Ahh, there's that juicy, juicy meat that I was looking for.
Re: Agility.
I suppose we have to first define what agility actually is in order to make any headway here. I've taken it to mean the capacity for a missile to quickly change direction in response to a wide variety of factors (The abstracted evasive maneuvers that ships are assumed to be taking, for instance). Going by that, it doesn't make much sense that some fighters moving to intercept a missile with high agility won't be able to calculate where it'll be five seconds from now and move there instead of towards the location the missile is currently at. Their high agility won't change the fact that they're flying to their target in a straight line (Assuming a stationary target, if there's movement there are some potential issues, but I'll be going into those later).
I'm in complete agreement that writing an exception is poor programming practice, but that's not what I'm looking for. I don't want the missiles to move first when I have fighters set to intercept; I want the game to run a calculation based upon information that I already have access to and send my fighters towards the point where I *expect* the missiles to be at the end of the five second increment (or, if it's done in such a manner, whatever time frame the player decides to input).
As Aurora doesn't know the increment until the player presses the button, wouldn't that be more of an argument for the more advanced function (The player inputting the time) rather than one against the concept altogether? I'm not even sure if it would be necessary for the game to do anything extra during the movement phase as the calculation can be done as the order is set. After inputting the time, the location where the object will likely be based upon current sensor data is calculated and a waypoint placed. If it just so happens that the object you were attempting to intercept changed heading, then the interception would simply fail and your fleet would be off the mark. The only real addition would be that the arrival of your fleet at the interception point would cause an interruption.
Your list of potential issues are largely caught by my recent statements, but the last one could be a problem. The question is, though, just how often will a rocket's submunitions go off in four separate headings? Regardless, though, it seems as though this is also caught by my earlier statement: The interception order plots a waypoint where your target is expected to be in 'x' amount of time based upon current sensor data and if the situation changes during the movement phase, then your interception has simply failed.
You got my exact problem down, though. Perhaps the "Follow" command could simply be expanded to have the increased versatility of "Intercept. "