The Let's Play Archive

Wing Commander III & Standoff

by Ilanin

Part 1: Introduction

Continuing the story of Wing Commander and Wing Commander II: Vengeance of the Kilrathi, ably let's played by ivantod in this thread, is:



So this is a fan-made mod of a game you just called "pretty dire". Why are you LPing it?
Because unlike the game it grew out of, Standoff is an awful lot of fun. There's a lot to criticise about Standoff's presentation, and believe me, I'll be doing that as we go along (and so will you, I suspect). The actual gameplay, though, is fantastic - the modified Vision engine that powered Secret Ops married to the Wing Commander II-style ships made for a great flight experience, and the mission design is, for the most part, varied and clever, if occasionally prone to throwing too many ships around.

What difficulty are you playing on, then?
I will be playing on the hardest difficulty, Nightmare. There's one mission in the game I've not beaten on that level yet; we'll cross that bridge when we come to it. (This mission was Wild Weasel, the second mission of episode 5's winning path. I got through it, though I did kind of whine about it.)

This game is basically fanfiction, right?
Sort of. There's two licensed Wing Commander novels set between the end of Wing Commander II: Special Operations and the start of Wing Commander III. The events in these novels are mentioned in the manual to Wing Commander III, Victory Streak, making them canon even if you do ignore the novels. Standoff broadly follows the (non-dull parts of) the plot of the second of those novels, Fleet Action. Not all of the specific characters and events shown in Standoff are things that happen in the book, but they're a plausible extrapolation from what is.

So this game is bascially fanfiction, right?
Well, yes. But it's fun and it makes as much sense as anything does of the transition between WCII and III.

OK, you've danced around it for long enough, are you going to explain the plot already?
There's a longer summary of events in the Terran-Kilrathi war to date in the paragraphs below this one. To understand Standoff, all you really need to know is that humanity has been fighting a race of aggressive, intelligent felines called the Kilrathi for just over 30 years at this point, and the Confederation has recently adopted a new strategy of using groups of expendable small escort carriers in deep penetration raids to target Kilrathi logistics. This has been highly successful, prompting the cats to propose an armistice and a reduction of forces. Human leaders, who in common with many of their counterparts in other science fiction, have apparently never read the right books or seen the right films, accept the proposal.

The longer version, for the benefit of anyone joining this thread without having read the previous one (though, seriously, go read it, ivantod did a fine job). Humanity is at war with a race of aggressive felines called the Kilrathi (colloquially "cats"), and has been for some 20 years at the start of WC1. At the beginning of that game, the Kilrathi have just overextended in an attempt to end the war with an attack on Earth, and Wing Commander 1 tells the story of a Terran counterattack, spearheaded by the carrier TCS Tiger's Claw, on which the player's character, later to be officially named Christopher "Maverick" Blair, begins his career. The Kilrathi are routed and driven from the Vega sector, which, occupying the space on a direct line between Sol and Kilrah, is the primary point of conflict in the war. In the expansions, the player and the rest of the Claw's flight wing destroy a prototype Kilrathi superweapon in a daring deep raid, and save a newly-discovered race of intelligent aliens, the avian Firekka, from enslavement and near extermination in a Kilrathi religious ceremony.

Prior to the start of WC2, however, the Tiger's Claw is destroyed by a new type of Kilrathi fighter, equipped with a cloaking device. Christopher Blair (the player) is the only pilot to report an encounter with these fighters, and his flight recorder is mysteriously blank. Blair is blamed for the disaster, court-martialed, reduced in rank to Captain and assigned to an out of the way space station. His career is resurrected ten years later when the heavy carrier TCS Concordia, home to many of the survivors of the Claw, is chased into the same sector as Blair's station by a pair of Kilrathi cruisers, and Blair is able to prevent its destruction. Circumstances conspire to keep him aboard the carrier long enough to prove both his worth as a combat pilot and his blamelessness for the loss of the Tiger's Claw, with the main game culminating in the destruction of the Kilrathi starbase which Blair's former carrier had been destroyed assaulting ten years previously.

