What have they done to the formation thing?
Honestly, fixed it. Large strikecraft formations tended to get your ships killed by causing them to do silly slide maneuvers that even ion cannon frigates could hit rather than keeping their speed up and being hard to target, and in general formations made them take greater losses. Enemies could retarget on the next ship more quickly than when they were in a dispersed group, spending less time trying to bring their own personal Sajuuks to bear and more time pewing.
I'm personally really annoyed it doesn't work for small frigate/capital groups (X) or large groups of frigates/capitals/multigun corvettes (wall). I'm also annoyed that the swarmers had their fuel removed, although baffled and overjoyed to discover that the Drone Frigate actually gets **** done now.
you can play it at least, for me it crashes right after the intro.
the olden ones work though.
If you mean it seems to stop responding while loading the first mission, let it run; it'll work after a bit.