The Star Forge
Deck 1
Objectives: Penetrate to the interior of the Star Forge
After you land on the Star Forge, you'll have to exit the Ebon Hawk and select a team. Light side players should obviously go with Jolee and Juhani; the Dark side will need to select one of the remaining characters to accompany the PC and Bastila. If you were malicious and had Zaalbar kill off Mission, you might not want to pick him, since he'll turn on you shortly after you leave the ship.
No, Zaalbar! No! Bad Wookiee!.
When you've traveled far enough, you'll have to face off against the Star Forge's elite droid defenses. As per usual, these things get knocked over easily by Destroy Droid, but if you never learned the skill (shame on you), you'll have to take them out the hard way. After you run that little gauntlet, you'll pass through a few Dark Jedi defenders on your way to the elevator that takes you to Deck 2.
Deck 2
Objectives: Survive
Speaking of gauntlets.... By our calculations, if the Sith Academy only turns out one full-fledged apprentice every year, then some of these guys have to be at least 400 years old. The ability to zap kids who run onto your lawn with Force lightning must lend a little zest to your old age, though.
At any rate, this level is where the fun begins. There is apparently a finite number of enemies here, so you may run out of foes after a while, but our usage of the phrase "a while" should not be interpreted as a reference to a length of time that human beings can comprehend. By which we mean to say: there is a crapload of Sith here. Dark Jedi, Sith apprentices, Sith heavy troopers, and Sith troopers all apparently take personal offense at your continued presence in this area. And really, how can you blame them? This is Deck 2, now; not Deck 1. Deck 2 matters.
There are few enough viable strategies we can offer to help you through this. The first is simple: turn the game's difficulty down to easy. Yes, that's right, the game has difficulty settings; you can find them in the Gameplay settings of the Options menu.
We told you there were a lot of enemies here.
If you're a real man (or woman), though, you'll probably want to know if there's a way to survive this level on the normal difficulty setting. Well, there is. First off, make sure your characters are healed, and have full Force point meters before you start walking around; the thing that makes this level so hard isn't just that there are a lot of enemies, it's that the enemies almost never stop coming at you, which means your characters almost never leave their battle mode, which means that they will almost never regain Force points. If you take out one group of foes, another will magically appear behind you; destroy that group, and another appears immediately afterwards. Prepare to be hounded and harried for quite a while.
The geography of the level offers one small amount of respite: if you can proceed to the large hallway in the southern portion of the level, then reach one of its far ends, the Sith seem to stop respawning for a short while, giving you a bit of a break in which to heal your party and recharge your Force points before entering the fray once again. Indeed, you'll need to reach the southwestern corner of the level anyway; that's where the elevator to the next level is. It's to the southeastern corner you should head first, however.