So I set out to make a simple mission... similar to a mission I made years ago for Freespace 2.

Now I've used a LOT of mission building tools over the years, heck I did some missions for some games in notepad (and that was a pain typing everything).

So I try to make tow fleets battle..simple enough no? I place a federation and a klingon fleet, setup costumes for all 5 ships in each fleet. Then I notice I can't adjust anything else. Difficulty levels, equipment, nor anything else to make a specific ship stronger or weaker. Must be set to scale to player by default. But SURELY there is some option somewhere to disable that. What if i want to make a boss fight and have a single, really deadly opponent? Well, maybe the fleets have pre-set stats. Let's try adding a single klingon Neh'Var with an enemy captain and set him to make a bee-line towards a station. So I place NPC ship..and again, no options whatsoever to do anything with it. I can't even get it to go from point A to point B. Only thing I can do is let it wander aimlessly. And Iplace a fed flagship as a group leader.

So I test the map. The conversation and location triggers work...and once I reach the location I notice that there is only 1 federation ship and only 1 klingon ship. WTF? Aren't there supposed to be 5 ships in each fleet?
And the klingon commander is friendly...since apparently all NPCs are friendly and you can't change that.
And the Fed commander just sits there and ignores the hostile ship completely....

So putting down a single ship results in a always-friendly ship that can't be used as an adversary.
Putting down a squad/fleet...results in one ship. So to get a fleet I have to place multiple squadrons?

Who in their right mind designed this?
When I can use a editor from a 13 year old game and make the entire mission in 5 minutes there; when I can type out a similar mission by hand in notepad faster and more efficient...something is friggin wrong.

Utter, complete failure of a tool!

A lot of your complaints will be addressed soon™. They are putting a lot of the Foundry features on hold because it shares code with Neverwinter. And Cryptic decided to wait until they got Neverwinter to a release state before transferring that over to STO Foundry.

The new features will address things like pathing, triggers, etc. Foundry as you see it now will be completely different after the new features are added.

The Foundry is a stripped down version of the engine Cryptic itself uses. While, obviously, we don't have as many features, the core is what they use. Their own balancing acting is providing enough features to us while not making it too difficult to understand.

They seem to have done a lot of what is frustrating you, in fear that it would be exploited. You see five dots, but 5 ships may only appear if your testing as a VA, or if you're playing with a team.

So, your control of the mobs is very limited. In the end, you can't even really be sure as to whether or not the player will find them easy or hard. There are just too many variables beyond your control.

I agree that there are lots of counter-intuitive things like this. Hopefully, the tool will become more user-friendly.

Wrong game mate. This one is made for the lowest common denominator. Don't waste your time, try to learn Unity instead.

Yeah, the most you can customize NPCs is by reskinning them and giving them new contact names. Hopefully that will change soon.

The number of ships per mob depends on the number of people playing the mission. If it's just one player, all mobs will have one ship except frigates (three ships) and fighters (~ seven ships).

Sounds like you're using NPC Contacts, which are friendly and non-combat by default. Only NPC Groups will fight and have enemy status.

Pretty much.

Once you get used to the limitations, it's actually a great tool. Play missions like "City of the Polmar Ree" to get a look at what can be done with the Foundry. It certainly impressed me, anyway.