IMG Quest difficulty variance?

[oberlerchner123]

I've been doing the IMG quests up to the one where you have to shoot down some named dude and his lackeys in Sierra.
I found the game not head-against-desk-banging kind of hard but still challanging up to this point. Which I enjoyed.

Then this quest pitted me against 11 ships. lol
I figured, lets just go and see if I can seperate them and snipe them off one by one.

I killed the named ship on the first pass, leaving the remaing swarm with about a dozen missles on my tail.

Then suddenly ships were jumping in all around me, more fighters, battleships, cruisers all firing missles from all direction.
Was quite a mess. haha
So much harder to evade them when they are everywhere, instead of one blob.
In the end a missle hit me and took out my weapons system and that was basicly the end of that.

I took a break at that point, but I remained thinking about how to deal with that.
So a bit later I plugged my joystick back in and thought lets give it another try.

Loaded up my save, still docked looking at the quest:
Now it's 2 ships instead of 11... What?

Is that supposed to be random like that? Or did the game remember I failed it once it made it easier?

Granted, 11 + jump ins, was pretty overkill for 1 ship.
(I havn't used the fleet recruitment thing yet.)
But 2 was too easy. I just jumped there, flew directly at them, and they were blown up soon thereafter.

[Maarschalk]

Nope, not suppose to happen 2 ships only!......LOL!......

Still you where lucky with only 11 to start off with! When I did this mission I had 20 to 30 hostiles from the start when jumping to the way point and more jumping in all around me!

[oberlerchner123]

Pretty strange yeah.
The quest says how many ships there are estimated to be there when I accepted it.
First time it said 11. Second time 2.
I only had 1 extra fighter warp in the second time as well.

What was also funny was that the quest with 2 enemies gave half the reward of the one with 11.
I sure got a better value out of that one.
Kill 5,5x as many ships, get only 2x the reward? No thank you!

Shame though since it seams like I basicly skipped the original quest.
But hey that mission type shows up as the random quest types too, so I'm sure I'll repeat it some time.

[Marvin]

Never look a gift horse in the mouth. Those kinds of odds only happen once in a blue moon ... especially in places like Sierra. Take the money and run (that's three cliches in less than three lines ... I'm on a roll). Anyway, you'll get your chance in later parts of the quest to pit your ship against (here we go again) overwhelming odds.