I like the premise of this mission as it seems more of a Search and Rescue than pure combat, but I think perhaps the Cylon forces are bit too strong, and once things get loud it just becomes another combat mission. Perhaps only one basestar? Or give the Sobek some backup as it got pummeled in my playthrough just now.
The tweaked Raiders are much better, means I can save my CMs for basestar or Heavy Raider missiles which are much fewer which means survivability is higher.
A few suggestions/observations:
1. As above, maybe less Basestars or more Colonial forces to even the fight. If we are to extract survivors then we need to be able to survive ourselves!
Also it might just be me but it seems that the Cylons show up really early on in the mission. Not sure exactly what the trigger for them is but it seems I can't even get all of the wrecks and ships scanned before I'm dodging Raider bullets, and from what I can gather from the premise of the mission, my job as a Raptor pilot in that location is to get survivors out of the wreckage, not engage in dogfights with superior fighter craft.
2. The background is better but it's still not using a Skybox. The different background BMPs being used definitely help with breaking up the purely black background, but using the default stars doesn't look nearly as nice as using a fully fleshed out Skybox. Especially as the default stars are just little white dots and don't look especially great.
3. Good to see the Directives and Escort lists being used. I think however they need to be used a bit differently.
Directives: The 'Scan/Destroy' directive needs to show up from the very start of the mission. I noticed it didn't show up until I'd already scanned a few ships. Also, I think perhaps some things could be left off the Directives and just used as Objectives for the mission (like Kill the Basestars, maybe even Kill the Scouts. If the Raptors' primary mission is to scan for survivors and then escort them to safety, those are the Directives they need to be given. Killing the enemy is something the Viper pilots should really be concentrating on, thus the player of the mission as a Raptor pilot doesn't really need that Directive. I'd definitely make it an objective though.
Escort List: Would be really handy if the ships we need to scan are in the Escort list at the start of the mission so they're easier to find. On the last playthrough, I didn't find about half the ships until after the two Basestars showed up, which made things quite difficult.
As I said, I really like the idea of a Raptor mission concentrating on rescuing survivors and obviously there's gotta be some kind of combat in there and whatnot, I just think at the moment the balance of the mission is geared more towards the action and less towards the recovery mission. The fighting should be part of the scenario but should be mostly constrained to being between the Vipers and Raiders and capital ships of both sides. Obviously some bleed through is inevitable, especially as you need to dock on the Battlestar.
