@OneoftheLost: Feeling frustrated on that mission?! Won't spoil for ya, but wait till you get to the 1st mission you'll fly on a Y-Wing, or the later "family missions". You'll feel like smashing your head into your monitor LOL

I always found the Y-Wing training mission (the first one when you join the Rebels) to be very difficult. Destroying the Tibanna gas station and the Sodrab cruiser were easy enough, but taking out the convoy always ended up with the Imperial escort craft shooting me up with some turbolasers.

When I first played the game (many years ago) I ended up skipping that mission to get to the second training mission where you dogfight against growing numbers of TIE fighters, and that was so much easier. However, having recently tried playing it again I finally beat the Y-Wing hit-and-run training mission having followed some advice. Drop all energy so that it goes to engines, and race towards to the convoy craft. Dumb fire missiles when relatively close to the convoy craft so that you cause the pulling (or pushing on some) craft to become disconnected from their cargo. Then flee the area and hyperspace back to the fleet to re-arm on missiles. Return to the mission area and destroy any remaining dropped cargo at leisure. Still took me a few attempts but I was so happy when I beat it. :)

I just stayed inside the hole where the missiles were. Station protects you nicely from all the directions. Picked them up and waited up for beacon. After that I transferred everything to engines and flew away.

X-Wing series is anything but easy, and although Alliance is probably the kindest to the player of the three main games, it has some pretty brutal missions. As others have pointed, wait and see :D

And even with those missions, it's nothing compared with what the other games can throw at you. I mean, on TIE Fighter you don't even have shields for a big chunk of the campaign!

I played through X-wing (classic missions) and TIE-fighter (hard difficulty, all secondary objectives complete), and XWA is the hardest one (on hard difficulty).

However, I LOVE how hard it is, because it pushes the player to the edge of his capabilities, more than any other game in the series. I love the fact that your vulnerabilities are emphasised, I love that TIE Fighters can rip you apart in one pass (let's face it, in the game X-wing you could have easily shake them off, by turning towards them. It wasn't more than a nuisance), I love the fact that my shields are just a little advantage I have over a TIE fighter and not overpowered-unfair-toward-the-opponent kind of advantage I had over all the unshielded enemy craft on X-wing, I love how you must keep your speed high and keep on maneuvering constantly to avoid being shot, I love that a fraction of a second, more than any other game I played, can mean the difference between life and death. In this game more than ever, you got to demonstrate skills to complete your missions.

The mission that emphasised this the best is the A-wing recon mission where you have to scan the Imperial search group and shoot down the probes the Star Destroyer launched. It was just amazing flying through all the turbolaser fire while scanning the ships and later on shooting those probes WHILE cork screwing towards them. Easily one of the best gaming moments I had in all my life.

Yes, some missions are amazingly designed and a total blast to play. But a few missions (not many) feel bugged to me. I did a post on such, the one you have to get aeron to plant a bug on a satellite. The end of the mission just won't trigger, no matter what. At the height of my frustration, I skipped the mission using some 3rd party software... wished they had corrected this in the patch, years ago :\

But I don't mind when the bugs get me laughing... Like the one you're supposed to make a rescue on that asteroid base. On the way back, the jump point was sitting close to the Super Star Destroyer, I was in the radius of the jump point, but at the same time I punched it, I was also facing the SSD, so I just smashed my ship into it, at light speed... Next thing I see, is the transport shuttle taking me back to the home base LOL!!

X Wing Alliance is an awesome game, but I agree that it is too hard. How I played it without losing my sanity:

1. Switch difficulty mode to Easy (in game settings).
2. If I couldn't get through a mission in 2 attempts, go to a game guide (note that the Prima Guide to the game is included in the bonus materials).
3. If I still couldn't get through in another 2 attempts, skip to the next mission. (You should create a new pilot called "FongFong" - this unlocks all the missions so you can play through the campaign in the combat simulator.)

Trying to beat every mission before you continue will drive you mad - as you have seen, there are some horrendous difficulty spikes in this game.

I got about 80% of the way through the game (and completed probably 80-90% of the missions to that point) before the difficulty level got so outrageous that I couldn't complete any more missions.

Don't torture yourself! Try each mission but move on quickly if it is too hard.

I had a lot of fun with this game, but I think the game design is badly flawed with the difficulty level. We have moved on since 1999 - no modern game is anywhere near this hard ...

One reason XWA is harder is that, on high difficulty levels, the AI actually lead their shots. Prior to XWA, you just do some lazy turns and watch the enemies laser pass behind your butt. But in XWA, you have to constantly throw off their lead. Speed and maneuverability become much more important, and dis-engaging come into consideration.

It's 2019 and still the same problem... That escort trash me up in seconds... I'll try your metod but it's sounds more like a solution to a adventure game than a filght sim. Only one way to do it :) Ohhh and yes, I play on easy :) I watch some yt videos and not everyone have this problem, the wingman take care of escorts. I hope there isn't mamy missions like this. Tie Fighter wasn't that hard (original campain on easy :P)

Word of advice: don't play on hard or easy, the game is balanced for normal difficulty and the two other levels are a bit buggy at times.
While I played through TF a lot of times I had played thorugh XWA only once when I was in high school before attempting it last year and remeber it being stupidly hard on easy. Last year instead I started on hard but dropped to normal and for some reason it got much easier than I remembered and even got all the Kalidor Crescent upgrades thanks mostly to the ability on normal to disable ships engines with the shields still up so they can't flee when you drop their shields, believe me it's really easy to rack up bonus points by downing capital ships this way.

I never really had the need to dumbfire, you can do it from a distance if you choose the tank containers since they are the most fragile and lock doesn't take that much time.
Also, play on normal like I said above, hard is not worth it.

I play on easy for one reason: I don't have a joystic and using x-box 360 gampad just don't feel precise enough for a sharpshooter :) But I will try playing on medium becouse some missions feels just too simple :)

Paradoxically due to some bugs "easy" is harder than normal due to broken AI in some situations.

A bit of both really, the AI seems to have dedicated scripts for some missions and easy and hard often break them, though hard is the main culprit regarding friendly AI since on that level they become dumb as rocks and get shredded easily by the bucketheads thus leaving you overwhelmed by enemy fighters.

-->Det_Bullock

And just when I said I'll change to medium Battle 3 mission 2 (steal warheads) happend. I coudn't finish it, even when I knew the proper order of actions. Had to change to easy. Next mission wasn't that hard but it took me several attempts on medium to win (I was destroyd when running to hyperbouy). I don't know if I have enough patience for this game :)