This is the part of the whole process than can make or break your mission. The Compendium is full of battles that are based on a great idea and an original goal, that are completely shot to hell by screwing up here.

Let's see what we can do to avoid that.

The tab where you set your flight group's orders looks like this:

With the Order Selector you can select up to three different orders for your flight group. These can be similar, or completely different. Either way, the first order of business is to decide what the flight group should be doing. There are a lot to different orders to choose from. TFW is also nice enough to give you a short description of whatever order you select. And even more, this is one part of the helpfile that was finished, and I encourage you to spend some time going through the order descriptions in that help file. It explains in detail what ships will do when given an order, and other interesting things. You can find them by clicking the HELP button on this tab, and then clicking the order descriptions link. After choosing the appropriate order, there are a few things left to do:

First of all, you need to specify the speed at which the flight group will travel through the arena, completing its goal. You are limited to mutiples of 10% here. You should also note that while a starfighter can change its speed during the mission, a starship can not. I recommend always giving your craft a start speed, unless you designed the mission for your craft to be stationary at the start. Here too, you need to be careful: if a flight group has speed set to 0%, it will be motionless throughout the mission. If this happens to a flight group just exiting the hangar bay of an ISD, they will be blocking the exit for the next flight group. Sitting and watching flight after flight being destroyed because of this isn't half the fun it sounds like.

Next, there are two parameters that change depending on what order you selected. If you picked something like Fly Loop", the first parameter will be how many times you want the ship to fly the loop. If you picked Boarding order, you can specify the boarding time here, and how any times the flight group should board. In that case, you need to be careful: it would look silly for three ATRs to disable a platform, and then ATR 1 boards to capture the platform, and when it's done, ATR 2 will board to capture, and when that one is done, ATR 3 will board to capture.

If you assign orders for starships, like Patrol Loop, you can still specify targets. It simply means the starship will fly through its waypoints, but it will start shooting at any craft matching its target. Again, points for realism: if a Star Destroyer is sitting in space, and an enemy frigate passes by, the Star Destroyer will of course start shooting.

And this is where things go wrong all too often.

There are two types of orders in TIE Fighter: you have orders that relate specifically to starfighters, and orders that are for starships. And you definately do not want to get them mixed up. There's nothing more annoying than seeing a capital ship dance around the arena like a ballerina, chasing down a TIE Defender like an overgrown A-wing. All too often, it makes the capital ship plough into other ships, which is bad when we're talking about mission critical ships. I remember playing a battle once that took several hours to complete because an ISD kept knocking out Cargo Ferries that were mission critical in an attempt to get a target lock on an TIE Defender (see the following TIE Fighter video).

This is where TFW is very clear: in the short order description, TFW speaks of either flight group or starship. These are starfighter orders, and starship orders, respectively. Generally speaking, anything which is flyable by the player is considered to be a starfighter. That includes all regular starfighters, all transports and all shuttles. Everything the size of a Bulk Freighter or bigger is considered to be a starship, and you should assign orders as such. Making sure you don't mess up here will avoid a lot of frustration for the people playing your missions.

Last of all, you need to specify the targets for the flight group. Again, you have the freedom to select anything from a specific flight group to a whole IFF code. By combining targets 1 and 2, or targets 3 and 4, you have even more freedom. For example, you could set target 1 to be Ship Type X-wing, and target 2 to be IFF 3. That way, the flight group would attack all X-wings that belong to IFF 3, but at the same time ignore all X-wings that belong to IFF 4.

Understanding orders is the most important thing in your mission. You should make sure you have a good understanding of what different orders do. One way to figure out is to test. And if you want to do something that one of the missions in the game did, just open up that mission in TFW and see how the orders are defined.

The last thing I want to say about orders, is that you should consider giving Imperial starfighters extra orders. I have seen missions, where you need to protect a cargo transfer, and then before the cargo transfer even begins, all friendly starfighters hyper out because all their targets were destroyed. For realisms sake, as well as keeping the player in suspense if there's going to be more enemies showing up, these friendly starfighters should stay around patrolling the area. You can easily get this done, by setting the last order for the flight group to Protect, and then set their target to IFF Imperial. The flight groups will then stay around until all Imperial ships are safely away, or until their Departure Condition or Stop Condition is met.