Is this supposed to be a multiplayer campaign? I can't even pass the first mission. You're supposed to keep everyone from escaping.

Even if I switch to a Valkyrie and go full engines, I can't catch Aries 2 before it jumps out. I assume that's intentional, to start the mission timer.

If I go after Aries 3, then I can't seem to get back in time to stop Aries 1 or the other frieghter from getting away. Same if I go after the ones getting to the jump node - Aries 3 gets to the comm station and calls for help. Either way, it's Fission Mailed.

If I send my wingmen after one and go after the other, then they either don't catch it in time, or get splashed without my inspired leadership, and Beta wing does okay against the fighters, but if I give them a target, their reason to exist apparently turns into "making pretty colors as they explode".

ARGH.

/Rant

Yeah, mission 1 was pretty rough. I think the first ship to escape is meant to escape. It is that second ship that you need to go after and destroy immediately, then get your butt back over to the fighting pronto.

Watch who escapes, when/where they escape, and note which one doesn't cause you to fail the mission (ignore that one). Yes, this is going to take multiple tries; good luck.

Overall, I think Silent Threat is just harder in general. Wait until you see some of the later missions...

Sorry to revive an old thread and this is probably not relevant to you anymore, but since I am currently playing this (on Insane difficulty level). Did you finish the campaign later? I played this first mission in a Hercules fighter with Prometheus + Leecher guns, and I think I switched all my wingmen to Hercules fighters as well, but with twin-Prometheus guns.

There is lots to fight, I just told my wingmen to engage (any) enemy, and kept fighting whoever was near me. I didn't specifically search for a certain enemy.

After all the fighters were destroyed (mostly by my wingmen, some by me), I think there was still Aries 1 left trying to get to the comm station. I still seemed to have quite enough time to get on its tail and keep shooting and sending missiles at it (I think I ordered my wingmen to attack it too, but I think they were further away).

The biggest problem was keeping myself alive in the early parts of the mission as there were so many enemies around, and specifically for Aries 1, to avoid its autoturrets while trying to shoot at it. However, my Hornet missiles seemed pretty effective against it, and also once I hit it with a Leecher gun for some time, Aries 1 seemed to stop and its autoturrets stopped too, a sitting duck to kill.

Judging by a walkthrough, you don't even have to care for either Aries 2 or 3. Aries 2 will always escape (it will re-appear in the next mission IIRC), and Aries 3 will get destroyed by itself by sentries near the comm station. So the only one you really need to destroy properly is Aries 1, plus all enemy fighters.

I never finished the mission, much less the campaign. Aries 3 never got destroyed, it failed the mission for me, too. I don't know if it was a bug or what, but yeah, I ended up just giving up on it.

Silent Threat is generally considered the least-polished campaign Volition made; if you're interested, there's a fan-made remake called [url=http://hard-light.net/wiki/index.php/Silent_Threat:_Reborn]Silent Threat: Reborn[/url] that's widely recommended to be played instead, and is supposedly even compatible with the retail FS2 executable (although obviously I'd recommend using FreeSpace Open instead).

Maybe I never stuck with it long enough, but the Leecher never seemed particularly effective to me. Might be a factor of my difficulty level though, and that destroyed ships don't need to be power drained.

It has been long enough that I don't remember exactly how I finished this mission, except that I needed to quickly focus on an outbound ship that was a distance from the main fighting if I was going to have enough time to catch it and destroy it. The ship that is destroyed by turrets for you might survive the turrets in lower difficulties; I'm not sure.

Not sure if there is difference. I just remember first fighting anyone close to me (I recall having my hands full with them, just trying to survive against them), and when everyone else was destroyed, I raced towards that last remaining Aries and destroyed it before it reached its destination.

Frankly. I am not quite sure about the overall effectiveness of the Leecher, at least against the smaller ships. It is hard to tell if they become less active when hit by it, at least they are supposed to. Sometimes i use it, sometimes not. I usually give my wingmen just double Prometheus (medium shield damage, high hull damage), but in one mission where they just kept dying, I give them one Leecher as well, and oddly that time they seemed to survive longer.

A couple of missions were... odd. The third mission (Ghosts) where you are supposed to guard escape pods that are being retrieved: I had massive problems against the first enemy wave which I think consisted of fast Manticore fighters, and some heavy Shivan bombers. As soon as the bombers engaged me, I'd die in a matter of seconds to their constant (also autoturret) fire, and so did my wingmen. Each and every time. I find it very odd that a walkthrough claims those are quite easy to kill. WTF? If they are so darn easy, why do also my wingmen flying Hercules drop like flies against them?

After I learned that apparently that enemy wing is not even trying to destroy the pods but attack me, I said phuck it and went the opposite way with my wingmen (telling them to form on my wing), never engaging those enemies. Then I just watched rest of the mission from far away: those initial Shivans just circled around, some big Terran ship came to collect the escape pod, some unknown fighters came for whatever reason (I don't even know what they were doing, fighting some of the other Shivans?), another Terran ship appeared...

It was all rather confusing, and I didn't do anything except escape to a safe distance in the beginning. In the end apparently one of the escape pods got rescued IIRC. What exactly was I supposed to do in that mission? Oh well, at least I passed it, without fighting at all...

Now I am on the 6th mission I think ("Secret Recovery"), and I am unsure how to approach it. It seems to have optional primary objectives: Epsilon 1 transport will try to dock with the Giordano science station. If it fails, Epsilon 2 will try the same. If it fails too, I am supposed to destroy that station.

The walkthrough suggests it doesn't matter which way you achieve that, so I guess I should just try to destroy the station right away? The combat in that mission is very intense from the very beginning, I usually die in like 10 seconds after starting the mission. If I survive longer, all my wingmen have surely died already, and Epsilon 1&2 have failed too I think. Also if I understood right, the enemies will just keep respawning, you can never destroy them all.

I once tried the same tactic as in Ghosts, ie. I just run away. Well, I obviously have to go back later, at least to destroy the station I guess.

Wingmen seem oddly fragile even in Hercules, in quite many missions they all die like within 30 seconds or so, even if flying a Hercules with 2xPrometheus.

Frankly, that's why I am reading a walkthrough, to get some hints for the worst missions. It says the last mission in Silent Threat is possibly the hardest mission in the whole Freespace game, but even they suggest some trick to make it manageable, hiding in a small cranny near the ship which you are supposed to destroy.

Then again, for some reason I usually end up doing things my own way, and the hints in the walkthrough seem completely irrelevant, at least in the insane difficulty. Then again, surprisingly some missions which are supposed to be hard feel pretty easy, maybe I was lucky or something. Like the Hellfire (5th?) mission in Silent Threat, one walkthrough claims you have to use D-Missiles to disable the big ships in order to survive, while another gives elaborate instructions which turrets to shoot down from the ships. I just attacked them as fast as I could with my wingmen, and we were able to kill them all (five big Hellfire ships).

One reason I often check the walkthroughs is because I got tired in the base game how so many of the missions had red herrings, bogus mission objectives that you are not even supposed to be able to achieve. And you don't really know that either so you just keep trying, and dying. Until finally letting the objectives fail by themselves, and only then finding out that that's exactly how the designers intended it to go. I find that a bit irritating, putting objectives that you are not supposed to finish.

I can understand that, and it is typically irksome (like "Kill this boss", except the game is designed so you lose to the boss for story purposes).

It does make sense from an in-game perspective though, like saving the Plato. In game, Mission command would issue you that objective because they don't know about the overwhelming assault that is going to hit mid-mission, so it's okay by them that you end up failing that one.

The trope "acceptable breaks from reality" crops up, though.