Hasse Wind

I was about to start complaining about the new look of my favourite forum, but it seems there's no need for it. Thanks for all the hard work, you owners of this site.

And if you follow those orders and accomplish your missions, you will get promoted and fast. Too fast in fact, in my opinion. At least that's how it is in my OFF...

I like crumpets very much, especially those who fly in helpless two-seaters! In my opinion, crumpet (or krumpet) is a much nicer word than, for example, englische Schweinehunde.

I recently lost my best pilot (almost 50 hours) to a sneaky AI N.17 that struck my Albatros from behind. The AI in this sim will fight back - with the highest realism settings, you won't be shooting down hundreds of helpless AI planes like in so many other flight sims.

The crumpets must be really angry when they lose their brand new scouts as soon as they deploy them! In good hands, the Alb is a match for anything.

Oberleutnant zur See Faber is still in captivity. I'm currently flying in Jasta 5 in summer 1918, my first D.VII career. The action is really intense and its a miracle the guy's not dead yet. Very different from 1916 and early 1917... challenging but also great fun. I hope your Marineflieger has shot down many Nupes and so avenged my POW Oberleutnant.

I can confirm what the other guys have posted here about feeling paranoid and haunted when flying with the most hardcore settings - no other sim has ever given me such feelings, or at least not as strongly as OFF does. I've lost a couple of pilots because the AI managed to surprise my flight and hit my plane badly before I had time to react properly, and I can tell you the feeling is pure panic when your best pilot is on the line of fire like that and you know that if you lose control of your plane, you're most likely going to die - no parachutes... But the rewards are also great when you succeed in your missions and live through the hard situations - then it feels really great afterwards. :yes:

Wow, bombers that actually hit something! In all the three or four bomber careers I've tried in OFF, not once have I hit the assigned targets with my devastating weapons of mass destruction (ie. bombs weighing a few kilos). That's one of the reasons why I prefer flying the scouts - I'm a lousy bomber. :yes: Olham, I really like the colours of that skin. Too bad we can't (yet) have only personal skins in OFF...

When the devs have become unbelievably rich after selling millions of copies of OFF with the add-ons, I hope they can purchase a whole new and modern engine for Phase 4. That's probably the only way to get rid of many of the current limitations we have in OFF. :yes: But if we talk about more realistic goals, I'd always want to see more aircraft, more different models of the same aircraft, and of course more squadrons. Hopefully these goals can be at least partially achieved already with expansion packs to P3. I'd also like my rank to have more meaning in career mode, ie. when I'm the highest ranking guy in the pack, I'd like to use my power somehow. Squadron management, you know. And it would be great if the squadron casualties wouldn't be so random as they now are. OFF is already quite difficult, but I think it would be great if P4 had malfunctioning engines and everything to simulate the often serious technological problems the early aircraft had (remember that a huge number of pilots were lost in accidents). More realistic mission types would also be appreciated. It would be nice if I didn't have to skip all those ground attack missions and deep patrols behind enemy lines when flying as the Germans, but wouldn't get them in the first place when flying in a Jasta. *** P3 is superb, but with such improvements P4 would be even better! Edit: I forgot to mention the option of having my own aircraft individually painted without giving those skins to all the other crates in the flight.

I think Germany has indeed learnt the lesson - no other country in Europe has had to so thoroughly examine their past and try to understand what went wrong so horribly in one of the oldest centres of civilization. Every nation should deal with the hard and difficult things of their history and try to gain a better understanding of their culture. Too often nations just deny they did anything wrong or could have done something differently.

I guess I love the spirit of aviation pioneering about those early 20th century airplanes - everything was so new back then, new ideas came and went constantly with many unsuccessful designs but also some real gems among them. I admire the guts of those men who were willing not only to fly in those primitive planes, but to fight in them. The whole business back then was much more personal than with modern supersonic fighters with their fancy radars, computers, missiles and all the other Star Wars stuff. Primitive but often so beautiful and elegant aircraft, a pilot, and a machine gun or two - that's all it takes to take off and go looking for trouble above the Western Front. WW1 also interests me more as a conflict than any later wars. It was the war that basically shaped the world we now live in - WW2 was in so many ways nothing but a continuation of the Great War in even larger scale.

I got my copy in 7 days, which is fast.

I may be wrong, but wasn't practice of removing personal sidearms when approaching Hitler started only after the Stauffenberg's bomb attack? Before that it wasn't so strict. I think the reason why 99.99% of German general officers were not willing to act directly against the Nazis was that they were brought up in a culture that emphasized obedience to the authorities above all else, no matter what kind of dictators the authorities were. Field Marshal von Manstein was asked to participate in the plot against Hitler, but he refused and replied that "Prussian field marshals don't do things like that!", or something like that, I can't remember the exact words. But the majority of the Wehrmacht generals were no fanatics, they just considered the Nazis as a much better option than the Communists. Wehrmacht's reputation is far from pure, however, as they quite willingly participated in the SS atrocities on the Eastern front. When you rose to a high position in the Nazi system, it was impossible to stay completely out of the crimes, even if you weren't a fanatical Nazi. I think that's what happened to many otherwise decent German officers and men.

