Geier

Right. So how many did Spillsby get? ;-) Thanks for the explanation!

Re: air domination. During Black September 1918 the Germans inflicted the heaviest losses ever to the Allied air forces and during Bloody April 1917 the RFC had its highest percentage of losses. At no point during these two months did they stop the Allies from achieving their goals. During Bloody April RFC sent inexperienced crews flying inferior planes on Contact patrols, Deep Offensive Patrols, Recon and Bomb missions and the Jastas shot them down. So they sent more and kept sending more until they got their photos or contacts. Not once during Black September did the Germans stop or even halt allied operations. I think the book Bloody April ... Black September by Franks et al sums up the situation for the German Air Force quite nicely. It's also important to note that the RFC pilots at the time thought they were giving as good as they got. Their claims were all over the place which is entirely understandable given the circumstances.

I had a pilot with Jasta 5, my longest career with 16.5 hours (it was actually more like 19, some weird time bug happened on two occasions). Started early March, flew ca 20 missions, at least 16 of those with my fellow musketeers. Richter, Grabenhoff and Huber. Richter had 8 kills with two claims lodged since forever, Grabenhoff also 8, Huber and me 6 with two claims. I was always disgruntled when Huber or Grabenhoff got replaced by some other guy. Then along came 1.26 and without testing or warming up I took off in Campaign and everything went splendidly, I rtb without problems. Next mission is a railyard attack so I advance time. Got a message: Richter killed, Grabenhoff missing. By die-roll I assume. I decided it was time to do that complete reinstall I had planned for some time and scrap that career along with it.

Thanks rabu. Both for your work with the maps and for making it available to us! (I suspect most ppl are busy trying out the 1.26 patch.)

Diving turns to the left, climbing turns to the right. The Camel shouldn't like that too much. Apart from that - Dicta Boelcke. Never engage unless you have the advantage. Get in, shoot him, get out.

Olham: Scrambles were good fun IF you didn't care if your Jasta got wiped out. Sometimes they're OK but the last three I got was 9-12 enemy fighters sitting on top of 4-5 of us when we hadn't even started our engines. That's a massacre no matter if you get 3 or 4 of them by yourself, and I even managed to quite easily just fly away from them once. I haven't tried it with 1.26 though, the N17 are no longer the terror I thought they were before. Their DM has been turned down a notch and the DIII is now a far superior plane to what we've had before. Hoghead: The Bristol Fighter was in service until 1938. I'd say it is a great machine if you flew it correctly. But I'll QC a few of them with my DIII and return with my reports. They had some weird AI flying them back in 1.0. Anyway, I'm sure the team would look into any complaints you might have, they are a supremely committed bunch. The DIII is after 1.26 exactly the terror it was during March-June 1917 and can hold it's own against all opposition, including the SPAD VII and the Tripehound. When the SE5's and Camels arrive, they're in trouble. What the Jastas were built for was protection of balloons, attacking balloons and knocking down the two-seaters. As they were outnumbered they picked fights they could win and didn't go tally-hoing into any enemy flight that crossed their path. The BE2's, the Strutters, the Harry Tates are your primary targets - not the scouts.

Good catch Fortiesboy! Definitely remember pressing the stick forward and applying some rudder too I believe in good ol FCG.

I really really recommend setting Guns on Hard with 1.26.

Best. Sim. Experience. Ever. Tonight. TrackIR and OFF 1.26. 4 Albatros DIII vs 6 Nieuport 17 at 13.000 feet. Towering cumuli, sunny breaks. We got two, they bagged Richter. Wings torn off. Rudder jammed. Forced landing. I don't envy Allied pilots trying to make it through Bloody April now. Gentlemen, we have a DIII.

I just - sorta - barrelrolled my DIII with 1.26. It was ugly, it was slow, I lost tons of alt but I would still like to proclaim it a barrel roll. Only to the right btw, no chance of rolling it left. Yeah, I had to dive, otherwise I couldn't pull it off at all.

Never mind my previous post re: the DIII and N17. The DIII flies like a dream and both it and the N17 are more fragile. Just download and install 1.26. Man oh man what a sim this is. I absolutely love the changes made to these AC. The DIII is also far better at high alt compared to before. Had a great fight with some N17's at 13000 feet. I got one, Grabenhoof another but the bastards got Richter. We were 4 vs 6 and my rudder got busted so made a forced landing with someone called Tom Falcon Something shooting me up something terribly. N17's still fly as great as they did but now you can hang onto them much better. Sure, you can kill them faster but they can kill you much faster as well. Really recommend the Wide setting for the guns. The air just got far more deadly.

