[Vidmaster]

it's still difficult, the easiest campaign is RaiderWars after all

[-Norbert-]

I guess they played the Earth-Minabi-War demo first and were continuously blasted apart by the Nials.
That's why they say they couldn't finish some missions even after the fifth try  and had to jump to the next mission.

Yeah, those Nials do pack a punch, especially if you're new to TBP.

[Sushi]

On the other hand, you can beat half the missions in the demo by just flying around and not getting shot down...

[VERTi60]

Which is the point, it's more like a "survival only" campaign rather than "survival+kill everyone to proceed". In that case it's even easer than RW.

[mxlm]

It's not necessarily the case that players will realize they merely need to survive.

[FUBAR-BDHR]

Basically the idea is to follow orders and not play hero.  While it may be possible to totally avoid combat and still win it doesn't always work.  So none of that Alpha 1 can you take out those 20 fighters and blow up those 2 Minbari cruisers for us.........

[-Norbert-]

Ah, the memories....
When I played the Demo for the first time and that Sharlin warps in.
Hey a Sharlin! Let's attack it!
3 seconds later I had a LOT more respect for the Sharlin and it's anti-fighter defences... after being blown to bits of course  

[Vidmaster]

hey, same here.
Still, from a fredders point of view, the last two missions of that campaign were really badly designed.

The first three are awesome, the Battle of the Line is not.
Run away and you win, attack you die, follow your instructions you die, stay with your caps you die.

[Slasher]

To be fair, the game played differently in November of '01.  I'm not sure how much time went into rebalancing the old missions for contemporary builds.  You have to remember, TBP Release 1 was developed years ago, and even Release 2 in the spring of 2003 was intended for standard, non-SCP FreeSpace 2.  So much has changed, the tables have gone through so many revisions and tweaks, the flight model and weapons themselves have been overhauled at least once...it's very different now.

Anyone remember when beam weapons for fighters weren't true beams but regular pulses that were elongated to look like beams and the Nial fired all three at once because it was the only way to make it work pre-SCP?  That's what I'm talking about.