Unfortunately most of those generals and admirals who accepted the Devil's Offer didn't see anything terribly wrong with the Nazis until they started to lose the war. There were some notable exceptions of course, people who were willing to risk their lives by scheming against the regime already when everything seemed to going according to Adolf's plans, but there weren't many of them in high-ranking positions. I'm no expert on Udet's Third Reich career, but it seems he was part of the silent majority, though not nearly among the worst ones, and not a fanatic.

I guess I should someday give the TW games another chance. I liked Shogun and Medieval 1 a lot, but after them I've felt the series has been going downhill, or not offering enough new things in addition to more 'eye candy'. I didn't even bother to get the latest. But it seems MTW2 and especially Rome can be tremendously improved with mods. Now if OFF allowed me have some more free time, I'd probably be able to try them.

As far as I know, more like anti-Göring.

I haven't tried MP (yet), but the single player campaign system in OFF is the best I've ever seen in any WW1 sim. The historical accuracy is just breathtaking - there are so many different planes and squadrons available that you can spend endless hours getting yourself immersed in the Great War. I've been playing OFF for months now, and I feel like I've only scratched the surface. You'll have to see it for yourself, I can't describe it adequately. :yes:

I remember shooting down the future Herr Reichsmarschall a couple of times in RB, but I've never even seen him in OFF. Nicely done, Olham. Though I'm not so sure about the Brits being grateful for that in the future. Göring was a pretty bad Luftwaffe commander-in-chief (which helped the British), so now they're probably going to get someone better for that position. Maybe Udet, or Kesselring... :yes:

The Pup's a great plane, one of my favourites. So easy to fly and be successful in. Edit: If it only had two MGs and it still retained its awesome manoeuverability...

There's no need to remove them from P3, but I could live without such numbers in P4. They just aren't necessary in my opinion - I can see without any percentages when my setting are on hardcore realism or arcade mode, and the numbers seem to cause some headache for some people.

I completely agree with getting rid of the realism percentage for example in P4 - it really isn't necessary.

That is so true! I've tried strafing the trees, but they won't go away.

The hardest thing to do as a SPAD pilot (at least for me) is to not get fixated on a single target but to fire at opponents that are closest to your diving plane - it's easy to go chasing after one opponent, expend all your energy in the turn, and then realize you just lost the best advantage the SPAD has - speed. Probably the next thing that happens is somebody getting behind your clumsy brick of a plane and shooting you down in flames. And voila, end of a promising SPAD career. You have to be even more patient with the SPAD VII, because there's only one MG and it takes longer to shoot anybody down - I really miss a couple of 20mm or 30mm guns then... Once I had a funny encounter with some Halberstadt D.II's in late 1916 (some poor Jasta was still flying them!) with my brand new SPAD VII: they were much more agile than my crate and were very successful at evading my attacks, but I completely dominated the situation, as the SPAD was so much faster than them. The temptation to turn after one of them to finish the job was great, but I knew they'd surely get me if I did that, so in the end I ran out of ammo and didn't manage to shoot down any Halbs, though I damaged a few of them. With the SPAD's great speed it was easy to disengage and fly back home - I must have been at least 50km/h faster than the Halbs!

This has been a really lousy OFF day for me! First I lost a brand new British SE5a pilot on his second flight when the bloody Huns decided to clip his wings off with an AA shell. I then decided to continue my longest-lasting campaign career ever as Oberleutnant zur See Joachim Faber of Marinefeldjagdstaffel I in early 1917, hoping to finally reach the magical 50 flight hours I've been trying to achieve ever since I got OFF. It all started as a routine escort mission with 3 Roland C.II's from SS-6, their orders to bomb something near Ypres. My flight of 4 Alb D.IIs was to fly close escort for them. It was a sunny day for a change with excellent visibility to all directions, no clouds except some cirrus here and there. Shortly after we crossed the front we were surprised by a flight of some RNAS Nupe 17s - they were painted with green and brown instead of the usual white. I never saw them coming from behind and below us, so I must have been too lax and overconfident, just scanning to sky above and left and right to my Alb, but not down and behind. I broke left to meet them and quickly ordered my wingmen to attack, and then it was all over - my Alb was riddled with bullets, the engine was hit, I almost completely lost the ability to use the right aileron and then I went down out of control. I fully expected my pilot to die, but he survived only to become a POW for the rest of the war. So close to 50 hours... ****! :angry2:

Beginners shouldn't lose their hope, because it takes some time to learn to survive long in this sim, and even experienced players lose a lot of pilots. That's just the way things are in this war. Bad luck can end the longest of careers without any mistakes being done by the simmer - you can't always dodge the flak successfully, for example, no matter how skilled you are. Alsace is probably the most peaceful region in the sim for the whole war. I'd recommend flying there for some easier campaigns to become familiar with the planes and get some extra flight hours. The Germans have some decent Albatros Jastas there, and the French their Nupes and Spads.