I still think it's pretty awkward to get thrown out of an intercept action due to lack of pilots. It's not as bad now that there is a button to take you to the ship screen to assign a pilot, that was a big improvement, but it's still a bit cumbersome to have to go through a few menus for something that usually doesn't matter.
I don't think the 'auto assign' option in the options menu is as useful or as intuitive as it could be. Currently the auto assign option forces all ships to use whoever is last on the list as their pilots. This is ok for most situations, but sometimes it just isn't what I want to do - and I certainly don't want to have to go in and out of the options screen whenever I want to change tactics. In general, I care about who pilots my interceptors, but I don't care who pilots the troop transport ships. The tricky part is that some troop transport ships are also interceptors. I think it would be better if auto assign only tried to assign pilots when there aren't enough already.
Here are a few other approaches which I think would work well. (Any one of them would be good. Not all three!)
- Whenever the player puts any unit in a craft, the game checks if the craft has enough pilots; if it doesn't yet have enough pilots, the unit being added to the craft becomes a pilot. I think this would be good default behaviour, and it would remove the need to even have an option to 'auto assign' pilots.
- Alternatively, when an intercept is told to launch, if there the ship doesn't have enough pilots, it could then (and only then) automatically assign whoever was available as a pilot. This would be the functionality of the 'auto assign' option. If 'auto assign' was turned off, or if the craft still doesn't have enough pilots even after auto-assigning, the game would do exactly what it does currently. ie. tell the player that there isn't enough pilots and offer to go to the ship screen.
- There could be an additional button on the 'not enough pilots' screen which effectively says "auto-assign and go!" The button would try to automatically assign pilots, and continue the intercept command without the player having to reissue it.
As I said, I reckon the current system is still a bit awkward. I also think it's potentially confusing for newer players who are less comfortable with the UI. I think it would be much better if one of the suggestions I've offered was implemented. I like the first option best.
