This was a standard, straight-forward destroy-the-Rebels mission. The construction was solid, and it runs well. But it takes a very long time to complete. There are about five disabled cruisers with 100% shields for you to destroy in your T/D. The player should definately have flown a MIS instead. Also the balance was off in general terms. T/D vs Z-95 gets tedious fast. But if you like long, invovled missions and getting huge wads of points, this mission is for you.

This was a very average mission. There was a little stab at humor, but the "looney" guy was mostly bland. The mission design wasn't bad, but it wasn't anything special either. It's a simple, short mission that's good for competitions or a quick FCHG point. (Merely being fun and bug free does not deserve a 5, by the way.)

The missions in this battle were complex, action packed, and fun. The story was rather lacking though. Each mission was detached from the others. There was no complete storyline, and what there was was too vague for me. But if you just like fun missions, this is a good battle for you.

This mission was fairly complex. There was a good amount of action going on. It was pretty difficult at first to save the VSD, but not impossible. The plot was a little bit weak, but I'm biased against any mission that involves destroying Rogue Squadron. (Imperial pilot John Doe shouldn't be able to shoot down the best of the best Rebel pilots.) I was also disappointed that I didn't get to fly the Phantoms.

This battle had nothing to do with the Dark Brotherhood! It was just a bunch of TC free missions bundled together. The storyline was almost nonexistent. It was very disappointing. However, the overall mission design was fairly good except for mission 3. (The tip there is to disable at least one of the A-wings, delaying the arrival of more which you wouldn't have enough warheads for.) The other missions were relatively fun to play.

An average mission with just a little bit of difficulty.

The main purpose of this mission was to test the "ShuttleFly" patch. It was made a year ago and got lost in the TAC, but here it is now. For reasons that are unclear to me now, I made it massively difficult on purpose. I advise any normal person to fly it on easy and read the tips in the readme.txt. Only very skilled pilots (unlike myself) should try it on hard.

An average mission. It is very difficult if you're not in the right place at the right time (at least you think it is until you read the debriefing and find out a repair craft would come if the SHU got disabled). The waiting around at the beginning is long, and you're likely to sit through it more than once. This one's probably more fun if you know the pilots it's about.

This mission was hilarious and quite fun to play. It's also fairly easy and doesn't become frustrating. Yes, the tricks have all been done before, but this mission comes up with entertaining excusses to use them again. I especially liked the part about villians coming back! :P

There seemed to be no effort at all in telling the details of the story. All the briefings had were one liners like "Protect this shuttle," end of briefing. You have no real idea why anything's going on. All of the missions themselves were mostly just endless dogfights with Rebel fighters. There was also lots of waiting around, poorly timed radio messages, and a Rebel CRS as the player's mothership. Plus, nothing about it makes it an ID battle except for the shuttle is carrying ID leaders, otherwise a subaverage TC battle.

If you're looking for a quick FCHG point or a very tough dogfight, you should fly this mission. The primary goal can be completed in a few seconds if you want to skip the tremendous fun of you in a T/I vs 4 A-wings with missiles! My only gripe is that the mailman part didn't really have much to do with the mission. It was a cool idea. I wanted to see me doing more mailman stuff.

Overall: A very good battle. I liked the story, but not necessarily how it was told. The radio messages were great and added a very peculiar tone or atmosphere to the battle. It was so close to normal that it practically dared you to take it seriously. But you could always feel the slightly skewed perspective. Some of it was very subtle, and some of it was downright disturbing ("rescuing" a clone of Natalie Portman to satisfy Ast so he won't kill Mike? Um...yeah). It was kind of odd all over; I loved that part. Also there were quite a few really well done design tricks. They were simple but unique. The IW training mission being may favorite of these. But the gameplay was less exciting, especially in the first missions which were slow and rather boring. And the last mission was overstocked with T/Is and quite frustrating. The middle mission are good. The pros outweigh the cons. Well worth flying. ***For a more detailed review see the Sept. Battle of the Month thread in the Mission Creation Forum.***

This is an amazing battle. I didn't think it was funny, just fun. The tugs were very creative. I never realized how dangerous they could be! :P And that made the missions unique and a blast to fly. The other great thing about this battle is that it had a decent plot. It wasn't just a showcase of weird tug behavior, but there was a good story to explain everything. Great work.

