https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/ ... sp=sharing
that tracks which mission each ship type in the base game appears in. There's a count for each ship row at the end.
Thought it might be useful for people to have this information all in one place.
Some notes:
- Purple columns are Family missions, green are Rebel.
- The ship list assumes the standard XWAU installation, so the TIE Advanced x1, Home One type and Reef Home type Calamari Cruisers are present, despite not being in the vanilla game.
- I've only counted ships that were specifically included as FGs in a mission: obviously the escape pods and respective faction pilots can be randomly spawned in any mission. The list shows zero appearances for the pilots, for example but they can all appear in any list their assigned faction is present in. The escape pod does get two specific appearances where it's used for mission objectives.
- I've only included the ships in Spacecraft0.lst. For the most part, that covers all the opts seen in game (plus a couple of others), but it leaves out all the Death Star II tunnel parts used in B7M4 (the reactor room, reactor core, E-WEB turret etc). I figured it's pretty self explanatory which mission those parts appear in anyway.
- All possible appearances of a ship are given. There are some missions where you are really unlikely to see certain FG groups, as they only appear under certain triggers. Some of those triggers, eg. for the Interdictor in B1M7, don't even work (more on this later). But if they're included in the mission file, they're included in the list.
Some observations:
- Perhaps unsurprisingly, the most commonly seen opt in the game is the trusty Hyperspace buoy. There are only four missions in which it does not appear: the attack on the Liberty in B2M5 and the three Endor missions after the first.
- In terms of actual ships, again unsurprisingly, the most commonly seen is the Liberty. It is, after all, you home base for the vast majority of the game. Second place is, curiously, a tie (pun intended). Both the Corellian Corvette and the TIE Fighter appear in just one mission fewer than the Liberty. The humble TIE Fighter you probably would have expected, but I thought the Corvette's commonality was interesting. Given that you are barely ever required to interact with one in the missions, it's in there a lot. I guess the very first ship ever seen in Star Wars just makes for good set dressing.
- Third place might also be suprising - the Rebel Medium Transport. That's right, the evacuation ship from ESB shows up in X-Wing Alliance more than the ship the game is named after.
- Outside of the pilots/escape pods. there are 20 ships that never make an appearance in the campaign. I was actually surprised how large that number is. Many of them are probably better classed as objects rather than ships. Mines Type B and C, Nav Buoy 2, Probe, both Proximity Mines, Homing Mine B, R2-D2 etc. While some, like the other Mines and R2-D2 see use elsewhere (Skirmish and Salvage Yard respectively), there are quite a few that seem to have been added to the game for no real reason. More noticeable absences from the campaign include the Factory and Shipyard, used all over the place in TIE Fighter and XvT and presumably appearing in XWA more as legacy opts than anything else; also the Freighters Type H and K and the Pinook Fighter, which bizarrely was created for XWA. It's not a legacy opt like the Missile Boat, which also doesn't appear (though interestingly they created a whole new opt for it here). It seems really odd to me that they created this ship and then never did anything with it. No wonder it was the last starfighter in the game to get the XWAU treatment.
- In general, ship count in missions tapers off after the prologue and first battle. It trends up a bit again for B6, but on the whole missions involve fewer types of ship. A lot of the clutter in the earlier missions is 'set dressing' - opts placed in the mission to give them a dynamic feel. You have things like shuttles flying around the fleet, escorting fighters or civilian traffic in combat zones. These elements get less common in the Liberty missions. I wonder if that's representative of the order the missions were created in, and whether the later half of the game was designed under tighter time pressure.
- Some opts are clearly preferred over others of a similar type. For example, Space Colonies 1 and 3 only get a single mission each and both are early in the game. After that, every occurrence of a Space Colony is type 2. Pressure Tanks, the big type Js and Container Hangars are used almost twice as much as any one other container type. The Imperial Landing Craft is used only rarely, and loses out in usage quite considerably to the Assault Transport. The standard Bulk Freighter shows up far less often than you might have thought, with the Mod Action Transport, Medium Transport and the Mobquet Transport dominating the freighter appearances. Wherever civilian cargo ships are needed for background dressing, it's these three that are called upon.