BEWARE: continuing my Freespace woes (insane difficulty). tl;dr: still didn't make it. This is my public Freespace diary, don't read if you can't stand vitriole.
1. Trying to disable an enemy fighter in the second last mission, in order to get myself in an Ursa bomber to the last mission, as well as my wingmen in a good shape:
It seems different enemy wings behave differently for this. I think disabling the last fighter from the fourth enemy wave (a Manticore fighter in the Krishna or Rama wing) should be perfect because at that point both friendly Delta and Epsilon wings should appear, and you are free to hurry to the jump node.
The problem is, after this the next (Bheema and Virgo) enemy waves will appear regardless! Having one enemy fighter alive from the earlier wave doesn't seem to prevent them from jumping in. This is different from earlier waves where they will not appear before the earlier wave is completely destroyed (also the mission timer will not be started before that).
So back to the drawing board. If you disable an enemy fighter from any of the first three wings, then the game will remain in a kind of frozen state: Delta and Epsilon friendly wings will not appear (you need them to appear to get them to the last mission), the Bastion ship will slowly and surely move towards the jump node, no new enemy fighters will appear, no one is telling you to rush to the jump node etc.
One possibility would be to wait until all your troops (including Bastion) are near the jump node, and only then destroy that disabled fighter, and try there to fight the next two waves. Then as soon as the friendly Delta and Epsilon wings have arrived, you can jump out almost instantly without having to face further enemy waves. The only problem with this approach is that it takes a long time, waiting like 20-30 minutes to get everyone near the jump point, and what if I fail then anyway (e.g. lose too many wingmen)? Try again, another 30 minutes wasted?
2. I went to my earlier tactic to fly a fast Ulysses, and Alpha/Beta wingmen in heavy Hercules fighters, and hoping Delta wing can destroy Lucifer's five reactors with Harbinger bombs in the last mission successfully. Now I finally found a way to destroy the Lucifer weapons subsystem myself, this works like 50% of the time:
- Tell Alpha, Beta and Epsilon wings to engage enemy, but to ignore Lucifer (Lucifer autoturrets will kill them quite fast if they decide to fight Lucifer). Delta bomber wing will not take orders from you anyway.
- In your fast Ulysses fighter (fitted with Prometheus + D-Advanced guns), hurry to the Lucifer's weapon subsystem in its front section, by setting your engine subsystem to max and using afterburner. The thing is, you need to take a long detour, not beeline to it. Go below Lucifer so that you are never closer than 3000-5000 units, mainly so that no enemy fighters notice you, and Lucifer will not send missiles at you..
- Go all the way in front of Lucifer, and approach the weapon subsystem directly from the front of Lucifer. If some enemy fighters have targeted you, fight them off until some of your wingmen arrive to fight them, and/or you have destroyed them yourself (but more will come...). Position yourself as close as possible to Lucifer's hull on its "nose", in the exact middle because if you are to the side even a little, autoturrets will shoot at you. Park there.
- Now you should be free to shoot at the weapon subsystems, use D-Advanced and Prometheus together (set Gun subsystem to full, in case you run out of weapon energy). Your wingmen should keep any enemy fighters busy. Every now and then (like every 5 seconds, if you are unlucky) Lucifer will launch missiles at you. When that happens, just keep pushing X (countermeasures) once every second or so, until missiles have been evaded. If and when you run out of countermeasures... tough luck, hopefully most of Lucifer missiles will still miss you because you are so close to the hull, and your hull is strong enough to take any stray hits.
- A long as you can keep shooting at Lucifer's weapon subsystem, it should reach 0% in 1-2 minutes. After that, engines to full and fly away so that you are not hit by Lucifer's missiles anymore.
Destroying the weapons subsystem seems to make Lucifer's autoturrets and missile launchers less active, but not completely inactive, they are still operational. I am unsure what is the best thing to do after this, try to fight any enemy fighters, or try to shoot any Lucifer autoturrets/launchers, or try to help Delta wing by shooting at reactors?
I was hoping that getting the Weapon subsystem to 0%, and still having most of your wingmen around to fight any enemy fighters, would make it a piece of cake for the Delta wing to perform their bombing run. For some reason that still doesn't seem to be the case, quite often they still fail to destroy even one reactor. I seriously don't know what is their problem, why aren't they ripping the reactors with Harbingers but more like taking potshots here and there at the reactors? Who trained these people?
The few times I've now tried this, quite often the damn Delta wing doesn't manage to destroy even one reactor. One time things look good as they suddenly got reactors 2, 3 and 4 destroyed in a short period of time, but then they just seemed to stop there, 1 and 5 still remained until Lucifer jumped out.
I'm wondering if the Volition developers and play testers were able to beat the last two missions in insane difficulty consistently? I always feel that if even the playtesters struggle with a game (on any difficulty level), then the game has been made far too hard for everyone. If the playtesters can beat the game consistently in the hardest difficulty, then I feel it is about right as then you at least have a confirmation that it is possible to beat it consistently, and not related to e.g. sheer luck (like now I feel it is about luck if Delta wing will destroy reactors efficiently, or just dick around running in circles doing nothing, the asses).
Post edited February 18, 2016 by timppu
