Confed ships - generally better than Kilrathi equivalents? *Screenshots*

-danr-

Vice Admiral
I've recently been flying Kilrathi ships in the Standoff simulator to try and compare them with their Confed equivalents that we all know pretty well by now.

It seems to me, that generally speaking, Confeds have a slight edge in terms of ship speed, maneuverability and firepower.

Fleet Assault is my favourite sim mission, I've played it enough times now that even on difficulty level 3, I almost invariably win the mission (sometimes by a greater margin than others.)

I switched the ships around so that my attack force comprised of Vataris, Hhriss and Grikath - since the cats don't really have a Crossbow equivalent - I gave the Hhriss a couple of torpedos each and off we went.


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I flew the Grikath.

At the navpoint, we engaged a Bengal and a Gilgamesh, with escorts of Epees, Rapiers, Hornets, Morningstars and Ferrets. Plus two confed corvettes to replace the Kamekhs.


We lost, badly.

After a five minute firefight, I was the only ship alive, I hadn't been able to get close to the capships...and the remaining Confeds finished me off after an awkward attempt at clinging on to survival in the slow and highly unmaneuverable Grikath.

Tried again in a Vatari too, but no matter how quickly I killed the enemy Morningstars, everyone else got ripped to shreds. The Confed ships seemed a lot harder to get close to, generally faster and more maneuverable.

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So I'm guessing the thinking behind ship ability in Standoff was that the Confederation on the whole had 'better' fighters, but the Kilrathi almost always have numerical advantage - which is what makes the game dificult in campaign mode.
 
That's quite an accurate representation in Standoff then, I think. Starting with WC2, the Kilrathi always had rather pathetic fighters when compared to Confed: slower, more cumbersome, less well armed and protected (and in case of Armada: even costlier) That's even referenced in the novels, WCATV and the manuals I think.

But their capships were mostly a match for the Confed ships if not even superior.
 
I'm not sure.....I mean usually Confed ships are outnumbered too which could attribute to it being a little tough if the roles are reversed....most Kilrathi ships are a lil subpar vs the confed equivalents
 
I always thought that the Kilrathi were the Japanese to the Confed's America (in reference to the Pacific theater in WW2).

The Japs (like the Kilrathi) tended to have more maneuverable fighters while the American fighters were more durable (like Confed). At least that's what I got out of WC1 - 3. The Kilrathi do seem to be scaled down in Standoff, but there are swarms of them much like TIE Fighters vs. Rebel Alliance fighters); in the official WC games, there generally weren't swarms of Kilrathi.
 
We mostly just went with the original ship stats (applying the same conversion factors to both Confed and Kilrathi ships when necessary). It's possible that Confed ships are superior in some of the less well documented stats which we couldn't get accurate measurements from in the WC2 files (off the top of my head, stuff like gun pool size, gun recharge rate, maybe? Not sure anymore), but this wasn't deliberate.

We balanced the missions to suit the ships and not the other way around. You can see this clearly in some of the missions where you are given a choice between ships... someone will argue that these missions often feel easier in ship A than in ship B, while someone else might argue the opposite, but I don't think many people are indifferent to the ship choice. We didn't go out of our way to "standardize" the difficulty across different ships because we know this is a matter of playstyle.

If this seems to confirm some of the passages in the novels (IIRC, End Run also mentions that Ferrets were more agile than Sarthas, so its not even just FA), well, that's no surprise - both Standoff and the novels are just building on the same foundation, so it couldn't be any different. :p
 
I always thought that the Kilrathi were the Japanese to the Confed's America (in reference to the Pacific theater in WW2).

The Japs (like the Kilrathi) tended to have more maneuverable fighters while the American fighters were more durable (like Confed). At least that's what I got out of WC1 - 3. The Kilrathi do seem to be scaled down in Standoff, but there are swarms of them much like TIE Fighters vs. Rebel Alliance fighters); in the official WC games, there generally weren't swarms of Kilrathi.

Well, if you send out two fighters against an average of 4 fighters a swarm, coming to an average of 10 each mission, I'd say you are outnumbered.

The Kilrathi did strike me more as "offensive fighters", with striking power being the most important.

As for the star wars reference, the TIE fighters were low cost fighters, and so were their pilots. Where the alliance had to recruit and train their pilots, the empire could just open up another can of stormtroopers. It's only during the clone wars cartoon that we see that they have different personalities and qualities.
 
My impression in Star Wars is that the Imperial pilots were not clones, or at least, not all of them were. In some of the novels, Tycho Chelcu (sp?) was an ex-TIE pilot from Alderaan who had joined the rebellion, and was decidedly NOT a clone. Biggs says in (cut scenes from) Ep 4 that he is going to the "academy" to become a pilot, by which people generally take to mean the "Imperial Space Academy", and that he must have defected to the Alliance at some intermediate point. I'm sure TIE pilots were cheap...they generally were trained less rigorously than their Alliance counterparts, and were valued less highly, but they definitely had their own personalities and qualities. And some of them became legendary aces in their own right.