As my lovable pilot Geier now is but one mission away from getting 17 hours combat flying in his belt I thought I'd pass along some ideas I've developed along the way. If these have already been beaten to death in earlier discussions, well, there's nothing inherently wrong with flogging a dead horse, is there? First off, I'm now running on settings which I've decided to name LaLD (Live and Let Die) which is pretty much as far away from DiD as you can go in that I'm using the Unkillable setting for my pilot. Why? Because I want to see how things turn out. I've taken some ideas off Gimpy's excellent thread from the old forum. I use TAC and have been resorting to Warp too on some missions with heavy clouds where I couldn't reach half of my waypoints otherwise. Labels are also on. It doesn't mean I rack up tons of kills. Not at all, I have 3 confirmed and 3 claims plus 7 rejected. Three of the rejects were Camels and N16's which aren't available in the kill lists. In fact, the Camels shouldn't exist at all since I'm flying March 1917. But anyway. I run away from any scouts that are higher than me OR more than me. All the time. What I've read has led me to believe that the Germans did not, at least not from April 1917 onward, use scouts to escort bombers unless it was attacks directed near or at the frontlines. Neither did they attack airfields or railyards with scouts. Scouts existed to bring down the two-seaters over German lines and to attack obs balloons. If opportunity knocked, of course they knocked down single-seaters as well. I'm also not fond of the way the Scramble!-missions are implemented either so I often give those a miss too. What I do when a mission arrives that I don't feel like flying, I exit and run a QC. Whatever I feel like. This advances time a bit and I can jump into Campaign again and see what kind of mission is given this time. Most of the time it will be a mission inside German territory and I can play it. I don't get any credit for kills or do I get more registered flight time. QC's can weel be viewed as practise for your pilot with mock combats and what have you. I guess what I'm saying is that there was a big difference in strategy between the British and the German air forces and I'm trying to adjust my game accordingly. When I do get more competent and familiar I'm sure I would run my future German DiD pilot in a similar way. As a Brit, anything goes. Hmm, I guess I will wonder why I wrote this when I wake up tomo...today. :yes:

Baywing: I agree that the Scramble missions are complete suicide missions and are not implemented perfectly. I never fly them anymore. Enable Advance Time Manually in Workshops, then you'll get a button saying Advance Time which is helpful. Blue: I've never heard of an RE5. There are RE8's which are two-seater bombers/recon planes and there's the excellent fighter the SE5, which comes with either a Hispano-Suiza or a Wolseley Viper engine. If it reads RE5 in your claim form you have a faulty install I dare say. DerMo: Yeah, I mainly stay away from N17's, even with my Albatros DIII. If the Albs get a roll rate improvement and the N17 gets a slightly more vulnerable airframe in the upcoming patch I'll be all over them. The N17 losses during Bloody April were staggering when they went up against the DIII. So get posted to a DIII Jasta asap, then you can always run away from them until the patch comes ;-) Note: I have no idea whether the design team agrees on my assessment about the Alb roll rate OR the N17 DM!

The Albatros DIII outturns the SPAD VII all days of the week. It outclimbs and outruns the N17 all days of the week as well. It rolls really poorly and has far nastier stalls than the N17. The N17 can stall out at 100 feet and recover. You can't. The Alb DII and DIII are also crap above 10.000 feet, at least compared to the lighter Pups and N17s. If you want to shake a SPAD, hard turn with full bank should do it. Get behind him and be prepared to fire most of your ammo to down him unless you can get dead close and/or is a dead shot. I think Olham54 summed it up best: The Brits and the French made great flying machines - The Germans made great fighting machines. If you think your Alb will handle like in RB3D you're in for a nasty surprise. That said, I believe that the Alb roll rate might be upped a notch or two and the N17 DM downed a notch in the upcoming patch. Just guesswork (or wishful thinking) on my part though. In my Bloody April campaign(s) N17's are by far the most dangerous foe, even worse than the Tripehounds. If attacking fighters at higher alt with inferior numbers on your side is your thing, prepare to Die-A-Lot in OFF. Why you are attacking Allied fighters at all I don't know. Their main purpose is to keep you away from the two-seaters and they're more than happy to let you help them with that. The two-seaters are your main target and your only priority is to get them. Attacking scouts is something you do when you have a strong upper hand. Like altitude and numbers. Almost no plane outclass the contemporary opponents so much they can disregard the Dicta Boelcke. The BMW D7 might be an exception, I don't know, never flown it.

