Galactic Starfighter Strategies: New ways of dealing with old problems on the liberty front
A lot of the things I am usually concerned with politically and professionally are current disappointments. Just this past week I learned that conservative groups could not agree on a candidate to challenge John Boehner’s seat confirming that many people talk tough until it really counts—but in the end they wimp out—and will get the government they deserve as a result. There appears to be a challenger to John Kasich’s seat, but that will be an uphill battle with major opposition rolling large stones down to stop the progress, so that is hardly a success story at this point. President Obama is proving to be a crook more and more as the follies of Obamacare are setting up 2014 to be a disastrous year for many financially. And my public school of Lakota got their tax money with a levy approval. I am personally making arrangements in financing to ensure that I don’t pay the extra $36 dollars in taxes per month—but the monopoly hold the institution has on the press, the political structure and the young minds of America’s youth remains strong—at least on the surface. Professionally, I am busier than I have ever been in my life. There is no shortage of need for problem solvers in spite of my attempt to be ostentatious to lower the line down to only those most serious–so free time is short—and at a severe premium. It is in times like these that one must have good constructive hobbies—and I do. I have shared with my readers here my long history and love of strategy games—particularly combat oriented war games where I can apply methods learned in The Art of War and The Book of Five Rings to theoretical situations—which I then apply to my real life needs by washing out strategic theories against real life opponents. Currently my two favorite games of this type are X Wing Miniatures, CLICK HERE FOR REVIEW, and the squeaky new online computer game Galactic Starfighter—which is my topic of discussion today.
Galactic Starfighter has been a very pleasant surprise. As a space flight simulator featuring aerial combat that I have been looking forward to for a long time—it has delivered spectacularly. I have a favorite video game called X-Wing from way back in the early 90s that I used to love—the graphics were not what they are today, but the game play was infinitely interesting. The enemies were NPCs (Non Playable Characters) and would require tight combat engagements with a variety of craft to fly and fight against. Huge capital ships would come into the scenario and would often hyper jump into a hot zone and start dispatching enemy fighters leaving a player frantic to shoot down as many as they could in a short time and attempt to take out the large vessels by knocking out their shields then destroying their bridge where the command structure was usually housed. I played that game with a nephew of mine for many hours—and he still talks about it 20 years later as if it were one of the most fun times of his life. Galactic Starfighter came out only as recently as December 3, 2013 and it didn’t take me long to discover what the design team at LucasArts, BioWare, and Electronic Arts were up to. They essentially made a game with the basic concept of the old X-Wing game and dusted it off with a slick new paint job which modern programming allows. The flight mechanics, the ability to shove power to shields, or engines depending on need is there, directional shields, targeting reticules, telemetry data streams—it’s all there. Only Galactic Starfighter is better.
The old X-Wing game had NPCs programmed to go after a target along fixed parameters. Once a pilot learned the basics of these standards, the NPCs could be dominated—so the learning curve was not terribly steep once the basics of concept and flight control were mastered. With Galactic Starfighter the entire game is PVP (player versus player) meaning the people you fly against are all live pilots. It reminds me of a very slick version of the old X-Box game Crimson Skies and how that game played on X-Box Live. I have now played hundreds of matches, earned over a million credits, countless ACE awards, medals, and ship requisition allowing me to purchase upgrades for my small fleet of ships—and I’m nowhere near finished with it. If anything I am more eager to play it with each match queued up. It is that good.
But what’s even better is that my wife—who is not a typical dog fighting advocate has found she can play it with me at the same time as we have very large specially built computers designed to exclusively play Star Wars: The Old Republic which Galactic Starfighter is a part. That is a new development for me to have a combat simulator this powerful and dynamic which can link up to another player in real-time to fly coordinated maneuvers toward separate targets. My wife does not love speed the way I do. It is not something she enjoys. I love to zip in and around obstacles forcing my opponents into a mistake running themselves into a fix object with close quarter fighting. My wife is more of a defender type who takes her time and is good at holding down the fort after I’ve taken it—which is ironically the object of the game in Galactic Starfighter—which is essentially a fancy capture the flag game.
