Has anybody played this on hard successfully?

I enjoyed playing Star Wolves 1 and Star Wolves 3 on normal difficulty last year and was thinking about doing another play through this year on hard. Unfortunately, I immediately perished several times during the very first mission. I don't want to cheat code my way through the game (why play on hard in the first place?), but also don't want to run into a brick wall when the truly difficult missions occur.

Any suggestions, other than go back to normal? If I do, I'm thinking about picking a repair/shield/engineer specialist. Do you think that would make it easier or harder?

if you remember anything about the pilots you pick up through the game you should try to figure balanced wings and make your character based on that.

i found that when i tried my hand at hard i did the best early on with a gunner pilot. cause then id be able to put the others in my wing on repair or AM duty and it worked well.

another really big advantage i found when using an engineer type character was using a wing cloak helped a lot... sometimes.

i guess what im really trying to say with this long winded and utterly pointless post is it depends on how you formulate your team, thatll dictate what type and how effective your hero is...

hope that wasnt too confusing, im confused just typing it...

No magic solution? Hmmm, cloaking... Never tried that but always liked having longer sensor range than my opponents. Half the missions involved skirting large groups of enemy, so cloaking is a good extension of that strategy.

It's mentally tough to put your main character in a subordinate support role. Gunnery is so much more front line and macho.

The man is keeping me down this week and next, but I'll report back in a few weeks with my findings.