I'm having lots of trouble with the wingman AI not behaving as expected. This has caused me to restart the mission "Evacuation" many times in absolute frustration.

If I press the 2 key to order them to join formation, sometimes the order confirmation message appears on my hud but, they haven't actually joined with me. This has caused me to enter LDS approaching a waypoint without any wingmen in tow many times.

If I press 3 to order them to attack a target with me, they won't.

If I press 4 to order them to defend a target (the space station we're evactuating) they'll start attacking my ship even though I haven't fired upon it.

On one occasion, my two wingmen inexplicably began firing on each other until one of the two was destroyed, then went about business as usual.

This is particularly problematic at the end of the mission when I need to dock with the station to evacuate the remaining crew. I only have about 60 seconds to do this so I can't kill all the indies, then dock. I try to launch a few seekers at the two remaining indies and order my wingmen to attack the corvette while I dock with the station.

What has happened each time is my wingmen ignore the indies and my ship is destroyed, or damaged to the point where I have no thrusters functioning well enough to dock in time.

Help me. :(

I'm having exactly the same troubles as you. This mission is extremely buggy.
I've tried the mission 20-30 times. In fact, I actually completed it mission once, only to be unable to jump out of the system because I couldn't select the star system menu due to another bug. :(
I found a solution to the wingmen losing you during LDS though. Make sure you hit 2 to make them follow you. Select the waypoint location and hit F6 to approach. Press 2 immediately after LDS. I keep tapping it all the way as though I have OCD. Wait until the autopilot drops you out of LDS and your wingmen are <50m away before disengaging autopilot, even though there are already targets on the scanner. Using this method I never randomly lose them on the way.
No solution to the problem where they start attacking each other though.
Any tips for this mission? I wasn't doing anything different the time I "completed" the mission.

I'm convinced this mission is impossible, though I must have finished it 'back in the day' as I finished the game. The reason - not the wingmen, the f******* autodock!

I've destroyed all the Indies and reached the end of the mission 20 times or so (using the REM C-Fighter) only to run out of time. As soon as I am able to, I order the Dreadnaught to dock with the station and jump into the C-Fighter. But every time, autodock takes at least a minute to actually dock with the station (I'm right next to it when I start docking), meaning once the crew have transferred across there's no time to escape the blast (usually the station explodes whilst I'm still docked).

Any suggestions (Ravenger?) - can I get a wingman to dock to the station or somehow dock earlier?

Activating dock when you're right next to the station might be counter-productive, as the ship will move away to get some space and line up, which will take extra time. Best to activate dock when you're a shortish distance away, but not right on top of it.

Got there in the end - your suggestion is spot on, also I'd recommend anyone else having problems to park the C-Fighter somewhere between the station and where the last wave of ships come from, hover near to the station, and start auto-dock the second you can (when the dialogue from the station asking for help starts). You can then ripple-fire missles or REM-link to the C-Fighter (or both) while the Dreadnaught takes on the evacuees.

God I love this game.

I loved that mission.
Flying the C-fighters was excellent and the last moment was intense. I got off the station with seconds to spare and LDS'd the frak out of there.

Proves what a great game it is, no matter how frustrating it gets, you can't help but go back for more.

I just wish I'd been able to revisit the game and add save points like we did for Defiance - it'd have made the game less frustrating. Unfortunately the budget wasn't there - it would have involved a complete re-test of the original game and a re-master of the discs.

That would have been fantastic - I'm now onto WEP Advanced II and I'd love to skip the exercise at the start!

But I think what people, myself included, love so much about I-War is that it is so uncompromising. You fail a mission because a retreating wingman smashes into you? Tough, it could feasibly happen, so deal with it. Accidentally LDS straight into a planet and burn up on re-entry? Same goes. It doesn't nanny you, and while sometimes that makes it seem buggy (like the docking issue I had) it feels a great deal more real than the sort of ultra-scripted, same-game-every-time checkpointing you get with modern games.


The fact that I've only been able to find out which in-mission 'ship deaths' are scripted from reading your threads proves this - I spent my whole teenage years playing the game and still thought there might be some secret way of saving Evac 3 ;)

It can be overscripted occasionally, like when you have to allow your ship to get hit to progress. For the most part though I agree. That said, "realism" doesn't sell in today's gaming market.

As for Defiance, I'm stuck on the carrier escort mission....the fighters all get blown up trying to assault the target station and I can't damage it faster than it gets repaired.

It's kind of silly, but the trick here is that you have to take out the station, despite it being their job, the fighters are completely useless at it.

As soon as the fighters are released, go straight for the station while ripple firing at the pirates on the way, but don't bother engaging them.
Get in the station gun's blind spots and blast away with max weapon charge.

It appears that I forgot to ever mark anything as a solution in this thread. Oops!

Better late than never right?

Ravenger's post was the most helpful. I still find the mission challenging due to the Wingman bugs and my own lack of a working Joystick but, the game is still plenty of fun. They don't make them like they used to.

Just finished the mission:)

'darkgoat' then play until the docking part (co-pilots may or may not have shot each other..who cares anymore..)

then just shift-w and you win!

The shift-s (skip to next phase) is extraordinaly good when you really want to play through a buggy mission such as this. You can easily skip the cargoship loading part just as it has docked. Shift-s and its immediately ready to embark and you can continue.

EDIT: what spilled my cup was that when I FINALLY got in docking range with decent time window. THE AUTO DOCKING FEATURE DID NOT WORK. i checked and rechecked that I had station selected and I was hovering right before (1km) of the airlock.

Ravenger: I got the co-pilot 'defend target' action to work ONE single time, with one cargo ship.

Honestly... this was a frustrating one for me. I had to restart many times because my wingmen would drop out of LDS and then just disappear 50km away. I fixed this by just tapping the formate with me command over and over. This mission is impossible without them. A couple of times I took control of the C-Fighter while in the process of autodocking, but this somehow broke something, since when I undocked from the station, I could not do anything at all except go back to a REM connection with the fighter. I could still use autopilot, but when I went to the exit lagrange point there was no prompt to go through and end it. Happened three times.