Hey guys, I don't know if this has been kicked around before so I'll try to keep it short...
It seems to me that FS2 singleplayer would greatly benefit from a revised death system where you get to take control of surviving wingmen upon death instead of getting booted to mission failure. A lot of higher-difficulty FS2 missions (both canon and custom) are rife with plot twists, enemies warping in from nowhere, instant death caused by a small mistake or bad luck, or are just nigh-impossible without a weapon loadout guided by perfect foresight. As a player, I often find myself just failing or restarting a hard mission when something unexpected happens to tweak my loadout or camp on top of where the bombers will warp in. And suddenly failing a 25-minute mission because I got in the way of a anti-cap beam really feels like the kind of design flaw that belongs in a primitive 1990's game.
I believe that revising the death system would give players more flexibility and allow them to play more aggressively. Scraping through and beating hard missions on the first attempt would be much more plausible, which greatly helps story-telling, as even the most wonderfully written Blue Planet mission gets crappy after hearing the lines and going through the opening motions seven times. Players might also be less inclined to let wingmen wander off and get thrashed, since those ships are now their extra lives.