Very nice work. The plot was well done and interesting, I thought. Mission design was excellent; still challenging even though you're in a super fighter. The only thing that keeps it from getting a five is that the missions were a bit repetitive. They all had the same goals: destroy all capships and all fighters.

This battle was very disappointing. First of all the plot was ridiculous. I cannot believe that any real person would go along with the plan that says, "To prevent civil war, we have to kill a bunch of our friends because they don't know any better." The whole problem would've been cleared up with simple communication and any officer willing to start shooting buddies rather than try to straighten out a misunderstanding is just plain stupid. Aside from the plot being unfeasible, it was also rather shallow. The missions didn't seem to have much of a point. They didn't flow into the main storyline very well, and were only of average construction and gameplay. Does running a Recon mission in a Gunboat (the slowest fighter we have) make any sense to anybody when we've been flying TIE Avengers for the past three missions? And the final straw: I don't much like it when the mission is FAILED when I COMPLETE the goals and obey orders (It's not a bug, it's made that way on purpose). I shouldn't have to die and read the hints to find out that to complete the mission, I've got to be an unskilled pilot and let my mothership be disabled! There are no radio messages or anything suggesting this is nessecary for a "victory." How this got to be a FCHG battle is beyond me.

This mission takes a long time to get going. There is far too much waiting around. The plot about Alhana's return was pretty weak and didn't really have any rhyme or reason to it. The radio messages were oddly timed. In the middle of being attacked by pirates, Alhana and the commander have a calm chat about her returning to the Corps! However, once the larger Rebel fleet finally showed up, the mission improved very much. Well placed ships and fighters to make for an exciting dogfight. I think the pros and cons cancel each other out in this mission.

This mission is a good moderate challenge and well-balanced. Protect missions seem to be too few in number. We need more like this. Good work.

I'm afraid this mission was rather dull. First of all the plot seemed to be "Destroy the Rebels because they're there." A good cause, maybe, but uninteresting. Second, there were just too many enemy capships, but there wasn't enough firepower to take them all down. A few more friendly bombers were desperately needed. Even after switching to unlimited ammo after getting bored, I still sat around for a good 20 minutes before they were all destroyed. Boring and not well-balanced.

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 briefing maps as usual from Drake. The briefing Q&A were good as well, though I don't really prefer the "What are my objectives?" style. The plot was very good. However, the overall plot seemed just a little less exciting than the subplots for each mission. The subplots really made the battle work for me. Between missions 3 and 4, when the ETRs are after Ronin (and in other places), the pacing of the individual missions were great and created some beefy tension in the story. I found the difficulty levels to be perfect. Despite flying advanced TIEs, the missions were not easy as happens in other battles (and it wasn't hard because of endless waves of A-wings with advanced missiles either). The missions were also deceptively simple with lots of hidden things going on.

Great plot and briefing questions. Unique gameplay is always a plus. This mission has average difficulty, but requires DIFFERENT skills and techniques from what everybody is used to. There was a flight or two of extra Z-95s at the end, but it wasn't too bad.

Flying in the old TIEs is great, but when you give them shields and warheads, it defeats the whole purpose of using them in the first place! The plot was really vague and without a point. Aside from spelling mistakes, the briefing questions were lame anyway. The missions were all very easy except for mission 5 which was the bright spot of the battle.

It doesn't make sense to have the player in a T/D and the rest of the ship's squadrons be T/Fs and T/Bs! Otherwise an OK if not easy mission. Good use of capital ships.

This has fair plot development and level complexity, but it is too easy even though you fly a gunboat. Also, the use of B-wings was way excessive.

For the most part, a good and complex mission. However, there were way too many waves of each enemy craft, and that got monotonous and dull very quickly.