General Difficulty - anyone yet succeeded on Medium or Hard?

This seems to be a recurring trend. While the overall difficulty of the missions is about the difficulty set, there feels like "spikes" in difficulty on certain missions, specifically ones involving defense. I tried certain missions I found easy on Hard mode, and they were still pretty easy, meanwhile the super hard missions didn't feel very different.

In spite of the wavy difficulty, the main issue is that the pre-flight banter gets really annoying when heard the 5th time. While the crew should be applauded on the voice acting and plot creation, the majority of this should have occurred within the action, or barring that, saving just before the auto-pilot jump into the action. I hear a lot of backlash about how an auto-save before the first auto-pilot jump would cramp difficulty, but when there wasn't anything to do beforehand, it's really just cutting down on the frustration involved. Remember: The trick is to keep them challenged, not raging out of boredom.

basilfawlty wrote: Did anyone manage hard ? Just out of curiosity ?

I've tried to make it on hard, but there are four or five missions where it is unlikely to survive, e.g. the missions with heavy enemy fighter presence - you can't shake ten fighters the whole time also, the countermeasures are empty sooner as one might think... but nevertheless, the "regular" missions are doable.

Running out of decoys....

Reminds me of WC3 on nightmare where some missions only seemed possible for me if I took an Arrow (even if the mission reccommended a T-Bolt) and used full burner auto-slides to get enemy squadrons to waste their missile loads. There just weren't enough decoys or burner fuel in the universe to save a Hellcat, Thunderbolt or Longbow from Im-Rec spamming Dralthi (shudder)

Good thing an auto-sliding Arrow could easily take out carriers and heavy cap-ships with guns alone...felt like cheat mode but on Nightmare flying a torpedo-boat was suicide.

Played Brimstone missions on Hard.

In Vega, first mission escorting the sabres:
- at the nav point with the corvettes.
incoming dralthi, 10-15 seconds: sabres death.
Three times in a row.

Really? The Sabre mission? The Sabre is a regular fighter killer. The only hard part is attacking the cruiser, but even that can be done. I really think the Sabre is probably the most effective fighter killer after the Excalibur...

IF I fly the Sabre it is a lethal weapon, but the two pilots in that mission eject after 1 shot from a Drahlti. :/

They certainly don't. They may eject after 1 missile hit and so would you. Also there's a big difference between you and them here. They are trying to get a torpedo lock, htey cannot evade. If you don't do your job of escorting them, that is suicide in a Sabre. They are relying on you to have their back and to distract the corvette's turrets or destroy them. That's the entire point of this mission.
I already made one mission showing how that is done. Saving both is somewhat difficult yes. Saving one is easy breezy.

Since they don't evade the corvette's shots or the enemy fighters, your best bet is to focus ONLY on cat fighters moving towards these "hot machines", ignore everything else, then afterburn + shoot at the corvettes as soon as they start firing at the Sabres, if not before that.

Sounds easy on paper, but it is actually quite tricky to stay close to the sabers at all time. The AI isn't quite as good as a human pilot when it comes to making bombing runs .

Speaking of the game's AI, did the WCS team kept FS2 retail's AI code, or did you guys made any adjustments for WCS?

We made several adjustments and bugfixes.

So, the mission lacks AI on the sabres. While in other missions the AI is pretty awesome on your wingman in terms of survival!