griphos

I'm not sure, as I haven't really ever used it, but I wonder whether warp always dumps you when enemy are near. I'm sure there's some threshhold, but it may be that you warp right through some possible encounters that the program reads as non-threatening.

No, I keep the rotten fruit for eating (easier to chew). I'll be pelting you with the hard stuff. But don't worry, I can't throw very far anymore! Now, where did I put my walker? I need to pee again!

Couldn't edit, so here's a new post: 1. Pup 2. 8 RNAS, Vert-Galant 3. 12 kills 4. 11 hours 5. DiD 6. 110-130% (I've been playing with various settings)

RFC40! That's my squad now! I've flown almost exclusively Pups in 8 and 9 RNAS, but in MP, I've wound up in N17s a fair bit and liked the way they flew, so I started a campaign as Mick and he started in 40. I plan to move with him as he did through the war, assuming, of course, I last longer than a few weeks! Any RFC40 tips?! I like how the airfield is so easy to spot in the middle of that marsh/forest whatever it is. And I'll give the Lewis a fair shot. If it helps my percentage, I'm all for it. I'm pretty much a 15-18% man so far.

The N17 Lewis is new to me. One of my first flights in it. So, I hadn't experienced what you're suggesting. Very interesting. I very well could have taken hits on the gun while downing the one right before this guy. I might have taken them from THIS GUY! When my gun jammed in the Pup, I could almost always fly around a bit pulling on the trigger occasionally, and when it cooled down, it would start working again and I was back in business. But I chased this guy for a very long time, and all I got from the gun was two or three individual and random bullets for all my trigger yanking and cursing. I'll keep an eye on that. I have to say I'm not crazy about that targeting sight/cone/whatever in the cockpit, but in that second shot, I was lined up to start sawing on the left lower wing all the way through the cockpit to the right lower wingtip if only I could do more than yell curses at him! I don't have a good feeling about this Lewis gun!

Can't make it tonight. Have to work. Shoot! I'm looking forward to trying PD's missions.

Actually, I had two crashes tonight that I fully expected to be fatal but weren't. No hospital either. Of course, I had another that was (bad night!). Anyway, three crashes tonight with two different pilots (I just can't get used to the flimsy lower wings on these darn Nieuports!....great work on the DM and FM on these, devs!....they sure can't dive with impunity like they used to be able to!) and I survived two of them. Could be something funny going on. But, MAN, I love this sim. I've been unable to play most of this last week, but got a few missions in over the weekend and a few more tonight. Scoping out the new patch. The great thing is that ALL those missions were absolutely unique. The AI were different in each one. Sometimes fierce, sometimes lazier, different tactics, different skills, different outcomes. As I've said, I've been away from sims for some time, but I've never seen AI this good anywhere. I keep thinking these guys are real. With the low level foolishness fixed, there's really nothing they do that reminds me they are code.

Hey Rick, Those are great. Here's one from my first mission with a new pilot tonight. Lined up beautifully on an ACE, and my gun jams!!!!

Okay, I'm home again so I checked. My AI is set to Realistic. I'll set it to Normal and compare. But it appears that the gods like me. Rickity...75%!

Hmmmm....about flak. I can't remember what my AI "ground fire" setting is. I've been following DiD, but the various patches have changed these settings and I don't recall what the latest did. I know Siggi has now set the AI gun fire range to users choice. All that just to say I don't recall exactly what my setting is, but it's either normal or realisitic I think. I haven't changed it from the start I don't think. But the point is that I've NEVER been shot down by flak, nor have I really even ever tried to dodge it. I see lots of it, but it's not really ever gotten close. I can only recall one time when I lost a wingman to it, and that time I lost both of them to archie right over the line. Knock on wood....but I sort of thought of flak as scenery (mood setting) more than anything else until I started reading these threads about how deadly it can be. This is really interesting if some can fly and it not ever get close and others get knocked down frequently. I've flown a fair bit in this sim since it came out. So, now I'm very curious. Maybe we should do a poll on how many people have been hit by flak.

Nice shot!

