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Well, I seem to have gotten the hang of flying a fighter but I still need LOTS more work with capital ships. I have been playing the first campaign and I was wondering what picking different missions really does for the war effort. When I flew my first mission I did not notice a huge minefield, but as I whittled away at it, it seemed no larger. It just had a different letter each time I attacked it. Does taking different missions really do anything to affect the overall war effort? The only thing that I really saw was that I took a patrol mission my first mission and watched two destroyers from the 60th Squadron get destroyed. My fighter was a bit of a fuel hog even at a drift so there was nothing I could do to help. heh, in fact I ran out of gas on that mission. Bummer of a 1st day of combat.

Fuel hog? Sounds like you need the patch. I had this same issue and the patch fixed it (with a little extra effort). Once you install the patch, youll need to take a look in the games directory. If you see 2 exes there (one should be "Starshatter the gathering storm.exe"(the origional exe) and one should be stars.exe(the patched exe)). If you do see a stars.exe, youll need to modify the shortcut on your desktop so that it targets stars.exe. Now when the game loads, the patch will work correctly. Note that if you didnt see a stars.exe after installing the patch, you should be ok to run the game as normal.

The minefield you saw can and will be destroyed after a few missions. The game is persistant between missions so if you manage to severly damage a ship, Its hull will still be all torn up for the next mission you fly. When using a fighter, dont feel bad taking a few missions to destroy a big cap ship.

Also notice that in the "forces" menu, there is a drop down bar that allows you to select differant sides of the war. You can use the little boxes in the top window to expand and view the contents of friendly and enemy groups. Notice that when a ship dies, it will still be listed in the forces menu but it will be tagged as (KIA) or killed in action. When doing missions with my big Devestator class cruiser, I take care to check where the enemy forces are between missions so I can make a few extra kills once my assigned mission is complete. Eventually the entire enemy force can be whittled down or even destroyed in a campaign.

A nice touch is that the news and events change depending on how you and your fleets fare. I saw some really dreary news reports when I first started playing as most the cap ships I flew ended up being destroyed. Now that I have the hang of the game a little more, the events are usually presented in a much more favorable light.

ORIGINAL: Rogue187

When I flew my first mission I did not notice a huge minefield, but as I whittled away at it, it seemed no larger. It just had a different letter each time I attacked it.

There are several minefields distinguished by said letters, and each minefield has several mines on it. So if you wipe off three mines of field A and one mine of field B, that is at least 4 mines less when you start next mission (AI guys of your side can destroy some more mines). When you destroy Minefield A completely, it's destroyed for good.

By damaged ships Psycho is referring to starships (frigates and up). Fighters are always completely repaired before they can be sent out again. Also once you destroy all enemy fighters, you can go against enemy starships without fear of encountering incoming fighters.

[edit]
Or if you destroy enemy carrier, that carrier and all fighters aboard it are destroyed and are out of campaign.

Or if you destroy enemy carrier, that carrier and all fighters aboard it are destroyed and are out of campaign.

Generally speaking if you destroy a carrier it's campaign over (victory). At least that was the case in the first 3 camps. Not bothered finishing nightfall yet.

Ask NOT what the campaign can do for you. Ask what you can do for the campaign. [;)]

I'm just starting up with training now,finnished reading the manual,have to make my cheatsheet/quick reference-card for keyboard commands.

One pitfall to watch out for; dont get overzealous with your fighter. When it looks like your about to get in over your head, turn tail and bring the fighter home. Your not going to be able to wipe out the enemy fleet in one mission with a fighter (a big mean cruiser is another story tho..[:D]).