In the expansions things begin to go wrong for the Confederation. Regarding the rebellion on four frontier Kilrathi worlds as a chance to strike a critical blow against the enemy, Confed high command sends the Concordia to support the rebels on the most populous world, Ghorah Khar. While Blair, now promoted to Colonel, successfully leads a defence against a Kilrathi assault, splitting Confed forces in the Deneb sector proves to have been a fatal mistake, with a major Kilrathi attack elsewhere having caused heavy losses, including that of the sector command post. The Concordia is then diverted to deal with a nest of traitors to the Confederation, lead by Zachary "Jazz" Colson, the pilot who framed Blair for the destruction of the Tiger's Claw. While successful, the delay in linking the Concordia with the rest of Confed's forces in Deneb has caused the loss of almost the entire Sixth Fleet and forced the Terrans to retreat from the sector.

Being as they are heavily down on carriers, Confleet high command opts for a risky strategy to attempt to restore parity in the war. Having identified the world of Vukar Tag as sentimentally important to the Kilrathi, they combine (in the licensed novel End Run) an assault on Vukar with a suicide deep raid on Kilrah itself by an escort carrier, a destroyer and a corvette, hoping to split the Kilrathi home fleet. The plan works: Kilrathi rear areas turn out to have substantially weaker defences than anticipated, and the TCS Tarawa is able to cause serious damage to Kilrathi shipyards before being crippled by returning Kilrathi carriers; the depleted Kilrathi assault on Vukar is ambushed by the four carriers of the Terran Third Fleet and smashed, with five carriers destroyed and two more heavily damaged. Following the victory Admiral Tolwyn disobeys orders and jumps the Concordia into Kilrathi-held territory to prevent Prince Thrakath's fleet finishing off the crippled Tarawa, allowing the Fleet to learn what the Tarawa had discovered about the weakened state of Kilrathi defences deep behind the front lines. Accordingly, the TCN adopts long-range penetration as a strategy on a wider scale, and escort carrier raids inflict heavy damage on Kilrathi logistics. With the Kilrathi unable to transfer supplies to the front line at a great enough rate, increasingly large proportions of their numerically superior fleet was forced to retire from the front lines for resupply and refitting, allowing the Confederation to gain numerical superiority in critical areas. In mid-2668, the Kilrathi proposed an armistice, and on 9th July 2668, Confederation General Order 2132A ordered the suspension of all hostilities prior to peace negotiations. Large sections of the navy, including most of the escort carriers used for raiding strikes, are placed into mothballs; according to the peace commission, the Kilrathi are likewise demobilising. Skepticism runs rife in the fleet, but in the core worlds there are many voices who buy into the narrative proposed by the Kilrathi ambassador, Baron Jukaga nar Ki'ra, that the unending war is propagated by and for the two races' respective military-industrial complexes. (The Firekkans, perhaps clearer-headed, withdraw from the Confederation in protest after the armistice is signed).

Regardles of the motives, the resulting peace deal not only emasculates the TCN, but also leaves hundreds of thousands of veteran combat personnel out of a job...fortunately, for now, Captain William Bradshaw, TCS Lionheart, is not one of them.

However, there are plenty of opportunists who would take advantage of the fleet's current weakness...



Intro video (Youtube)

After the introduction has finished playing, we end up here, in the TCS Lionheart's pilots lounge/ready room or something of that description. Apparently a destroyer isn't large enough to rate a bar.



Going clockwise from the top-middle, we can examine the killboard by clicking on the screen mounted high on the wall near the door, start the next mission by clicking on the door, quit the game by clicking the window/hatch thing which I've never quite divined the purpose of, play simulator missions (such as the "Kilrathi Gauntlet" mission I played to provide background video for the "what's Standoff?" video linked in the first post) by clicking on the, well, simulator in the bottom right, load and save the game using the obvious panels in the middle-left and go back to specific missions by clicking the monitor above them. The monitor with a picture of a fighter (those of you who followed the previous thread will recognise it as a Ferret) on it is the in-game craft database, and the panel labelled "COMM" allows you to read Bradshaw's e-mail account which will keep you up to date with the developing story. For now, though, it's time to hit the briefing room and chase down some pirates.