspace was dramatic, but this mission too was average. M4--Excellent ship placement (making the player fly into the hangar to make that ID was fun). Another group of containers that was supposed to look like a platform though. M5--The briefing got me all psyched up to fly this mission. It was on about how I'd need to use percision strikes to take out the turrets because there were to be no ion craft present. But the capital ships weren't much of a threat anyway. They just sat there with no useful orders. This mission was kind of disappointing and very easy. And the "eyebrow raising" docking operation was just a regular docking. The CRS to be docked with was simply ordered to zero speed (which makes no sense. Why would a CRS under attack just hold still?) and the ATR docked. M6--This mission was rather long, but that's not really a problem. This mission is the one that really killed the battle's chance of getting a 5 from me. It was a plot problem which I'll get to. OVERALL--Unfortunately, though good, this is not Drake's best battle. I think Drake tried too hard to make the plot a mystery, but instead of being mysterious, the plot became vague and uninteresting (until all was explained in the end). Thus, the whole story lacked the urgency and motivation that you get in Drake's FCHG "Shadow of Time". After mildly wondering why you should care, in mission six, you find out. And the reason you should care is so over-the-top and ridiculous that it nearly sends the player into a fit of giggles (which doesn't help the serious tone of the story). I mean, MAYBE, if we could have left out the part about growing new arms...maybe I could have still gone along with it. But the point is that the transformation that's supposed to happen to the villian is so silly and unbelievable that the urgency and drama that's supposed to be in mission six simply can't exsist. I also think there were too many characters and not enough time to develop them. By the last mission, all the names had run together in my mind. I kept re-reading the breifings saying to myself, "Now who's that guy again?" The missions we extemely well designed to look cool, but they didn't play quite as well as other missions Drake's done. This battle lacked the excitement and gameplay tricks of Drake's TIE-TC-171 "Fury of the Colossus", for example. Also on a minor note: there were quite a few typos in the briefings (the most annoying one being not writing "TIE" in all caps; it's an acronym, people!) But as I said, it is still a good battle. The plot needs lots of work, but the missions were enjoyable enough. (By the way, after reading Drake's review and playing this battle, I'm STILL wondering what Drake means by calling this the "first vertical mission in TIE Corps history".)

Awesome, great. One of the best TIE battles I've flown. A masterpiece!

Very good battle, probably the best I've ever seen for TIE Fighter. Very nice looking rebel platforms and good idea with boarding a cruiser. The only thing is that boarding mission was a bit too easy. Nevertheless, I rate it 5 - great job, Drake!

YEAH! The best TIE battle I ever played!!

quite possibly one of the best battles i have ever had the pleasure of flying! Drake has excelled himself on this one.