there doesn't seem to be any gameplay mods when i googled.

is there a way i could decrease the dmg missles do through an ini file or whatever?? im in a longbow with full shields, i get bombarded with missles, i use my decoys, one missle gets through and im dead..

yea missles for me are powerful too, usually 1 missle hit and the enemy are dead as well, but this really makes the gameplay a game of how many missles you have, and how many decoys you have.

it doesn't matter if you boost up your shields since it only affects how fast you recharge.

collisions too are annoying, usually 1 collision of any kind and im dead; good thing i could actually disable that.

i put the difficulty a notch below the default; maybe the enemy shoots out less missles, and i have to afterburn spam my decoys, because no matter what ship im in with full shields and armor, if you gets through, game over.

the enemies guns are even an issue, its these damn missles.

edit: i just played the same mission on 2 notches below default which is the easiest.. and now its just stupid easy..

there's no happy medium.. i liked how missles worked before in WC 1-3, .. eh.. wel'll see if ill keep playing at least just for the story. i honestly don't remmeber it being this rediculous the 1st time i played it when it came out in the 90's.

Missiles are pretty brutal in WC 1-3 too, one hit will destroy you or do heavy damage - and same on enemies. That's a feature to me in WC, part of the gameplay - just don't get hit by missiles. Don't let enemies lock on you, and if they do, avoid the missile (which isn't that hard, using decoys or afterburners and hard turns). It's similar to plane dogfighting (which WC draws heavily upon) in which a single missile hit is end of game.

Wing Commander gameplay is stupidly unbalanced, at the time they were covering new ground but I've been able to play them only after playing just any other space games that came out after them and they show their age even confronted with games that came out soon after WC1/2 so that spoiled them a bit for me.
Hell, the controls are downright simplistic compared to any other spacesim, and contrary to what one might think this makes the game more difficult, prioritizing targets is a pain (either you can't do it at all or you need to open a map interrupting the game) and energy management (when it's present) is always via some weird menu instead of having hotkeys like in ANY other spacesim.
The only thing they still do a bit better is storytelling, by that point of view they were the Mass Effect trilogy of the early 90s and Wing Commander IV is still a great game that's more than the sum of its parts thanks also to a better mission design that was much better than the other installments.

My personal speculation is that Roberts wanted to do some sort of Top Gun IN SPACE by making missiles overpowered but that doesn't work very well when you have to face overwhelming forces that often like it happens in Wing Commander.