Back to Wing Commander...I'd actually be surprised if the Kilrathi had too much of a "pilots are disposable assets to be sacrificed for the good of the Empire" mentality...because, to be a pilot in the Kilrathi society, don't you have to be a member of nobility? I thought that was established at some point. And in any imperial society, nobility are generally only a small percentage of the population. The pool of nobility with the instincts and reflexes to be a pilot is probably even smaller. I wouldn't think the Kilrathi could afford to be too cavalier with this relatively scarce resource, i.e. by putting pilots in crappy deathtraps, because they would run out of qualified noble pilots pretty quick (the Japanese actually had exactly this problem during WWII).

Of course, the existence of the Dralthi kind of flies in the face of this whole thought...
 
My impression in Star Wars is that the Imperial pilots were not clones, or at least, not all of them were. In some of the novels, Tycho Chelcu (sp?) was an ex-TIE pilot from Alderaan who had joined the rebellion, and was decidedly NOT a clone. Biggs says in (cut scenes from) Ep 4 that he is going to the "academy" to become a pilot, by which people generally take to mean the "Imperial Space Academy", and that he must have defected to the Alliance at some intermediate point. I'm sure TIE pilots were cheap...they generally were trained less rigorously than their Alliance counterparts, and were valued less highly, but they definitely had their own personalities and qualities. And some of them became legendary aces in their own right.

This is addressed in Zahn's Allegience novel which mentions that at that time (sometime after ANH but before ROTJ) Stormtroopers ranks were beginning to swell with actual recruits (we know they had a Training Academy on Carida that trained recruits, not clones) and that the ISB didn't trust them. The text seems to imply this is a 'pilot' program, even though we know for sure that by this point in the timeline other people we see in the Star Wars universe have already been accepted, trained, and are politically acceptable (like Turr Phennir, Baron Soontir Fel [The Imperial Ace] and General Derricote).
 
Many sources from all levels of 'canon' seem to suggest that clones were gradually replaced with 'normal' people during the time from the Clone Wars to the Empire of the original trilogy.

To bring this back to Wing Commander, I've always thought in the original games that the Confederation generally had a technological advantage to counter their numerical disadvantage. The novels and other sources seem to support this idea.
 
IIRC, and unsure, I think I read somewhere in a manual once that in the early stages of the war the kilrathi flew unshielded fighters. Also that either a neutron or particle gun was a refined kilrathi weapon(I'm not talking about the PTC, I think I read this in the privateer manual), and that the confederation went into war originally with lasers, massdrivers and stormfires(like in WC4, probably retconned somewhere to explain why Blair was not the highest scoring pilot in the war).
 
IIRC, and unsure, I think I read somewhere in a manual once that in the early stages of the war the kilrathi flew unshielded fighters. Also that either a neutron or particle gun was a refined kilrathi weapon(I'm not talking about the PTC, I think I read this in the privateer manual), and that the confederation went into war originally with lasers, massdrivers and stormfires(like in WC4, probably retconned somewhere to explain why Blair was not the highest scoring pilot in the war).

Action Stations makes it pretty clear that at least at that point, fighters were shielded.
 
The Kilrathi don't seem to have shields in the movie. As soon as a bullet hits, it goes straight into the ship. Also, Blair says "The big one's shielded" when he encounters the Com ship, which could indicate other ships are not. They could also be attacking a less well equiped fleet that's flying outdated Dralthi.
 
Edit Simulator Missions?

@-danr-:
You just say you flew Kilrathi fighters in the Standoff FlightSim, and you changed the ships in the FlightSim mission... May I ask how you did that? Or is it a feature that'll be unlocked after beating the campaign?
 
The Kilrathi don't seem to have shields in the movie. As soon as a bullet hits, it goes straight into the ship. Also, Blair says "The big one's shielded" when he encounters the Com ship, which could indicate other ships are not. They could also be attacking a less well equiped fleet that's flying outdated Dralthi.

That "movie" was not Wing Commander if you ask me. Nothing that was in it should be considered canon.
 
The Kilrathi don't seem to have shields in the movie. As soon as a bullet hits, it goes straight into the ship. Also, Blair says "The big one's shielded" when he encounters the Com ship, which could indicate other ships are not. They could also be attacking a less well equiped fleet that's flying outdated Dralthi.

He may also just mean "the big one's phase shielded" without saying it in full. Of course I haven't seen the movie so yeah....
 
Well, in on the same token in the star wars movies, fighters seemed to get one shot kills, yet in the books and games, they are much tougher.
 
Well, in on the same token in the star wars movies, fighters seemed to get one shot kills, yet in the books and games, they are much tougher.

Well-said. I've always noticed this too. Of course, a one-hit kill in a game would make for a very frustrating game (except in cases where it's supposed to be frustrating like bullet-hell games). I believe that the reason why one-hit kills aren't featured as prevalently in the in the Star Wars books as compared to the movies because both Timothy Zahn and Michael Stackpole were fans of the X-Wing and TIE Fighter games.
 
I don’t think the space combat in movies would be nearly as exiting if the fighters regularly took more than one shot to destroy. Watching each ship get shot 7 or 8 times before blowing up is a lot different than shooting it yourself multiple times while trying to stay alive. Even in the cutscenes in games we usually don’t see ships taking very long to blow up.
 
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