[Dan1]

Alright, I was playing through some campaigns today and I got to thinking about the commands that I can give to my allies/wingmates.

The only thing I can think of off hand is that I wish I could tell one wing to attack another.

As an example,  you have to defend a ship and have multiple wings incomming and say cancer is the bomber wing and capricorn is the fighter wing...instead of telling all your wingmates to defend the targeted ship or just tell a wing to attack a target (singular just attack all enemies.)

I wish there was a way to tell say beta to attack target WING not just target/ all hostiles while i'm busy dealing with other things.

[TrashMan]

"Get outta my face stupid!" would be a good command.

No, seriously, I think it would be good if you could when ordering disarm, get another window thin which you choose what?

Such as:
1. Whatever is closest
2. Heavy weapons (those with huge flag)
3. Light weaponry (anti-fighter stuff)

It would be so much easier for mission planing too.. Insted of giving you bombers orders like "destroy turret01", "destroy turret02" etc.. when attaacking the sath, you would have a single order - destroy heavy weapons

[Cyker]

Good ideas, but need work - I for one do NOT want to be traversing 300-sub menus to order my guys around in the middle of a battle.
I find the system cumbersome enough as it is without adding extra commands!

I really preferred the way it was in X-Wing, TIE Fighter and XvT - Commands were all one-shot key combos and simple.

X-Wing Alliance made it more like FS2, but even worse, and dear god I hated that thing. I don't think I *ever* ordered my guys around in XWA because by the time I'd traversed all the menus the mission would be over! (Exaggeration, but only just )

[Janos]

Good ideas, but need work - I for one do NOT want to be traversing 300-sub menus to order my guys around in the middle of a battle.
I find the system cumbersome enough as it is without adding extra commands!

I really preferred the way it was in X-Wing, TIE Fighter and XvT - Commands were all one-shot key combos and simple.

X-Wing Alliance made it more like FS2, but even worse, and dear god I hated that thing. I don't think I *ever* ordered my guys around in XWA because by the time I'd traversed all the menus the mission would be over! (Exaggeration, but only just )

We should really make FS's command system more like Operation Flashpoints.

"ALL MOVE TO BUSH ALL STAY ALERT ALL GO PRONE ALL HOLD FIRE 1 TARGET THIS 2 TARGET THAT--- **** **** ****"

Personally I haven't had too many problems with Fs2's commands. I rarely even thought of them, maybe because they managed to walk the fine line between too dumb and too sophisticated. And besides, wingmen are idiots anyways and propably start to hammer some blob turret instead of flak or AAAf.

[Whitelight]

Your wing mates tend to attack whatever fires opon them, be it a ship or a fighter, that is how I see it anyway. 

[Solatar]

Sometimes when I want to have my wingmen destroy the big cannons on a ship, and then they all go and stand there "dueling" with a AAA beam...it gets annoying, lol.

[Mehrpack]

hi,
mhh i think yes it need any commands more.

but i think its important not to add to many commandos, so that you not need 5 minutes to find the right commando *g*.

but i agree with the suggestion of dan1 with the "attack this wing" order and trashman's choise what weapons on a ship first attack.

my suggestion is to add a commando for "protect this wing".

maybe the same button like "attack this wing" but with AI, if it friendly there stand protect, if it hostile there stand attack.
if that possible.

and a another idea: a save inquiry for the depart, often i let all fighters depart becaus i hit 0 instead of 9 for attack all enemies .
so ala: are you sure that all fighters depart? hit enter or space, maybe.

Mehrpack

[bfobar]

Maybe I've been wrong the whole time but... I hotkey enemy wings to a key like F9 under the F3 submenu, hit their hotkey to select them all, and then tell alpha or beta to destroy them. Maybe the wingman AI is just magically doing what I want them to do with dumb luck, but I swear that they seem to engage who I want them to. I only have trouble with group-guarding of convoys. Wingmen never do that right.

If I could have one command for wingmen, it would be a hold/engage type of command. That way I could give the typical "destroy that capital ship" command, but make my stupid bomber wingmates hold off on shooting their bombs till I give the word, thereby keeping the bombs from getting shot down by flak cannons at 1800 meters. I do this now by telling bomber wings to cover me and then frantically telling them to destroy my target when I get the whole group to within about 800 meters of the capital ship.

On the other end of this command would be getting your idiot wingmates with the trebuchets to disarm your target while sitting next to you 4 km away instead of suicidally plunging through the flak to shoot a weak turret with interceptors.

Maybe making the COVER ME command toggled and persistant would do the trick. Then you could give an order to the effect of "Shoot that cruiser but stay in formation idiot."

