[Goumindong]

I actually don't mind the whole "you have to give specific orders to your team mates" aspect. For instance, i love that I can have a single member of my squad on missile/repair duty and he can still attack.

All I do is pause when i hear/see a missile, turn on the anti-missile defense and when the offending missiles are no longer in the air, turn off the missile defense. (ditto repairing)

My gripe is more that when I have pilots on Defend or Attack they are incompetent. An order of defend or attack should not have the pilot do a specific simple thing (though they should focus on the target you have selected), but should influence their behavior in a very specific way.

A pilot on defend should be concentrated only on getting an enemy off his rear(or concentrated on getting enemies of his friends rear, either one), and should be fairly successful at it. All of this of course depends on whether or not the pilot is good enough and the ship is fast enough/agile enough. A slow but agile ship should attempt to out turn an enemy, a fast ship should run out of weapon range and then re-align when the enemy can't shoot at him, so that when the enemy is back in range its no longer a threat or no longer a threat anymore. Pilots on defend should still be able to shoot(as shooting is part of defending yourself), just concentrated on not dying more than making others die. If i have a pilot on defend(or attack, it doesn't matter which) and a target they should make sure that that target won't be able to get a good shot off on whatever they're trying to kill.

A pilot on attack should be concentrated on attacking the target and should be fairly successful at it. The way in which they go about it should be different for each weapon. If they have lots of lasers they should be concentrated on making passes at high speed (because all you need to do is get the enemy in your sights for a second).

If the pilot has high RoF weapons then making high speed passes isn't valuable, the pilot should be concentrated on getting into a position where they have lots of time to make attacks.

If the pilot has SRMs active they should align themselves so that their friends won't be incidentally hit by their shots. I can't tell how many times i have blown up me entire team because i launched an SRM/LRM and had the super damage clicky on and then another team mate decided to fly right into the path of the super-missile of doom.

In addition, a pilot who has missiles active needs to have some sort of consistency of when they will use them. If missiles are active then the pilot needs to fly at a distance where the missiles will actually fire. Again, i cannot tell you how many times I have triggered SRMs for a missile pilot and had the pilot do nothing buy shoot their 2 small guns at enemies and never actually use the missile!

Pilots need to be better at running away from their wing-mates and escorts. A wing of pilots attacks my mothership which should be an easy fight considering the proximity to the laser/chaingun spewing monster... Nope, because invariably the enemy will chase one of my pilots off of the mothership and he/she will drag the others out there so that they can have a fight away from our fire support. It would make sense if it was the enemies running away, but its my own damned pilots!

For some reason i feel that these problems did not exist as much in the first game. It seems like as piloting got better my pilots were less likely to run away from the fight because they got someone on their tail and were incompetent at shaking them. That my pilots were less likely to sit and spin while enemies chewed them up and were more likely to fire their missiles.

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That being said i want to elaborate on the LRM/SRM thing.

There isn't much of a problem with long range engagement missiles existing and being effective. The problem is that LRMs/SRMs use the same resources. I.E. LRMs and SRMs are money and purchase limited and use the same launcher.

So if you want to use SRM's because you think missiles in dog fights are cool, then you can't use LRM's. And if you want to use LRM's because you know that LRM's are awesome and pre-engagement is valuable you can't use SRMs. (and you're probably going to be flying a ship that is worthless in a dog fight anyway). Because of this you're pretty much locked into playing a certain type of way. One of those ways which is pretty clearly inferior to the other.

The second problem is that missiles both do too much damage and don't do enough damage and there can really be no middle ground with the current setup. As it is, the clickies mean that LRMs or SRMs will simply take out an entire wing in one hit but that SRMs are pretty weak otherwise.

This is good in one way as the clickies limiting LRM usefulness means that you can't just sit back and bomb every enemy you see with your 400 range radar then redock and get more(exception is berserks of course as they have so few hit points and weak ABM). But its bad in another way that SRM missiles only do about as much damage as a single high quality laser shot unless you use the clickies... and if you use the clickies then your entire wing will explode because the SRM will turn into the equivalent of a torpedo.

If SRM's are to be limited use weapons they have to do a LOT of damage, they pretty much have to take out a ship(any ship) in one hit. But at the same time, they can't be such that the explosion is able to hit multiple ships.

It is funny when the MSF stops me for being a pirate and starts to attack and a single SRM wipes out 8 of them. Its not funny when a patrol launchers a SRM at an enemy pirate I am tangling with and the explosion kills me when I am unable to shoot down the missile! (because you can only shoot down missiles that are targeted at your wing, not allies, and not enemies. So if a missile is shot at an enemy and you are too close when it goes off you get hurt)

Its funny when you can lay waste to swaths of enemies by launching 8 LRMs in quick succession that all explode in huge gigantic fireballs of wing killing death. Its not funny when those same "fast launch" clickies are useless with SRMs because they send 3 missiles at the same target before you know it and the explosion of the first one blows up the other two!

To put it in a simple way, the reason that these problems exist and cannot easily be remedied is that SRM's and LRM's use the same game resources. Think about a game as an attempt to succeed against some odds using limited resources. When two things use the same resource you will always and only use the better of the two things (unless you're masochistic). If two things use the same resource and have wildly divergent uses then balancing them becomes problematic.

If SRM's and LRM's are on different resource schedules then you can design them in such a way that each one is useful.