I think I've got mine set at 10,000, but I usually fly around 7000. I just get tired of climbing after a while and want to go faster. Anyway, I've jumped German EA a number of times. It does seem that the majority of enemy flights I encounter are higher than me, but not all of them. And I DO SO love to swoop down on unsuspecting bosches.

:blush2: I suspect, Mr. Lucky, that there's a good bit more of that than people suspect, including those poor lunkers in their GA craft just tooling along to wherever. I know I've been a party to such shenanigans in my friend's RV4 a good number of times (strafing the enemy airfield, for instance....). We're all basically Walter Mitty fighter-pilots deep down, and I often think if only the FAA knew how many of us want to really use those tickets.... On the other note, I had the first SH, and it was pretty absorbing. I have to say that the movie above really is enticing, but I CAN'T get any other sims!!! My wife says she's a war widow already with just OFF, and I broke down and ordered IL2 for Bo60 the other day for some MP action!

It's now virtually impossible for me to see an airplane while driving without calculating lead on it.

I intercepted two Alb.DIIs and got one and then the other of them down, but too late for these lads. I was able to use the smoke from this to stalk the last DII. There's a whole war going on in this sim! Look at the mud on the tires of my landing gear!

I sense a business opportunity. OFF therapy: Hello, my name is Griphos. This is an intervention. Let go of the joystick... You guys have got it bad!...(the one leper says to the other lepers). The problem is I suspect you guys don't want to be cured!

I don't mean to suggest that the previous responses were not helpful, but to be precise, I believe the siren is an air warning siren going off at the airfields below because of the possibility of attack on the airfield or general environs from the planes you are shooting at!

I'm with Hellshade. It seems to me that dragging is a technique that the AI almost ALWAYS use now, instead of occasionally. I used to be able to take on two E/A after separating them from the larger group with no sweat. I was never sure what the other one was doing, but I would shoot at one, check six, if the other wasn't there, shoot some more at #1, check six.... When #1 was done, then #2 was usually cake. Now, since 1.3, it seems to me that every group of E/A are fighting as pairs. Very difficult. That's how Stan bought it. A clever drag. Alb. #1 flew across my bow (as it were) and then dove and rolled and did everything to make it hard for me to shoot him. But I stuck on him, thinking none of the other E/A were going to follow us through that! No sooner did I have a bead on him and opened up, than THREE (count them, THREE) of his fellows who had apparently followed us precisely through all of that maneuvering, opened up on me. Sheeshhh! Okay, so will OUR wingmen work with us this way?! I'm going to have to try not sending my #1 wingman to attack? Can you send the others off but keep your wingman with you? I've never used the help key. Perhaps it's time to start! I wish there was a key to get your wingman to drag an E/A into place for you! I've been reading about my avatar a bit, and it seems he was one of the first to emphasize cooperative combat rather than lone wolf tactics. Sims are inevitably about lone wolf tactics, at least with AI wingmen. If I have to stick with lone wolf against cooperative tactics from enemy AI, I'm going to have to become a very good pilot indeed.

I just love these "letters" and "reports." The combination of amazingly immersive sim, historically informed flyers, and blokes who know how to turn a phrase just makes for one compelling experience. One of my favorite parts of this forum. Keep them coming everyone!

