Cant say I enjoy that game much so far, getting further feels more like agonizing work than plain fun. In general:
*) Theres little sense of archivement. Tons of friendly units are typically covering you, taking down the targets if you aint fast enough. I solved a couple parts of mission without beeing responsible for a single kill. I`d expect a good (action oriented) game to be focused on my actions on not watching lines of dialogue how others finish the job.
*) balancing shield power? Wow, has to be one of the most stupid ideas Ive seen.... EVER. If it would atleast serve a tactical purpose like having to decide BEFORE which section you want to be shielded most. The way it is implemented (taking effect immediatly) its just useless micromanagment and a annoyance to equalice shields each time you suffered a strong hit.
*) balancing power is pretty much as useless. Sure you wont give the weapons anything more than they need and priorize getting full shields over engine? Just redundant crap in most cases.
*) Complicated controls, for the sake of...beeing complicated? I cant reasonably well map the controls on a gamepad without having to resort to the keypad way to often.
Why FFS do you have to toggle between weapon slots instead of weapontypes?
*) There simply arent intense dogfights. To much reliance of rockets to get anything done, thanks for rearming the whole game seems to be based on abusing rockets as much as possible.
*) Training missions are redundant (1-3) or to late, like learning about countermeasures and subsystems after you surely had to deal with them.
Miss 5 (or 6 not sure): you have to lure out a squadron of enemy fighters sitting between 2 cruisers. Closing in on them will likely end the game as it did for me (multiple times). So how do you lure out fighters? My wingmen ran to their death and I merely waited for the enemies to come for me, took all down except 1 when a big friendly ship jumped in and destroyed the bigger vessels. Im not sure if the big vessel would jump in anyway or I`d have to kill all but one (??) of the fighters. Just seems strange to me.
The missions in the nebula are just plain ackward, I dint realise there were further ships until the taken a big one down (heck my friendly ships show on the radar, surely theyd transmitt the position of ships shooting at them??), and later you just have beams coming out from everywhere and in the case of beeing lucky they will hit you head on /=

First of all, buy a decent flight stick to play with, or a mouse.
Flying freespace with a pad sounds really, really stupid.
If you haven't figured out why this game does have a shield manager
and power manager, you really don't know how to play it that well.
Pressing the shield balancing button is ofthen a good choice,
but in the heat of a battle, you need to concentrate your shields
to the direction you are fired upon.
Same goes with the power manager. You need to switch to different
settings depending on the changing mission objectives and playing style.
To my opinion, there's lots of dogfight involved with this game.
I myself don't really like those lock-on target missiles.
Normally i just load up a ton of tempest missiles.
But hey, i know how to aim. And yeah, i play with a good flight stick.
Trickier parts i go through with mouse and keyboard.
Accuracy is important. With a pad, you don't have that.

I can't get past the training levels.. I knew this would happen..

You know there are pads with analog sticks, right? While a flightstick would probably be the optimum, a good gamepad still beats mouse and/or keyboard.I understand the theorie behind it, but the practice is that the only difference to a single shield is that you hit the "equalize shield button" relentlesslyno need to, running with nearly zilch for weapons, lotsa shields and medium engines most of the time. unless theres a drasticall need to rearrange energy I dunno why I should bother, its stupid micromanagement.
When do you need engines? when you bail or cruise around
When do you need shields? around enemies.
So give me a cruise/battle mode toggle and be done with it.Must be nice to be you.
Got to mission 17 where I have to babysit a ship thats getting blasted from a cruiser, fighters and hit by asteroids at the same time. I played a fair share of hard games before.. if it where just difficulty I wouldnt complain.
The problem is that the gameplay aint grabbing me, its more a hassle than anything else.

