This mission is nothing really special, but it is well made and it requires some good timing. Thumbs up.

A fun mission, and challenging when you want to have a good score. There are minor logical flaws, like why you do a demonstration of the Gunboats abilities by destroying stationary targets while the brass you hope to impress hasn't even arrived yet. But that's nitpicking. :)

A mission which proves that "challenging" and "frustrating" are not far apart. Personally, I would have used one or two fewer waves of X-Ws. On the other hand, it's a matter of your own personal taste (and ambition) how long you want to fight. The primary goals solve themselves without the player doing anything at all.

The setup is simplistic, it's 12 imp fighters and a cap ship against 12 rebel fighters and a cap ship. You kinda have to despise the creator for hating it himself but submitting it to the compendium anyway. Of course, there are still far worse missions up here, therefore I think his own "1" rating is actually too harsh. At least this one is bug-free, patch-free und quickly over. 'nuff said.

No less than four cap ships with starfighter orders plus fighters in groups of six and nine make this mission a ridiculous crashfest. Oh, and you fly a Missile Boat. Zero.

A very simplistic and uncreative setup; four ISDs with a squadron of TDs and MBs each trying to "sink" the others. I "kinda" liked it, but it is a very long mission, especially if you play for score (dogfight three dozen TDs... yay).

Very quick but fun mission.

This one has everything that makes a mission bad. Ships doing weird dancing on the spot and/or crashing into each other, craft not able to enter a ship's hangar and endlessly going in circles instead, wrongly set motherships which lead to funny effects, like: You can enter a rebel ships' hangar. ALL fighters in the mission, hostile as well as imp, enter from a neutral Modular Conveyor. And some rebel FG don't arrive at all as they have NO mothership, hence the bonus goals are uncompletable. Plus we hardly get any storyline and also never find out who the enemy is. I'd say this mission was laughable, but actually I didn't laugh much. My advice: Complete the primary goals (just inspection) which is done in a minute, then quit and don't look back.

It does not have any glaring flaws, it's bad in a very generic way. Too many waves and too few ideas. On an unrelated note: Mission 3 is a striking example of why our HS system sucks.

This is just stupid. Why do imperial flag officers arrive in non-imperial craft just so that I have to inspect them? Why am I supposed the lower the shields of an INT in a T/I? Why is that made pointless by it crashing right into the ISD before it can be captured? Why am I supposed to kill a MonCal and a VSD, still in a T/I? Just stupid. Not the worst I ever played, but close.

I take no pleasure in criticizing Hawk, nor am I usually one to advertise my own work in a mission review... but seriousy, if you want starfighter racing, play TIE-TC 244, Lord of the TIEs. This one here suffers from a bunch of problems. First of all, you don't even *need* to be fast, which kinda defeats the point. What's more, the waypoint shuttles appear seemingly random and out of order, the "finish" transports arrive before the last waypoints. In the end it kinda turns into a random dogfight as some enemies appear, which, however, don't do much except going in circles and waiting to be killed. And the whole thing does not even run on TIE-CD because the inflight message limit is violated. It is, in short, not working very well right now. I advise to wait for the updated version which Hawkins is working on already.

I regret that I can't give a better rating, as I find the concept of converting the original XW missions interesting. But the difficulty is very imbalanced. Means that is is frustrating on hard and boring on normal. Also, some of the XWs were just going in circles instead of attacking anything.

Shame on you, Landon. This one has more bugs than flight groups! Invest more than five minutes next time.

All in all it was well made, although there were some design flaws like the one in mission 4 where the ATR crashes. But the main reason why I only give a medium score is because it's just not very much fun to do this much dogfighting in a dang Missile Boat; any other craft and the rating would be at least a point higher.

Breaking this siege by fending off all those fighters and blowing up cap ships is fun - and a real challenge if you want a good score. I'm missing some more originality for a top rating, though. Briefings were pretty minimal, too.

Shouldn't even be on the compendium.

A good battle with some minor flaws, like minimalistic briefings (which do the job, though) and some enemy fighters finding no craft to attack while a battle is raging around them.
What annoyed me a bit was the last mission where there is a large-scale fleet assault. First of all, the amount of cap ships lead to flickering and ships disapperaing in TIE-CD, which can be bad when you have to kill your opponents quickly and can't see them.
But more importantly... as always in missions like this, your side brings an INT. As always in missions like this, the enemy pounds the hell out of it and you must be on your toes to protect it. And as in far too many missions like this, the enemy cap ships just fly home anyway if you are not fast enough - so why did I even bother to keep that INT alive? :) It's not terribly important, but a bit frustrating on the first go.

Pretty much the same mission cloned a few times, with crap like cap ships ramming each other, others being invulnerable, first generation TIEs entering from hyperspace, and dogfighting TDs in a GUN. It's a very fine example of very bad and lazy mission design. Gotta love Jansj's comment about the grinding headache, it hits the nail on the head. Ouch.

Fun, but nothing really special. The "cloaked" FAC was a nice touch.

The battle is mostly unspectacular, with you flying around killing too many waves of fighters. Not bad, but certainly not great. I'd give 3 points so far. I deduct one for Ender, as always, using his silly broken craft patches for no reason. And one more for this:
In mission 1, you can easily prevent Havok's wife and baby from being kidnapped and escort them to safety, however, Ender completely failed to allow for this possibility. As soon as the shuttle is safely aboard the ISD, you get lotsa inflight messages how the mission was failed, and sure enough: you spend the rest of the battle retrieving the victims of a kidnapping that never happened.
This is such an epic design fail that I wish Ender was still around so I could flame him for it. Well, and because he's awesome. But it surely does not show in this battle. :P

Lots of stuff to kill, but otherwise boring. In two missions, the minimalistic briefing doesn't even match the mission. In the last mission, there's also a small bug; when the primary goals are completed, it doesn't show on the goals screen. All in all this one is pretty bad and sloppy.

A simplistic battle without anything worth mentioning.

This one has an interesting little design flaw that allows for ridiculously high scores. :) [Not anymore - TAC Sienar]
But it's really fun to play.

A fun mission with the kind of hilarious briefings you'd expect from Frothy. Nothing really special about the flying part, though. And it is a little strange how a bunch of smugglers is just sitting there in their ships doing nothing and not even attempting to flee. :)

Silly, boring, and far too easy. Especially mission 4 must be one of the most pathetic missions I've ever played. Now surely you ask yourself how such a pile of poo won "Best Battle of 2007". Well, what the TAC isn't telling you is that it also got "Worst Battle", just that the latter "award" was conveniently dropped to hide the fact that the Golden Tugs 2007 have been a ridiculous farce.