Since I just got my TIR I think it would be great if we could collect all the insights about what works best when it comes to TIR use in OFF. I just took my first couple of flights and damn if I didn't get something in my eye after a while. Since I was seven and started reading Biggles my life has been a long wait for this moment. I'm now 40. Took off in a Camel and toured the front alone in the winter. One niggle that I haven't decided how to solve is raising my monitor. My table is kinda high and I had to swivel my chair far too far down for it to be comfortable in order to align my eyes with TrackIR. But please, if we could put all our TIR posts in one thread, that would be really helpful, I'm sure not only for me.

Just had what is probably the greatest dogfight of my life thanks to TIR. Me and my Jasta 5 kette (all four of us have been around since start of campaign 6 weeks ago) swooped down on a flight of six Nieuport scouts that had been eluding me the entire flight by constantly having altitude advantage that I couldn't seem to beat, until they got careless. The fight probably lasted for over 15 minutes and we were joined by a DII and a Halberstadt at some point. But wow, being able to look around like this made it so intense I was sweating. Normally I would padlock an enemy and check my six once in a while but when you're flying like this your six isn't often where your hat switch thinks. At one point I rolled right to avoid collision with Richter, barely missed him, kicked full rudder and jammed the stick forward and went straight between the two Brits that were chasing him. I probably missed both by four feet, not more. Without TIR I wouldn't have seen anyone. Got one Nieup that burst into flames and probably put holes in all the rest. Out of ammo I got the heck out and Richter smoked the guy that tried to follow me. Got home with lots of holes in my Albatros, got confirmation on my three claims and someone threw an Iron Cross at me. 6 kills now, as many as Huber but two short of Richter and Grabenhoff. Poor Richter has had two claims for three weeks now, he really wants to reach ten before the inevitable happens. Gontermann has the highest score right now but he's a balloon chaser. Schneider and Nathanael close behind. I've had worse days.

Really recommend the Advance Time Manually option for fliegers so inclined. It suits my approach to a German campaign perfectly. MK2: That would be, as pretty much everything you do seems to be, awesome. I believe, but probably need more data, that such a setting would be suitable for most of 1917 as well. There is no mention in the Bloody April chapter of any airfield or railyard strikes by the Jastas. However. During the great German offensive of 1918 I do believe attack against airfields in the way of the push would be appropriate. So there you go. No rule without exception I suppose.

Great job everybody! Looking forward to AussiePilot's profiles and whether Gous can get FreeTrack to work in OFF. (I and others have also managed to spread the word on the other game fora I frequent and I believe a sale or three has been effected through that thread.)

Gous: You can't have a bogey padlocked if you want to avoid that. Simply un-padlock before you hit F4, I believe that's the only way. (To un-padlock I cycle through all bogeys until I get a non-lock.)

This looked like info that could prove useful for those interested, posted by Winder in another thread: ---- Guys you can time advance if you enable this in the workshops: Campaign column - Campaign Date Advance - On. And in your campaign interface you get a 'time advance' button under the briefing button. HTH WM ---- I'll be certain to try this out later tonight.

Pol: It's no biggie to me. I promise to write down names of the squadrons next time it happens. I've been running Vista with English (US) settings for at least the last ten days. Last night was the first time I've seen "wrong" AC since I switched OS language and reinstalled OFF. One weird thing was that the first time I ran into Camels they were ID'd as AFC-3 squadron which I don't think exists in the game? Sad to say I'm not 100% sure. I'm sure the new date settings will solve this problem anyway. Dej: I think the design decision to have similar experiences for both sides are sane and sound. That would be what I guess the majority of the players would want and what is possible/sane to implement. Otherwise, most German missions would be pure intercept missions. They had observers at the front who would give a general height, direction and size for incoming enemy flights and the responding Jasta would send up what they could. My post was more intended as a how-to IF you want to have a more "Germanized" (sure, that's a word, too) experience. Also, most, even almost all, Jasta pilots had experience from flying in two-seater squadrons before being "promoted" to the Jagdstaffeln and already had far more than 17 hours of combat flight under their belts.

Jimko: Desktoped! Thanks.

Alrighty then. This looks like it could be a bit of the alright.