Skill is important because it makes it easier to avoid being tailed, and for gunnery. It has negligible impact on the engagement roll outside of tailing/being tailed.
I wonder if this is another thing we've been doing differently. Skill, as I understand how engagement control checks work, IS indeed a very important variable as it sets the baseline TN. The winner of the check isn't who got the highest roll but who got the highest MoS. Lowering the TN ends up directly equating to an indirect bonus to the roll itself on a one-for-one rate.
If I have a skill 2 pilot, it doesn't matter what your pilot's skill is. Whatever I roll has a MoS of two higher than what I would have otherwise rolled with a skill 4.
With regards to tailing*, once you purchase even a single upgrade (to skill 3) you're only looking at a 1 in 36 chance of failing your check. Skill 2 and better is flat out unable to fail the check, making tailing a pretty fringe phenomenon once skill upgrades are brought into the calculus.
*=again, I consider exoatmospheric contexts for theorycrafting aerospace balance issues
What if you had to declare the target range before the engagement roll? Short gave a +4 to target, Medium +2, Long +0 and Extreme +4?
so there was a risk to going for short range?
I think this has theoretical promise. I think it could work if each side of the engagement declares its own range but having A shoot at B at one range while B shoots back at A at a different range is threshholding a rabbit hole that may be more trouble than it's worth. Not only is it going to change the existing paradigm, it's extra detail/complication for big furballs.
Honestly, I think in a context of several squadrons worth of ASFs thrown into a mutual dogfight with one another the system works pretty good as-is*. It's simple enough that you can rotate through 12-18+ ASFs' actions fairly quickly and the level of detail/attention doesn't feel overly abstracted for a single fighter's contribution to the outcome.
*=Of course, "as-is" in my case assumes that declarations to fire strictly come before the results of the engagement control check are determined. In a furball it doesn't matter in the same way as a two on one dogfight whether or not the little fast guys are anklebiting you. You won't find any given fighter "gamed" out of having any eligible targets to fire upon. And yet in the two on one scenario where one anklebiter draws the declaration to fire and then picks extreme range while the other then freely swoops in at short range without risk of return fire... that very much feels "works as intented". We're talking about a wingman-less, outnumbered target here afterall. Complaints about the unfairness to that target sound to me very much like complaining about a Fireball or Locust being so fast as to run around and backstrike a big unit that's already moved. That's not abusive... that's how they're
supposed to do it...
And then a related Wingman/escort rule, where two units declared as wingmen (during movement) always have the same range to a target, but have a +1 to control rolls (per wingman)? But only the one rolling would be tailed/not tailed?
I'm glad you like the general idea of a wingman rule but until the way engagements are going to be coded is finalized I don't know that we can discuss how wingmen should contribute to an engagement.