Recent reviews by John_Crichton

Microsoft Allegiance is a professionally-developed network game( with offline play available in training missions). It has deep and satisfying gameplay, both in strategic aspects as well as individual ship management. The game's match lobby shows that it can support 2 teams of up to 100 players (pilots) each or larger number of teams (6 teams is a balanced amount)- map dependent. Though it rarely has playerbases of more than two-to-three dozen players in a server at once. Those days which have that many players are Sundays (occasionally Saturdays and Fridays) in the PM Eastern United States Time and are usually limited to one player-populated match server at a time. Although now there are network bot-populated 24-hour match servers (team deathmatch and "conquest" gamerules - although the conquest bots don't seem to engage other pilots). However, if you want to play with as many internet players at a time, then you'll apparently want to make the "Anniversary Game" - something I've never before had advanced warning of, but intel says is this upcoming Sunday, March 24th 2024 at 3 PM Eastern Time.
I'd advise going on the wiki at "freeallegiance.org" after training to download the image of the keyboard layout for a 'steady hands' setup and have that up in a separate window to in-game remap your keybinds from "Escape->G (game settings)->C (controls). It may take some time and some adjustment to the new buttons, but it's worth it to be able to control most of your craft and its contents and targets without having to continually glance down to the keyboard. Another, less discussed, issue with controls is that if you dock at a base with any of your ship's thrusters firing, they will continue firing and making you drift upon launching - the way to fix this is to toggle your recticle/cursor on then off again.
Another tip that I personally overlooked for years is, when firing at your target, disregard the craft's icon, instead aim at its model position.
Some Pros:
-The feeling of flying as a fleet on a strategic, or even as-needed tactical operation is priceless, yet free!
- flying up to an enemy base or strategic ship or carrier to destroy it and orbiting it in weapons range while yor ordinance reloads or you whittle down its defenses is very fun
-The feeling of capital ship scale when you watch a friendly small ship escort going the same direction behind it try to bump the capship to donate the smaller ship's inertia, forgetting friendly fire is on until the full hull & shields' small ship taps the larger one and immediately and unceremoniously explodes across the sector
-Cooperating on a stealth run against an enemy base and watching you and your partners evade detection until it's too late to be stopped
-Being able to save loadouts between matches of a given faction's ship on a given server using the Control + 1-3 keys when in the loadouts menu in-base

Some cons:
-The (F3) sector view not having a reset rotation or default orientation symbol (i.e.: Celestial North)
-The kickban-happiness of some of (read many of) the veteran players in positions of power (as team commander or team captain), even for understandable offenses such as setting one's loadouts in base or deploying no-eyed probes at the enemy's base exit doors
-The limited playerbase and marketing of the game leading to small match sizes and low game-setting options for most of the year

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