Hasse Wind

Ah, another convert to the Kaiser's side of the front. Willkommen! I've shot down so many Eindeckers so easily in so many Nupe careers that I don't have much respect for that monoplane, but in the right hands the Einie seems to be quite the killer. Let's hope we'll get some early crates for the Einies to shoot down in the add-ons so that we can have a real Fokker Scourge some day. Oh, and you'd better start learning to like turnips, because they are going to be a major part in your menu if you survive long enough in His Imperial Majesty's service.

Oh, I've had many careers with the D.III and like it a lot - in fact I still have one active D.III pilot in Jasta 36 during the Bloody April, I just haven't used him for a while now but plan to do so after I've flown the D.VII enough. The Dr.1 I tried in one campaign and found her quite challenging to fly well, or rather to shoot well; she's unbalanced, but because of that turns like a devil. But the D.VII is something completely different - easy to fly, fast, very nimble for a late war fighter and quite tough. Unfortunately I have serious doubts about surviving long in those late 1918 careers, there's just so much action everywhere that it's hard not to become entangled in disadvantageous combat situations. I've been wary of updating my TrackIR to the latest version, because it's probably optimized for the new TrackIR 5 which I have no intention of getting as long as my TrackIR 4 works well.

I've only tested the new XIII in QC, but I could instantly feel it was much improved over the old one. The lowered stall speed really makes a difference - now I can actually do some proper yo-yos without stalling all the time.

Nice skin Olham, and keep up the good work of shooting the backstabbers down! I'm now flying my first D.VII career ever, and just like Duce Lewis mentioned in some thread, it may be I never want to fly anything else anymore! That Fokker is brilliant in every way. But it's ugly compared to the beautiful Albs... ugly - but deadly.

You don't have to mention which squadron you were facing in battle when writing the claims. Flying as the Germans, its practically impossible to distinguish the British squadrons from each other in combat without labels, but that hasn't prevented me from getting very high approval ratings in my reports, so the squadron name is not absolutely necessary to be there.

It's Jasta 6. Jasta 2 had also black and white tails, but no stripes.

Ditto!

They were British, I had time to see the blue roundels before I crashed. Most likely some criminal RNAS gang sneaking cowardly behind our brave Heldenflieger, as is typical of the British.

Fortunately the Quirks are still safe and easy opponents for the Luftstreitkräfte - no amount of improvements can make them dangerous for even the worst German pilot.

You could join my old marine Jasta in April 1917 - they'll get the D.III then and the worst weather is gone already. I was really looking forward to it, but that's history now (I've started a D.VII career in July 1918 with Jasta 5 - what a plane!). And do shoot some crumpet Nupes down to avenge my pilot, bitte. Especially those bastards with the green and brown paints.

Good post, Olham! For all those who are trying to make their pilots live over 17 hours with the hardcore settings, I can offer this advice: be very careful and approach every combat situation like your life is really on the line. Avoid all unnecessary risks. Don't go after every opponent. It's a long war - there will always be another day to fight - if you live, that is!

A very interesting article. The writer does have some problems with the spelling of some of those words, though I can't really blame him - German is not the easiest of languages, especially compared to English. :yes:

Thanks for the Photoshop offer Olham. Yes, I was very careful with this pilot, but I guess was finally outwitted by the AI. It doesn't always help to stay high - sometimes they'll stab you into back from below! I'm really impressed by the AI's tactics in this battle, it was such a quick and fierce attack that I was completely surprised. Oh well. Time to create a new pilot. At least Oberleutnant Faber will live through the war in captivity - but with my luck he'll probably die of the Spanish influenza the day after the Armistice!