My best pilot just died, with 11 hours and 12 confirmed kills. I've been flying 110% DiD/T with Tac set at 2 miles and turned off when the dots turn red. I've been very careful with him, as Rickity describes. Flying without aids once the fight starts means I spend a lot of time just searching for where everyone is, and I find that helps me not get so blindered on one target, as when I used to leave the TAC on and relied on it to tell me if someone was behind me. I've actually done MUCH better without it. But, I lost Stan last night (can you tell I'm still in mourning?) because I hadn't flown in about a week (that da*ned job!) and I was feeling cocky. I mean, 11 hours and 12 kills! I was feeling invincible. It didn't help that the last few missions saw no enemy. So, my skills and tactics were rusty, to say the least. When those two sets of white dots first showed up on TAC at 2 miles, one at 11 o'clock, and one at 2 o'clock, I should have gathered my wingmen and headed to 6 o'clock while climbing to reconnoiter the situation. Instead I kept my heading and waited for the dots to turn red. When they did, off went the TAC and I signaled my wingmen to climb to meet the group now at 9 o'clock. I think if they were the only group, even outnumbering us 6-4, we would have been fine (I got two of them in that first whirl of battle). But of course, the other group turned out to be just as strong, and also enemy and we were vastly outmatched in seconds. So, I think that flying without aids actually does make one more invested and safer, as others have suggested, even though that might seem odd. But it also helps to keep sharp. When I fly daily, I feel a lot more like I imagine those pilots did in life. I get anxious. I get stressed. I look forward to quiet flights. I keep my wits about me. But after a week away I KNOW I should have flown a few QC rather than jump back into campaign. I'm guessing that for real WW1 pilots, those first few flights after leave were always the most dangerous. But I was anxious to move Stan along in the war and when I was tossed by thunderclouds in the first mission (doing damage to my plane...that's never happened before...new in 1.3???) and had to land just on the German side of the front (escaping after 19 days), I should have taken that as a sign that Stan was not ready. Instead, I jumped right into another mission, cocky and ready for action, and Stan's war came to an end. Of course, one of the best things about this sim is the number of ways one can play it. Each very fun. But I do love the challenge of flying a campaign pilot without aids at hard realism settings and trying to think and feel and act as necessary to make it through more than a few months. Hopefully my next guy, flying for the French, will make it.

Yes indeedy, as I wrote on the Patch thread, these new AI models certainly are improved! I had six Alb. DIIs follow me to the deck and continue to plaster me as I did my best to imitate a tree. Lost my best pilot, Stan Goble (in his second incarnation....I think he's done with this crazy war)!! Gonna have to take up Dej's tactics of staying aloof until I spot the weak member of the pack or high-tail it for home when I meet superior forces from now on!

They certainly are improved! Six of them jumped my best pilot, Stan Goble, near the front after he had already downed two others, including ace Max Boerne, and after he had gotten separated from his wingmen. He tried valiantly to engage, but they shot him up pretty badly. He dove for the deck and tried to fly away, as he has done in the past, but they dove after him and continued to plaster him while he tried to land his now very badly damaged crate in friendly territory. Sadly, he crashed, and died from his injuries. There goes that tactic! Ah well, poor bloke. At least one of my pilots finally made ace before dying. And he had 11 hours. Got close! (or at least closer!) I was thinking it was time to fly for the French, though.

Here's my axis profiles. Everything is stock Combat Flight but the X axis. I don't think you have to get too finicky about these settings. As you can see, my scaling is pretty sharp in X, but that really does help me see around the nose and over the side MUCH better than the stock setting. In the stock setting, when I would move sideways enough to look down over the side, I would run out of the sight of the monitor receptor and it wouldn't register my downward movement. This way, I only have to move a bit to the side to reach the terminus of that axis and then when I look down or up, it registers cleanly.

I've left the combat flight profile pretty much alone, as it works well for me (once I got used to TIR to start with), although I'm very interested to learn about Homeboy's mods. But the one thing I have done that I think helps immensely is change the profile on the x-y axis, the one that tracks side to side movement. I keep a good shallow spot in the middle so my normal movement side to side doesn't change things much, but when I start the curve, I make it basically a vector toward the top so that it scales very quickly once it starts. That allows me to move a little to the side and my view in the game to go pretty quickly to the edge of the range. This allows me to look around the nose and down over the side much more easily, but doesn't mess me up when I'm trying to aim. I'll send a pic of my profile settings on this axis when I get home.

Yes, Luiz, butt-handing-to is a regular occurrence in OFF. But what a treat to have AI like Cameljockey describes. Sometimes we fuss a little about the behavior of AI near the ground. I can tell you that sometimes I'm counting on that little AI glitch just to come out alive. Such a concern becomes niggling when stacked against the kind of battle Cameljockey just described where it is difficult to distinguish between AI and quite human. We've come a very long way!