Tides of War

For those of you who missed yesterdays practice, you missed a good one. Attending practice for the BSS were Coldfire, Deadlock, Eagle, BryZ, Sheep and CoreyT and Myself. ( By the way Coldfire made the toughest sacrifice to be there last night, because it was 1:00 AM in the morning there in Egypt and he stayed up and attended this practice. Thanks Coldfire!! I appreciate your effort.) The BBC had Popgun and Goofy.

Although the practice didn't quite go the way we hoped it would due the the lack of pilots on the BBC side, It was still a lot of fun. We played an LTS format, and went round after round. The SU side started out ok, but after second round we started getting pound on.

The Teams Started out with Coldfire, Bryz, CoreyT and Myself Against Popgun, Goofy, Eagle and Dealock. (Sheep joined us later in the game and this may not the the exact lineup, just the way my memory serves me at the moment.) Popgun had Deadlock and Eagle call the game on there side of things, and I did the game calling for most of the first 1/2. Some of the guys on SU where getting a little perturbed with the way I called the game, but having not played in LTS before it was a little new and took a while to get accustomed to. As they did most of the time the GE team came straight at us from the start. My game plane was to go for Alt and turn to at the last minute. It was effective for the first 2 rounds until the GE team started climbing hard as the came towards us. Some of them were able to get above us and I was getting targeted by Goofy and Popgun from the start.

All of the BSS pilots whether they flew for GE or SU did a superb job of flying. And if I remember correctly it was always a BSS pilot that was standing at the end of the rounds.

I truly wish that there would of been more participation by the BBC and hopefully we can get it together and do it again.

JoKeR

Thanks Joker for the report,

and no need to thank me that much for showing up at the practice, i'm used to stay up late at night sometimes, plus i wasn't really that tired. so it's ok

It would be nice if we did this practice session with BBC or any other squad again, Specially i love the LTS format, it have many benefits over normal match format,

1. Much more Suspense! = more fun and excitement.

2. Less interruption rate: 70% of the combat time u won't get interrupted speically if 2 opposing squad pilots left engaging at the end, unlike the normal match format, you struggle to finish a kill without getting shooted from behind all of a sudden. so it's like the whole flying arena is yours for a good while.

3. More Concentration and Focus: if organized well among the same squad pilots. for example..BSS Pilot A will engage pilot B from the opposite squad, BSS pilot C will engage pilot D from opposite squad..etc, so each of the opposite pilots will get distracted away from you with your own squad pilots until you finish ur mission with ur assigned pilot and make a kill. the move on for another (provide cover to your own squad pilots..etc).

those are the benefits of LTS format that comes to mind right now, maybe there is more i'm not yet aware of.

One more thing, I would love if we do a periodic practice sessions between our own pilots to focus on one well known important factor "Situation Awarness", i suggest that we make it 2v1 format at first and score points for that pilot engaging 2 same time. then we do it more difficult later 3v1 and 4v1 max (because that pilot will be a real hero lol if he manage to engage 4 pilots same time without getting killed and stayed alive to the end specially if the enemy pilots have no previous or 0% damage at all before).

the focus will be training this one pilot engaging 2 or 3 at the same time, it will teach him how to switch quicker between Locks : nearest Enemy "E"/", and "."/"F4" and so on. like Tbar mentioned in a different post as i remember about switching those keys real quick.

Also another factor we need to focus training is "Zoom and Boom" with 109K even with Spitfire and La-7, we can just change the name to "Zoom and Kill".

cuz i'm still not very good at this one honestly.

those 'factor focused" practice sessions will serve very well specially the first one to help the pilot to set priorities of engaging with which pilot of the opposite squad if more than 1, 2 or 3 pilots are close to him all at the same time. on which should he focus and engage and when to re-assign new priority for another. ofcourse many sub-factors will involve making those very quick decisions. like the direction of the enemy plane for instance.

It just so sad that this game won't be developed any longer, there is ALOT of little but neat improvements that could be added to this game i have in my mind a while ago to make it way better and fun, and even more serious. for example showing the pilot tags on map next to their actual location plus their speed, altitude and heading direction. also on nearest enemy lock it would be nice to show the pilot tag being locked on, on the pilot main screen, showing which parts of the plane being damaged exactly on the screen not just percent damage %D, among other ideas.

i know back then at the time of WWII real pilots and planes didn't have those much options available not even all the ones we are using now already on the game. for example they didn't have an upto date map showing planes positions, it wasn't more than just a plain paper map or something. but since this is a simulation game why not take advantage of any more ideas we can use to make it a much better experience.

i wish this game is open source, so the full code is available to be edited and debugged.

i was also thinking few days ago about another mini-version of the game just focused for practice, something like a practice simulator that will help pilots aim better, turn-fight and so on with an opposite pilot which will be the computer itself engaging against myself, much better and focused than the training version available on the game menu already.

just my 2 cents

have a wonderful day,

BSS_c0ldfire

Hi Coldfire,

Very good observations. 1 vs 2, 1 vs 3, 1 vs 4, wow that can be tough but it would make a fun practice. I had a 1 vs 2 situation with two very good pilots last week and I was lucky to come out on top. At the other end of the spectrum our very own Air Boss ended up victorious in a 1 vs 4 in one of our league competitions. That would make for a very fun practice. I'll put some thought into putting something like this together.

Now as far as game improvements, I doubt that it will ever come to pass. There is a 1.5 version which I hear is floating around somewhere, but since Air Attack is free there is no reason to release it to the public. Its a shame that its a money driven world, but companies are in business to make money. As far as it becoming "Open Source", That would probably become to much to handle. We'd be seeing Hawker Hurricanes zooming around at Mach 5 speeds and Yaks having 50 cannons shooting at you. People wouldn't know where to stop.

I would like to see them make the plane fly at more realistic pace. We all know that the P-51 along with the was one of the top planes during the war, yet they have it so retarded that it makes it un-realistic to fly in the game, but I still like it and fly it on a regular basis.

So I guess we are stuck with what we have even do I don't agree.

JoKeR