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:

I just lost another pilot (flak ripped off two wings) and it seems this option is not working correctly in my OFF either - the screen went black a few seconds after I lost control of my wrecked plane. Oh, and I do have the option turned on in the workshop and am using the latest minipatch. Not a major problem in any sense of the word, but maybe you could take a look at the code and see if something's wrong there. :yes:

Yeah, I also hate that reality game! When not flying in OFF, I mostly play Civilization 4 and its excellent Fall From Heaven II mod, which is like a completely new game (and free!). I've also bought a couple of other games this year , but thanks to OFF and busy work days, I haven't really played them yet. I don't play shooters much, but I liked the Brothers in Arms series a lot.

Hah! We have such creative people here! (I'd sure like to have a couple of photon torpedoes to replace the Le Prieur rockets...)

Criticism should always be tolerated in a free society, but the people who criticize should always remember to be as constructive and polite as possible - there's no need to insult anybody, but apparently that's exactly what happened here with some people. In my opinion, this forum has been the model of good Internet behaviour for the most part, so I'm of course disappointed to see that we aren't immune to the usual BS that's so common in the web. I hope the developers aren't too dismayed by the few rude comments and realize that the overwhelming majority of people are very satisfied with OFF and appreciate the patching policy, and that most of the criticism we have heard hasn't been rude or uncivilized but mostly constructive. I was actually surprised they gave all those improvements in the superpatch for free - I know I would have been willing to pay some money for some of the stuff we got as a generous present. I really appreciate this kind of customer support - maybe people don't realize just how rare it is. I've had the experience (misfortune) of once being in contact with the support of a certain major game corporation (which I shall not name here) and I can tell you it was nothing like the service we have here. In my opinion, OFF is quite simply the best WW1 simulation currently available on the market. The competition does have their strengths, but none of the other simulations come even close to the great features OFF has, particularly in the campaign mode. So keep up the good work and finish the first add-on so you can have more of my money. My Visa is ready and waiting.

Yep, the Fee sure has a nice cockpit! I guess I'll have to take the plunge some day and see what those crates are made of. About two-seater careers in general - maybe they could be improved in the future (P4)? Bullethead's suggestion for dedicated bomber and recon squadrons sounds good to me. And maybe there could be some kind of a camera with the recon plane for taking those all-important pics the generals in their chateaus are so interested in? That would be cool! As far as I know, the awards system currently heavily favours fighter pilots, because you can only get medals for shooting down enemy aircraft, which is quite difficult to do with certain two-seaters. So maybe there should be a compeletely different system for giving awards to successful bomber/recon pilots? I think it's great OFF has all those two-seaters, but there's always room for improvements. :yes:

I haven't flown the Quirk in campaign mode, but I tried it once in QC. I liked its great stability, but also noticed how terrible its speed and especially climbing speed were. I always feel a bit sorry for the BE2c guys I shoot down in the campaign - it doesn't feel much of a victory to kill them.

Thanks for the tip, Bullethead, I'll give that setting a try! (I've been secretly thinking about starting an RE.8 bomber career for the Brits as a way of teaching myself some humility after shooting down so many two-seaters. Maybe I'll do that with the less accurate gun settings. I already have a pilot created for this purpose in RFC 10, summer 1917.) :yes:

Hey, maybe we could make a deal - you come flying our way, we shoot you down, rinse and repeat every couple of days. We'll send you the finest Imperial German turnips for your trouble. Sound fair?

This is one of the things that I really like about OFF - you are not forced to connect to some server every time you start the game and accept every file the developers decide to install to your game. If you think everything was perfect in version 1.28 or 1.30c or whatever, nothing forces you to update to a later version. Of course it may be the add-ons require the superpatch to be installed, but nobody forces you to get those addons.

I'd rather see you devote your energy and resources to P4 and of course the add-ons before that.

So you want to die more? Ah, that can be arranged - come to meet me and my boys of MFJ I around Mariakerke close to the Belgian North Sea coast and we'll see what we can do to your N.17 and your little "problem". Seriously speaking, I guess you've just been extremely lucky - sometimes you can survive those dangerous situations, but often you don't. But if you constantly run into situations that most likely would be fatal and always survive them, I guess that's odd.