[kondor999]

Outstanding info, Baloogan. You're a HUGE asset to the Command community and I appreciate your willingness and ability to De-FUD a thread.

If there's one aspect of Command that absolutely blows away Harpoon, it's the general competence of Friendly AI.

In particular, watch a dogfight involving your guys on a basic CAP mission. You can see where your planes are taking proper evasive action, using the "notch" to disappear from Doppler radar, deploying effective countermeasures, maintaining proper standoff when appropriate and going in for the knife-fight when it's not - all with ZERO micromanagement.

This is a gigantic advance over what we had to put up with in Harpoon, where the AI of your planes was nearly nonexistent (and whose behavior was nearly impossible to modify). Not to mention the ridiculous "shooting a missile out your tailpipe at pursuing aircraft" nonsense that Harpoon never got around to fixing, and which, to this day, makes most Harpoon dogfights nothing more than a poor approximation of real-world results.

The times where I've had to get in there and manage things personally are usually very specific, small actions such as guiding a strike package along a specific course for, say, terrain masking. Needless to say, this is something you'd have to do IRL anyway, and I think it would deprive the game of a lot of the Fun Factor if your AI did *everything*.

My favorite "The Mission was smarter than Me" example: On the scenario "Raven 21 is down", I kept trying (manually) to get my CAP to engage a target that *I* thought was important. My guys steadfastly ignored me. I refused to tinker with things by Unassigning them from the Mission, and then I saw why they were disobeying my orders.

There was an enemy fighter going full afterburner straight at my AWACS and my guys had quite intelligently insisted that *this* was their priority target. It taught me to think twice before I blithely overruled the Mission AI. These guys know how to BARCAP, that's for sure.

I've also seen Support missions scooting away appropriately when menaced by enemy fast-movers, and Refuel missions (surprisingly) seem to work without any intervention at all. Strike missions sometimes need some care and feeding, but nothing huge. I love how I can get a strike formed up easily and then take it over whenever I feel necessary. Basically, I restrict my involvement to the fun/important aspects and let the AI handle all the boring forming up, transit, etc. You do have to *learn* how the Mission system works, but once you do, it's very powerful.

One day maybe you'll just be able to tell your guys to hit a target and they'll automatically plot a course around known air defenses, using terrain as appropriate. We're not there yet, but I'd argue that this is the most fun and interesting part of the game anyway. The idea is to relieve you of the boring stuff, so you can focus on the fun aspects.

Command does a great job of this currently, and it gets better with every update.