In the year it was published, this was basically what it was expected from this genre: not a hardcore simulation, but not a plain action game either: X-Wing seriest, Wing Commander series, Starlancer etc. all required this kind of micromanagement, and the control stick<->keyboard switch was pretty much intentional... analog pads were still mostly unknown on the PC, so the concept of a player having both hands busy on the controller didn't exist.
The typical joystick around featured more or less the number of buttons you have on a analog pad now, and it wasn't supposed to cover all your needs; heck, even with a flight stick+thottle setup it was not impossible to need the keyboard at times.
I understand you may find this annoying, but this (mild) micromanagement combined, on the other hand, with a very forgiving flight model, what was the people liked in the space sims genre

What difficulty level are you playing this on that you're wingmen are taking everything down? Usually on medium or hard (or insane for that matter) if you don't take out enemy fighters they WILL take out your wingmen eventually. Granted, if you know what you're doing when giving them commands they can handle themselves to an extent (disabling cap ships, attacking sub-systems, cover fire, general engage enemy, defend target, etc), but they by no means can handle the mission on their own without your input.
As for the game pad, this game was never designed to be played on such a simple input device. Commanding your squad mates alone requires a keyboard, plus the different targeting options do become necessary when you need to target bombers, sub-systems, turrets, etc (and you will have to). The controls aren't unneccessarily complicated, each control actually does something useful if you know how to use them. Quick targeting can save your ass or your mission if you know what button to press depending on what you want to hit. If you want a console like game-pad space sim this isn't the one you're looking for. Plus the weapon toggles do come in handy when you need to disable targets. It's especially important for missiles as shooting 1x or 2x can be a huge difference in certain missions (like shooting torpedoes/helios missiles 2x is required to pass certain portions).
As for shields, usually the equalize button is enough, there's not really a need to focus in one direction. But power management is necessary, later on you'll get guns that drain your energy much more quickly and you will have to divert more power to them every once in a while to finish off a target, but then switch it back again or you'll be flying around at super low speeds. You will also have to dump all power into your engines on certain intercept/run away missions, or tank your shields when attacking large cap ships so you don't get blown up from the flak guns/beam weapons. I would say about 70% of the time you don't need to mess with it, but the rest of the time it can be crucial.

playing on normal, and I was talking about parts of missions. other times I cant save them from killing themself in vain, like in the 6th mission where you have to lure the enemy fighters away from the big ships.I wasnt talking about switching weapons beeing bad, but you cant switch weapons as you switch SLOTS. If you have torpedoes in 2 slots and rockets in one I would assume that I can simply switch between rockets/torpedoes with one press. Obviously you cant, and I cant come up with a valid reason why you`d prefer switching slots. The controlsystem simply lacks tought, throwing alot of options in a game doesnt helps if it aint controling well. Still the clunky way its been implemented sucks.
why cant I just boost the engines to 130% taking power from the other systems while youre cruising at that speed, why wont excess energy simply spill over to the other systems (like from the guns if you choose youd better of with getting that energy to the shields)?
That way you wouldnt need energy-management in 99% of the cases why still have the option of draining other systems in favour of speed or weapons. Its just simple logic how you are gonna adjust energy-levels with the clunky system in place (if you have any common sense that is) and come up with a way to reduce the micromanagment.

Ho hum! Complaining about how old video games solved gameplay problems is like complaining that food left in the fridge long beyond the expiration date is rotten. Why don't you be a little more constructive and think up some games that "do it right" or discuss solutions to the inherent problems developers of space simulators in the 90's were trying to address with their user interfaces, key layouts, and ship management (FYI: almost all space sims in the 90's had the exact, or damn near similar shield/power management systems in place).

Complaining about a game because you play with a controller that it wasn't even designed for? Tch, tch.

I could play with keyboard exclusively, but that wouldnt help anything,,, makin things worse actually.
And I brought up (rather easy) solutions for alot of the things that annoy me. Sorry for the ranting, but I was expecting more of this game and its not like I trolled with oneliners like "This game sucks".
For me the reference in space-combat games is still the "Colony Wars" Series, cant remember Wingcommander needing as much keys either. Its simpler and in many ways less ambitious in scale, but IMHO theres nothing wrong with getting the base right instead of adding stuff thats useless 90%-100% of the time like adding shield-simon (with 1 color as you usually just hit the equalize key) to a space-combat game.

instead you're being flames with one-liners.. hahah.

