Hmm, I'm just a little bit alarmed to hear everybody talking about how they did eventually take out the Hakaga

. Our intention had been to make it well-nigh impossible, since destroying the Hakaga actually puts you in a better situation than Fleet Action.
(ah... but does it really? The damaged Hakaga was sent back home with two carriers as escort. If you destroy the Hakaga, those two carriers won't be sent away... so wouldn't you need to deal with these carriers in episode 5?

)
Also, about the Crossbow - I highly recommend that everybody try flying the Crossbow in these missions. It's a whole different ball game, and having 6 torpedoes instead of 4 gives you a significant advantage.
Oh, I don't think killing the Hakaga was easy, but I did manage it on the first try somehow. (Must have gotten lucky. The next 3 times I played it, we kept running out of torps.) That said, I've been practicing on the Ep3 Verdun and Snakeir missions for... oh, about a year now.

I'm sure a lot of us have - and from the sound of it we've gotten pretty damned good at them. I think without a year of practice it would have been harder, but those two missions in Ep3 are serious challenges compared to any official WC game that came before it, and I think all of us have gotten way better at certain skills ultra-critical to Standoff:
- conserving afterburner fuel
- gunnery sans ITTS
- flak evasion
- situational awareness (i.e. who launches torps, and where and when to kill them), including use of rapid targeting, taunts, wingman control, and navmap
Every WC game has been fairly winnable without having to be particularly good at any of the above. Standoff pushes its players to limits never before necessary, I think.
But the missions in Ep4, so far, have all been hard. Really, really hard. When I go back to the Ep3 missions now, they seem so relatively easy... and I haven't forgotten that they used to give me fits. Defending capital ships in Ep4... let's just say that sometimes I find myself looking back at the Verdun defense mission and realizing what a difference it makes that the Verdun takes two torpedo hits to kill. In hindsight, practicing the Sao Paulo mission would have been better practice for Ep4 than the Verdun mission. Now I wish the Stiletto or Epee were selectable because their extra speed would be helpful for chasing down all those &^*@%$# torpedoes!