Battle of Hoth

30 years, 18 games,1 Battle of Hoth Personally I could do with 3 or 4 more.

 

I think that would be cool, especially with the gaming technology that we have nowdays. I wouldn't dedicate an entire game to the battle, but it would be interesting if it were part of a bigger OT game.

 

I absolutely loved the Rogue Squadron version of Hoth.

 

So I was watching TESB the other night just for the sake of the anniversary, and started thinking real hard about the Battle of Hoth.

Honestly, what a crock. What a fiasco.

Here you have this bunch of rebels holed up in this icy hole in the ground, having over their heads a fleet of about a dozen or more Star Destroyers, headed by the mammoth Executor itself with Darth Frakkin' Vader in command. And yet this might display of Imperial military might manages to let a good chunk of those rebels escape!? Seriously, was every ISD in orbit taken out by one stationary ion cannon emplacement? And where where all the fighters inside each and every of those ISDs? Also, couldn't the combined firepower of all those ships, engaging in one massive orbital bombardment, be enough to have taken out the shield protecting the rebels? Yes, it's an energy shield, but like all shields, it will eventually crack if strained to the breaking point!

But no, apparently that fleet of ISDs with its one massive SSD in command, with all the guns, fighters and bombers at their disposal couldn't crack this so called supershield. So what do they do? They only send out a landing party of five or six of these towering hulking walking tanks that took forever to reach Echo base. And without air support. What, are TIE's really so ineffective when flying in an atmophere? And if they are, doesn't the mighty Empire have a dedicated atmospheric fighter (like, I dunno, the gunboat or missile boat) for such conditions? Regardless, these walking tanks were impervious to nearly anything up to a nuke, but they could be taken down by these rickety airspeeders that just happened to have cable harpoons capable of making these walkers trip on their legs and crash to their doom!?! Or by one walking and very determined Jedi wananbe that could simply rappel himself to the underside of one of these mighty walkers, slash it with his lightsaber and blow it up to hell with one nicely tossed thermal detonator! Regardless, one of these things was lucky enough to survive and then take out the super shield but only when it was nearly at point blank range! It's then that the troop ground assault begins, but at this point most of the rebels have miraculously escaped, some of them even taking their sweet time - undisturbed -- a ways away prepping up one final transport and said determined Jedi wannabe's fighter for liftoff!

So in a nutshell, that's the Battle of Hoth. Even if perhaps he was pulling his punches searching for his boy, Vader should've choked himself for such utter incompetence. The Empire Strikes Back indeed!

 

That list is missing Force Commander, plus several handheld games...

 

Personally, I think the Battlefront games did it best. Since you finally got to drive the AT-ATs!

Plus, fighting as a rebel trooper, not pilot, can fun too...holding up in the trenches, fighting off waves of snowtroopers as AT-ATs pound away at you.

or storming the rebel base as snowtroopers...actually, i think Battlefront covers all the important angles itself.

 

It covered all the angles but it doesn't mean it did it well...

Actually it was quite good, but I thought there's always room for improvement, I mean you can always get smarter AI, more AT-ATs, more expansive maps, better quality graphics as it tends to movie accurate. So I reckon there will be plenty more Hoth, and I'm betting that we will get a Hoth level better than what we've seen so far, at some point.

 

Continuing from my previous posting: that's another thing, why so few walkers on Hoth, considering the entire fleet could have and should've deployed dozens of AT-Ats and AT-STs, not the mere half a dozen that we know of, considering how many of the things each ship could carry, let alone the dozens alone that could've been housed inside the Executor alone.

I know that the writers of ESB possibly didn't think things through and that hindsight is always 20/20, but the whole order of battle and strategy displayed at Hoth by both sides is simply mindnumbingly stupid.

 

I guess they didn't deploy dozens because even though Vader seemed sure the Rebels were there, the other Imperial brass weren't so confident (considering all they knew was there was a shield generator and a couple smugglers shooting a probe droid) and opted not to send an entire armada into the otherwise uninhabited system, perhaps to search/protect other systems of suspicion/tactical importance?

Along the same line, there were less than half a dozen ISD's orbiting the planet, all in very close proximity to each other, who's to say a majority of Rebel ships didn't escape into hyperspace on the far side of the planet?

 

Vader's Death Squadron fleet was quite sizeable and it should've maintained a perimeter around Hoth (not merely sit atop Echo base) in order to prevent the escape of ships through the planet's far side.

Considering the "All Terrain" part of their name, you'd think AT-AT's and AT-ST's would be able to be deployed whenever and wherever without any prior prep. But in any case, you have ships crewed by thousands of techs that should have no problem (at the risk of their lives) to prep a massive ground assault force STAT.

You got me there in regards to the low ceiling for fighters to operate in. I know that the Rebel techs were having a hard time prepping their fighters and speeders for the cold. The Empire, given their resources, shouldn't have had any such trouble or proper countermeasures to effective assault by space/air a shielded target.

 

I gather this Blizzard Force would be the small AT-AT squad under Veers' command? Sorry, I stopped being keen on things EU ages ago. I'd almost buy that the argument of prep time and extreme weather conditions if it weren't for the fact that we're talking about a mighty military machine with superior technology beyond our scope that shouldn't let a small thing like snow and extreme cold get the best of them. I can accept the argument of disadvantage from the Rebel side of the equation given their obvious disadvantage in regards to resources, tech and manpower.

And that still doesn't explain how one single Transport escorted by two measly X-Wings could escape past a disabled ISD (and really, it's embarassing for KDY that one of their ships would be so utterly incapacitated by ion cannons), given that thrice as many TIEs of any given ISD should've jumped the fleeing ships and disable/destroy them before they'd have a chance to jump to lightspeed. And let's not get started on how many times a hyperdriveless Falcon escaped from so many ISD's tractor beams during the movie, especially when at one time it was practically kissing the Executor's hull!

Again, in reality the Empire should have utterly destroyed all Rebels at Hoth, and Vader been able to capture Luke before the kid would have had a chance to reach his X-Wing.

 

The Empire's crackdown on Kashyyyk in the prologue of The Force Unleashed showed how Hoth should have been done. But I guess that had the advantage of coming after the prequels, where the clones demonstrated more realistic military operations.

 

Uh-huh. Yeah. And just out of curiosity, where do all those casualty lists come from, eh?

 

Well, both Hobbie and Veers survived Hobbie's attempted suicide run against Blizzard 1. Hobbie spent a lot of time in a bacta tank afterwards, and his affinity to bacta became a running joke among his Rogue Squadron teammates. And Veers, of course, lost his legs in that incident, but was still active in the military until his death during Dark Empire.

 

[image=http://www.videogamecritic.net/images/intel/star_wars__the_empire_strikes_back.png]

 

Um. Yeah.


*sighs*


How can I put this delicately...


Used to matter to me back in the day (as in when I threw away a good chunk of money in the Thrawn and post-Thrawn Bantam books up to parts of NJO), but now to me anything and everything EU is worth a steaming pile of alternate reality bantha poodoo. Sorry.

 

Um, sure, that's your opinion, which is great.

However, you can't discount a source just because you don't like it. Those sources exist, and to deny their existence or importance is the height of arrogance.

 

Guess I missed the announcement that video games aren't EU.