Here's a first test. Drones are coming at me, I've launched some missiles to intercept them. I press "T" and quickly plot the course.
Then I want to make some couse corrections and press "T" again and maneuver node gets discarded because fuck usability, dear player, do everything again.
2 minutes of my life are wasted for nothing.
Whatever, I redo a trajectory and about 30 ingame minutes later my missile stack (white circle) moves to intercept (red diamond) enemy drones (red triangle) to protect my fleet (green diamond).
Then I end the minimal one-minute turn and what do I see?
Intercept, bitch!
In case it's not clear, those drones bypass my missiles and jump straight to my ships. Kinda like this.
(I had several such events. During one of those, an especially infuriating one, my first stack of missiles did intercept an enemy fleet and did nothing. While the battle went by, another stack of missiles flew by the enemy fleet on a strategic map without colliding even though it should've initiated and intercept. Because fuck that skinny usability in the ass with a demon boil, no superlube necessary.)
Ok, let's try it another time. Now I launch the missiles properly in advance.
They intercept. See, I have 40 missiles vs 15 drones, about 2.5 to 1, moving head on, on default script ("distribute homing"), so they should try to to hit different targets.
It might be not really clear from the image, but I watched what had happened like a hawk.
What happened is that about 2/3 of my cloud tried to aim at 2-3 outlying drones and others do some random shit, accelerating in random directions.
And only a single missile hits.
No craft destroyed.
Only minimal damage is done.
So I went to check WTF has happened. It seems that missiles have 2 and 1 km/s dV versus 3.5 km/s of drones so they don't seem to be able to catch up to them at all.
Then my rage subsided a bit because it's a pretty "realistic" thing to have. Missiles are probably designed to hit large slowly accelerating vessels not those drone midgets.
But then the rage roze again because
a) Nobody told me that simple fact.
Ceres is the first mission that doesn't boil down to application of a single trick.
Ceres is a first mission that doesn't explain me a necessary weapon functionality. I got a page-long tutorial about some fantasy sandnigger politics instead. "Realistic", yes. Fuck this kind of realism.
b) Missiles have no cloud-based behaviour (I'm pretty sure 2-3 missiles could've boxed a single target into a non-evadable trajectory by doing a radial acceleration and then converging on the target). And they don't even seem to be able to properly distribute their targets.
b2) I've tried distributing them manually ("move to a spherical segment" and later "home to a target"). Missiles override my orders and still try to aim at 1-2 targets within a cloud. You can see it pretty clearly here.
c) Fucking GUI lacks basic functions that would override retarded default behaviour. I can't even point and click missiles to specific targets, FFS.
d) Oh and when I restart missions in a sandbox, orbits of the fleets change. And I can't seem to make the setup permanent without modding. So I can't even run clean repeatable tests in a fucking sandbox whose sole purpose is to do controllable testing.
e) I don't even mention that the game lacks combat sandbox, without any stellar-body map whatsoever.
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