Prompted by a pointy stick and some suggestions about where it might soon be placed, here's an end of year update from the Tactical Office!

Things we've done, things that will come, things that are fun, time for some rum?

One of my primary duties is approving and denying battle submission forms that were not automatically approved by the database.

On average I was doing about 15 per month. This is usually a mix of rejecting bad submissions - mainly selecting the wrong file or wrong battle - and approving high scores.

In XvT, using the unlimited waves option results in a score of 0. This cheat is allowed, but the database currently flags this for manual review because it looks like an empty file in some respects.

This year with the RtF 2021 scoring system being highly encouraging to XvT spam, I had a bit more than usual... there were nearly 400 BSF approvals in October.

There are 82 current high scores that were approved this year. Congratulations to Genie and Phalk for each doing this more than 10 times. (And me, but I don't want to brag in my own report.)

There were 3 free missions released this year, detailed in my previous report in August.

The TAC queue grew significantly this year thanks mainly to some battle submissions from Dempsey.

I made a conscious decision to treat the queue with a lower priority than other work, but I'd really like to pick it up next year. If you're interested in new content, please talk to me about joining the team and becoming a tester.

TIE Fighter Total Conversion for XWA - TFTC - is going to become an officially supported platform for single player. Anyone who would like to submit a new battle or free mission that targets TFTC is welcome to do so.

The initial submissions will be a learning experience for everyone. We'll start by following the XWA process and learn what needs to be adapted for the new platform.

Because it'll take a while for there to be EH-specific content, we're going to start off the new year with some competitions relating to the TFTC campaigns - original and remastered.

We've also started investigating whether the XWAU mod can be officially endorsed. (A reminder - technically you are not allowed to use it at the moment. Our missions have only been tested against the 'vanilla' XWA)

There are still some minor points to sort out here that I didn't quite sort out before the holidays. I'll do a standalone announcement early next year.

When I joined the fleet nearly twenty years ago, it was assumed that everyone had played all of the original games - in fact, it was part of the training requirements to leave Daedalus.

We can't make the same assumption now - someone who joined us for Star Wars: Squadrons might never have played TIE Fighter before.

We're working towards being able to encourage and give credit for pilots flying the original games. Get in touch if you have any ideas you'd like to share about this.

I have been devoting the majority of my EH-related time to the Internet Office.

We're very close to launching the new site, which has some exciting new work in the areas related to the TAC office - battles, patches and BSFs. It will also give us a cleaner base to work from and build new things related to TFTC.

If you are interested in testing new missions, fixing bugs in old missions or helping with TAC-related tools in PHP and JavaScript, email me!

I would like to shout out Solohan, Andr3 and Genie as people who have been helpful with TFTC/XWAU testing and research.

Reminder: feel free to poke me directly via email or discord about mission critical bugs that should be fixed. The database has a long queue, but you can jump it.

The perfect next year for the TAC office, in no particular order.

1. Releasing some custom EH content for TFTC

2. Verifying suitability of XWAU for existing XWA missions

3. Building support on the new site for the original game missions.

4. Clearing the TAC queue for new missions and integrating the testing process into the TC site.

5. Putting a dent in the ~700 open bugs

TAC/FA Pickled Yoda/CS-6/VSDII Sinister

IC/GOE/GSx6/SSx20/BSx19/PCx22/ISMx31/IAR/MoT-6rh/MoI/MoC-10doc-9poc-10goc-10soc-80boc/

MUA-Rx1/IS-4PW-47GW-139SW-215BW-2CW-6PR-56GR-137SR-164BR-9CR/LoC-PS-RS-TS-CSx3-Rx2/LoS-

PSx2-TS-IS-CSx6-Rx2/DFC-SW-Rx2/CoSx2/CoEx2/CoLx15/CoB/LoAx50/OV-19E

Imperator | Elite 3rd | Ranger 1st

{TCCORE-MCBS-MP/1/2-SM/3/4-TM/1/3-WIKI-XAM-XMD-XTM/1}