Can't get planes to do what I want

[Gunfreak]

I'm making a small strike mission on Tipan, 

I have two flights of F14s with bombs and Air to air(54s, SP and SW) Their mission is to bomb a base I've buildt.
They have each one escort of two F14s with just AA, more 542s, SP and SW)

And I have a flight of F18s who's main mission is to take of the SAM, with HARM, they also AA, in the from of AMRAAMs and SW. 

Against them some NK MiG21s and Chinese Su27s.

The problems are.
1. The escort F14s don't engadge with the 54s, they wait until the SP are in range. after the SP are out they'll start using the 54s.(I've set the engadement range of the escorts to 100 kmt.
2, if a MiG passes the escorts they just keep flying ignoring that the MiGs are on their way towards the planes they are supposed to escort. 
3. one F14 in each of the two flights drop their boms, the wingman dosn't, I have set them to only passive reaction to threats.
4. The F18s drop their HARMS even though I've set them to no reaction to threats

Attack on china.miz

[Gunfreak]

I've now changed the escorts from escorts to CAP, and given them order to attack spesific targets and forced them to use Long range AA missles, they still refuse to use the AIM54...

[Eugel]

Have you tried to remove the role completely ? 
I had the same issue in a mission where I wanted a pair of A-10s to attack a target with their guns, and someone gave me the tip to remove the "CAS" role and it worked.

[Exorcet]

I took a look at the mission, a few things:

 

Intercept is a useless task type in my opinion, I'd use CAP instead since it gives you more ways to control the AI

Passive Reaction to threat just means the AI will only drop chaff/flare and not evade, this isn't very useful. Evade Fire is generally better

Restrict Jettison will keep the AI from dumping important weapons when attack, use this if AG flights keep dropping weapons

Your ground attack waypoints are very close to your target, which makes it so the AI has a hard time lining up attacks, they should be 15-20 miles out if possible

The base you made is covered in trees, so AG weapons hit the trees instead of the units. I removed trees around the base.

 

The AIM-54 issue is a known one, for some reason the AI doesn't take advantage of its range. You can try making one of the F-14 Escort carry only AIM-54 and no AIM-7 and then it will fire the 54's at slightly longer range.

 

I've made two modifications to the mission, see if either of these work better for you.

Attack on china mod.miz Attack on china mod2.miz

[Grimes]

Removing the role is mostly for instances where there are targets outside the area you want the AI to be attacking at. For example wanting a SEAD flight to target specific sams but they see an EWR 200 miles away first and go for that. 

 

I haven't messed with the escort task much lately to be honest. It kinda fits the role of cool looking aircraft flying in formation, but tends to slightly compromise the AI's ability to execute their actual mission. Just giving them their own flight plan and to be slightly ahead of whoever they are meant to escort works best. 

 

Weapons wise the Mk-82 snakeeye (or air) isn't great for that tasking. AI will always do a fast and low level bombing, and will usually miss. Use normal Mk-82s and they will typically dive bomb the targets or at least be more accurate level bombing. For what it is worth you won't be destroying that command bunker with Mk-82s. It normally takes about a dozen Mk-84s to destroy it.