Am am currently at the beginning of the campaign, and i have major problems whenever i encounter A-Wings. So far, i have been sent against them in a gunboat, and i feel as if that thing is just way too clumsy to deal with them. I can win against them over time, but it usually takes me a few minutes to kill a single one because i hit them only barely often enough to overwhelm their shield regeneration.

The only situation i have found where i can kill one quickly is if they are far enough away for me to get a missile lock, and preferably not focussing on me. Then i can just launch three missiles and they usually die. If they focus on me, their laser fire kills my missiles, and i am once again in the close combat dogfight against them that takes ages.

I also cannot just ignore them, because then they usually stick behind me and murder me rather quickly if i try to fly anywhere else. I can ignore them to dogfight other fighters in the close surroundings.

This is pretty annoying, because it means that as soon as A-Wings turn up, i am basically no longer participating in the mission, and just doing a ten-minute dance of slowly killing the 3-4 of them. At that point, the mission is usually over.

Are there any tricks on how one can kill them more quickly? I can deal pretty reliably with all the other rebel fighters, but i just don't seem to be able to figure out the A-Wings. They are so small, quick and fast and they constantly rotate around me. (I know that the role of an A-Wing is to be able to kill enemy craft in a dogfight, but still, i would really like to not have every mission devolve into a 10-20 minute boring dogfight against A-Wings.

I guess it might be a problem with my accuracy, as i also have problems reliably hitting mines.

I am using a Thrustmaster Hotas X with a Joystick Gremlin curve to have more accuracy for smaller movements, to be able to smooth out the rather large dead zone in the middle with that stick. I will not buy a new Joystick.

Edit: And a second question, is there a list of how many of different types of missiles it takes to destroy craft and especially components on larger craft? I guess i could test it on my own, but it would be pretty nice to simply be able to look it up.

A-Wings are a pain. It has been years since I played, so my memory may be a bit fuzzy on a few things. I do remember linking weapons gives you a wider hit spread. Also target the ones that are targeting you first using the E key. If they're far enough away, start with a slower speed, launch a couple of missiles, and then immediately turn around and fly as fast you can away while bobbing and weaving. Hopefuly it's far enough away before they start firing their lasers, and the missiles should take them down to where you should just need to hit it a few times with the lasers. If you have wingmen left, you can order them to attack, and they can finish it off for you. Ion cannons do help, as it will slowly disable them.

If you already have multiple ones targeting you, assign wingmen to attack one, while you fight the other. If I remember right, the AI will automatically target the last enemy to hit it, giving you some time to focus on another. If you have friendly capital ships in the area, you can also stay close to them, and their turbolasers/missiles will also help keep them occupied.

The Assault Gunboat was probably my least favorite craft to fly in TIE Fighter.

For your second question, 2 advanced concussion missiles should take out most Rebel starfighters except for the B-Wing at full shields (possibly the Y-Wing wing as well). A follow up 3rd missile right after the first should finish it off, but that would be a waste of a missile. For the capital ship components, I found it easier to just take them out with lasers if I only had missiles. Took a little longer, but I'd rather save the missiles for the fighters.

Hm, how do you take out the capital ship guns with lasers without them ripping you to shreds? I guess it takes me too long to aim at them directly, which is always a period of time where i need to fly basically straight, and the guns just shred me during that. Do i need to be able to hit it while constantly ducking and weaving?

I have just done mission 6 of battle one, where you (or rather your allies) need to kill a light cal cruiser. I noticed that if i take out its warhead launchers, my allies always succeed at that very quickly, and if i don't, they don't. So i just launched a bunch of missiles at them at the start of the mission, but i thought it would be nice to know how many it takes in total. I could just launch the mission once, launch missiles one after another and watch, but then i would need to do that for every component i want to take out for every ship. I had hoped that there is a list somewhere.

It took me a while to get the hang of it. Sometimes it's best to NOT have the ship selected as your target. Just fly at the turret lasers blasting away. As far as I could tell, the game doesn't know you're targeting something, and you're just firing blindly. Eventually the ship will target you though, as you'll be the closest enemy.

Even though the training missing through the tunnels is a bit boring, it does help sharpen your skills at firing without a target lock at the same time as moving.

For capital ships, most missions you want to take out the engines first. That way they can't hyperspace away, and are effectively stuck in the mission until you jump out, or they get you.

I have done the training missions until level 8 on every ship.

My experience with capitals is pretty limited now (I have a bunch from 20 years ago, but i don't remember any of that in detail). In most of the missions so far i was kinda alone with the capital once i could concentrate on it and didn't have to deal with giant amounts of fighters. Which meant that all of the guns were only focusing on me.

I had one encounter (I thing it was a gunboat training mission) with a Nebulon B where i used missiles to take out its warhead launcher and the 4 guns which can shoot you when you are hugging their engines, then flew up to the engines and started blasting them. They didn't show any signs of getting broken even after i took about 30% of the Nebulon B's shield. Then i used time acceleration to speed things up to 4x, because nothing was happening and i was just blasting it with lasers. And a bit later the thing suddenly turned and the lasers killed me before i was able to reduce the time acceleration. Then i didn't want to do it again and did other things.

I just loaded the game up, and I couldn't disable engines either. I'm wondering if I am thinking of one of the later TIE/XWing games or Freespace. Sorry about that!

Once you do get the shields down when you're in a gunboat, blast it with the Ion cannons to get it disabled. I had forgotten how much of a pain A-Wings were. Let your wingmen focus on one, and then you on another. You'll have to keep an eye on when they take it out so you can reassign them.