My wife uses a gunship—which is slow, but heavily armored to hold areas that I capture with my strike fighter, and she has gotten so good at using her 15,000mm rail gun to strike down approaching enemies from a comfortable distance while I engage them up close and personal—that it has led to a devastating series of losses for the other players on the opposite team. And she is having a blast with it. I don’t have to coax her into playing; she is the one wanting to continue playing new rounds. Last night it was a quarter till one in the morning and we were both trying to find a good reason to play one more match—because it is so fun—and addicting. It has all the mechanics from X-Wing which were best I’ve ever seen even after playing Crimson Skies, all the Microsoft Flight Simulators, and even Star Wars: Battlefront—yet Galactic Starfighter goes to a new level that is unprecedented. It has a Wing Commander feel to it and is simply a combination of all the great war games beloved for years wrapped up into one very cool package.
Using that rail gun, my wife may actually have more kills than I do which should say a lot to new players not confident with their piloting skills. In Galactic Starfighter the gunships are slow—but powerful and very deadly. The strike fighters and scout ships are the ones that have to fly all over the battlezone engaging in dogfights with other players. The gunships sit back like snipers and zap their enemies from a comfortable distance—and using my wife and my strategy, I engage the enemy to keep them busy while she zaps away from a distance. So long as they are engaged with me, they don’t notice her, which then makes all the kills. Good stuff.
I get most of my creative strategic ideas for things in the real world by playing games like the ones mentioned. On the liberty front, there are some valiant efforts, but not enough horsepower to pull things across the finish line—and it basically comes down to a lack of will power. People talk a good game, but when they find themselves in the cross-hairs—just as they do in Galactic Starfighter, they panic and run into something killing themselves. If I had a quarter for each time I applied a missile lock onto an enemy and when they hear their sensor alarms go off in their ship warning them of my approaching missile, they panic and run into the side of a mountain, or a floating asteroid, I’d be able to solve world hunger by making millionaires out of each of them. The same thing has been happening in real life—people behave as they do when they play games like this—even worse because in real life they take even less chances because it matters there. There is no reset button in the real world. In a game like Galactic Starfighter at least if a mistake is made, the player can start over—and hopefully learn from their error. Because of the value of such games it is a privilege to live in a time where they can be played relatively effortlessly. My wife and I have a very expensive set-up basically just to play this game. We have thousands of dollars invested. But for a casual player, they could probably get by with only a laptop. However, when she and I are both playing vigorously, our computers with their big processors put out enough heat to warm up a good-sized room on a very cold night. We have six cool down fans on each of our computers to keep them cool during intense graphic interfaces enduring millions of calculations per second which makes playing Galactic Starfigher even possible. Our set-up is unusual, and it is unlikely that many of the thousands of players on the game with us at any given time have such system capability—yet they can still play and enjoy it. Since these kinds of things are so important to us, and we do so much of it, we take the extra measures to ensure a positive experience.
New strategies are needed when the old ones are not producing the results desired. The first step in such a process is to recognize the issue, and correct it. The way I do that is by playing these kinds of games. Not falling in love with a set of engagement rules is the key to discovering the best way to take out an opponent, and in the real life world of politics, business, and human relationships—there are many enemies that must be taken down—simply because their intentions dictate such a position. For me, the best way to do that is through strategy games—and currently the X-Wing Miniatures game is at the very top of my list—but this Galactic Starfighter is right there with it. I’m telling you all this dear reader because during the Holiday Season, there are often moments of downtime—and abilities to play these kinds of games present themselves often. Take advantage of the opportunity, because in 2014, a lot of tough topics are on the table—and fresh minds will be required to tackle them. One way to obtain that freshness is in the new game Galactic Starfighter. For you people out there who have a problem with me but the law won’t let us settle things properly in a parking lot somewhere, or in a duel of some kind—look me up on Galactic Starfighter. I’m on the Jedi Covenant server flying by the name of Cliff-hanger. You can’t miss me, I’m the one sending craft out of the sky in exploding heaps—and I’ll be happy to add your name to the list.
Rich Hoffman