You obviously don’t like the game very much, so I’m not going to try to convince you otherwise. I just want to point out a few things. Which, should you try FS2 again, might enhance your experience.
First off, using a gamepad is just crazy. I haven’t tried it, but I can imagine aiming will be practically impossible. I have never played Colony wars, so a gamepad might work there, but FS2 is as much a simulator as an action game, at least on the higher difficulty. You need good aiming, since the enemies can take a big punch.
What you should do is try the keyboard, no mouse. I have a nice joystick, but still prefer using the keyboard in FS2.
Sadly, you are right when you say that there is a lot of keys being used in the game, and this can be confusing. Especially since the default key setup is horrible. But once you get it right, it’s actually quiet intuitive.
Change the turning controls to the arrow key`s(use turn left/right NOT bank left/right), then change the shield keys to numpad 4,8,6 and 2. Equalize shield should be set to Q. The rest you can leave as default.
When you play use the left thumb on space for secondary fire, your left little finger on CTRL for primary. Lay the rest of your left fingers on A,Z for accelerate and brake plus TAB for afterburner. Now all your left fingers should be occupied. The right hand controls the arrow keys of course.
Several other keys like: H for enemy targeting, K for turret targeting, S for subsystem targeting, B for bomb/bomber targeting, E for targeting mission critical objects and X for launching countermeasures is also very important to note. The Power management keys too of course, at least on higher levels of difficulty. Lastly, you should get used to the C key for giving orders to wingmen. This can be a lot to remember in the beginning, and way to many keys for a gamepad, but every one of those keys are extremely useful when you get used to them.
If you play around a bit with these controls, you should find them to be very good. I did back when I was 12, and still do.
I also note you complain about irritating difficulty on missions where you have to lure escort craft away from capital ships. This is actually very easy to do, once you realize that FS2 is just as much about tactics as action. Here`s a quick walkthough: Convert all power to engines (might need 1 or 2 points on shield, but gun regeneration is unnecessary in short engagements), then go full speed towards the escort (but no afterburner for now). Lock on the nearest escort using long-range missiles (rockeyes has nice range in the first missions, later harpoons). Remember to take evasive maneuvers if the capships open beam fire. Once you’re close enough, fire your missiles, then crash dive and hit your burners. Put all your shield energy to the rear and order your wingmen to follow you. If the beams are firing at you, continue to use evasive maneuvers, but never change course completely. Concentrate on getting away quickly, by flying straight from the enemies. When distance to the capships are about 2000-2500m (anti fighter beam range is 1500m) crash dive again, switch to dogfight missiles and engage the escort fighters. Remember to equalize shield and set power back to gun and shield regeneration before engaging.
The process might take some practice, but works like a dream.
Note that on the higher difficulty levels (which is when FS2 is most fun anyway), tactics like this is vital to almost all tasks. From escorting freighters to engaging cruisers and doing bomber runs on bigger ships. Learning how to shake of fast pursuers during dogfight is also necessary as your hull can’t take much.
But most important of all, play with sound and music volume set high and try to follow the excellent story:)

Thanks GepardenK, I plan giving FS2 another try someday.
IMHO it wouldve really helped the game if there were tutorials how to approach the big ships as they typically appear a few minutes into the missions, quite boring to play to that each time and then try to figure out what to do. I still dont know what most of the subsystems do...
AFAIR there are sensors, navigation, communications, "weapons"( not the turrets themself ), engines, turrets. So far I only know for sure what engines, "weapons" (turrets go offline if destroyed) & turrets do and what I gain by taking those down.
I can imagine sensors could degrade their weapons somehow, but why should I care about destroying navigation or comm?

I wouldn't bother trying to take down any sub-systems unless its specified by the mission. Mostly its pointless and won't get you anything unless you want to disable the ship (so it can't get closer to a target, get away, etc). Also, taking out turrets tends to be more efficient htan taking out the weapons system. Laser turrets aren't very dangerous, so just take out beam and flak cannons and the cap ships are pretty much useless.

Hehe, doesnt sound like you have played any sims games at all.
"Complicated controls"... Eh... It isnt a FPS game. Try it on hard if its too easy and you dont even need to kill anyone. Same with rockets.
TBH, I dont agree on as much as one of your points.
Good thing theres a lot of other games for you to play. Too bad, since FS1-2 has a great story and good gameplay (for me).