[Trivial Psychic]

The only way I can see the massive number of commands we'd like to see, become available, would be to use the voice recognition thing.  It would basically mean that if you aren't using voice recognition, you can't access the extra commands, and are restricted to the 0-9 we have already.  One further command option that would be good for voice recognition, is the ability to give priorities.  For example, you want Delta wing to engage enemy fighters, but its primary function is to guard a cruiser.  You'd give a vocal command to Delta wing to guard the cruiser, and engage fighters.  It would recognize that both are comands to the same wing, but that the first command has priority over the second.  Not sure if its possible, but it would be useful.  FREDding allows you to give multiple simultaneous orders to a wing, with differing priorities, so why not player orders?

[WMCoolmon]

C (Communications)
3 (All fighters)
S (Stop dying)

[achtung]

C (Communications)
3 (All fighters)
S (Stop dying)

We can only dream.

[Col. Fishguts]

[brannigan]
"Stop EXPLODING, you cowards!"
[/brannigan]

[Goober5000]

Well "ignore my target" is now fixed, so it is now much more useful for this sort of thing.

[Fieari]

I can definitely see Voice Recognition being the key to adding more commands.  Without it, I never used any orders to wings at all, really... it always took far too long for me to get the windows up and hit all the buttons to issue orders, so that by the time I was done, either I was dead, the thing I was protecting was dead, or my wing was dead.  Frustrating.  Prioritized orders would be cool.

[Dan1]

I got another one..not really a command as much as a functionality wish.

You know when you have 3 or more wings that you are going to be starting out with? It sucks that you can't see all of the wings loadouts 

  Well I wish you could look at the loadout for every wing.  Only being able to see Alpha, Beta, and Delta's while Gamma is the primary bomber wing is annoying. And it's even more annoying when Command's like "Sending Gamma to help take down this cruiser/destroyer" and you see them warp in with Ursa's and then fire lots of rockeyes.  I'm just like..you've got to be kidding me.

So what I want is like a sidecroll selector for the different wings cause only being limited to seeing 3 (4 ? I don't remember what the max is on the ship select) sucks and would like to view them all.

[Roanoke]

How about stop banging into that frickin' escort ship, for christs sake!! That especially to the Iceni helm.

[TrashMan]

[brannigan]
"Stop EXPLODING, you cowards!"
[/brannigan]

LOL!!


Personally, I nver had too much trouble with those command windows....

Alltough, in big battles (Bearbaiting) it takes practice and planning to manage all those wings.

[Polpolion]

About the turret/wing commands at the top:

What if it was like the " destroy my target" or "protect my target" command and so if you had 'cancer 3' targeted, the fighters would destroy cancer wing, or you could select the turret / subsystems you wanted destroyed... ya know, sometimes I just think the programmers got lazy.

[bfobar]

C (Communications)
3 (All fighters)
S (Stop dying)

or the very similar

C (Communications)
3 (All fighters)
T (The next idiot that shoots me in the back with mourning stars while I'm flying on a level bombing run and trying to get helios lock on the heavy flak cannon shooting at me is going to get inserted with the plasma cores when we get back to the mothership.)

[karajorma]

I got another one..not really a command as much as a functionality wish.

You know when you have 3 or more wings that you are going to be starting out with? It sucks that you can't see all of the wings loadouts 

  Well I wish you could look at the loadout for every wing.  Only being able to see Alpha, Beta, and Delta's while Gamma is the primary bomber wing is annoying. And it's even more annoying when Command's like "Sending Gamma to help take down this cruiser/destroyer" and you see them warp in with Ursa's and then fire lots of rockeyes.  I'm just like..you've got to be kidding me.

So what I want is like a sidecroll selector for the different wings cause only being limited to seeing 3 (4 ? I don't remember what the max is on the ship select) sucks and would like to view them all.

The game was deliberately designed that way and I can think of a whole lot of FREDders who would hate to see this feature added. It would allow the player to use a whole bunch of exploits that would seriously damage mission balance.

Putting the bombers in Delta wing for instance is a common trick designed to prevent the player changing the lead ship of delta into a fighter and taking the bomber for himself. Which means that if the mission had been written to allow a certain ship to survive because the player couldn't kill it and delta didn't arrive in time then that wouldn't work anymore. The player could simply bomb the ship himself and throw out the entire mission or even campaign.

The only way to stop that would be to lock Delta and above but even that is problematic. Cause if the wings are locked what is the point in being able to view them?

Making it so that mission designers could choose to make a mission where all the ships can be seen or even rearmed is one thing but retroactively applying it to all existing missions is a huge mistake.