Recent air combat sim recommendations?

Oh shit I don’t have that, I only ever bought Gold, which did NOT have that manual. Gotta track that down. Is it called Practical Flying?

Why indeed, good sir, that it is!

Thanks, I’ll keep an eye out for a copy!

and/or

Practical Flying

Oh wow thank you!

I looked at the pdf of that and it was a bit challenging. If you’re willing to pay $3 a good Kindle version:

Perfect, thank you!

Have had it in my sim reading folder for ages, got it off some forum or other. Was happy to see its still available online. Nice that there is a Kindle version too.

I feel remiss for not pointing this one out:

SF2 has like a player base of maybe 20 people these days, but it appears every single one of them is a 5-star modder

Man that looks lovely. I need to play SF2 more.

Hey have you played Strike Fighters Modern Combat at all? It also looks like a good time.

Not in a while… but the various iterations of TK’s sim-lites have never left my phones and tablets.

I won’t play those (or their derivates) on the PC.

Fair enough.

So there’s a nifty little toy called Total Tank Simulator on sale at Steam today. It really, really reminds me of a couple of “ahead of their time” games named Campaign, from waaaaay back in the Amiga days.

Playing around with it a little, and I think it might provide some amusement/diversion for our sim-heads here.

Has anyone been playing Warplanes: WW1 Fighters in VR? I’m finding it a great experience and very pleasurable to fly around in, and multiplayer is nice, but the meat of the game for me is the campaign, but unless I’m playing it all wrong, I’m finding the missions very broken.

I have now two planes, the original Airco DH2 and a Camel. I’ve upgraded pretty much everything on each plane.

My main beef is that every mission is essentially 10-20 fighter opposition, no matter what kind of mission it is, in unrelenting waves that find you no matter what. The bombing and zeppelin killing missions are unlikely enough to beat without needing to remove all fighters first, with a useless wingman. Taking them down with forward guns is way too time consuming and difficult, I’m finding only by free aiming the Airco front machine gun can I do that. And once I’ve cleared the fighters, more often than not I run out of bombs or get shot down by AA from my bomber targets.

The game reminds me of that old game Birds of Prey for Xbox360 where the missions were made for arcade mode, hordes of planes that died just by passing your reticle over them, but that were not adjusted for higher realism settings. Except in this case, arcade mode doesn’t allow any complex flying maneuvers, and planes don’t die any easier, really, although perhaps have less of a deadeye. (I’d like to play on simulation or full real).

In my mind they need to reduce enemy planes for non-dogfight misssions to only a 2-4 planes, and even then, sometimes it’d be nice to just concentrate on ground targets, there wasn’t always air cover IRL. It’s not like there is a finite amount of levels, if the missions were shorter or buying planes happens faster because missions are easier, so what, or reduce the rewards. I’m baffled by the mission design and the reviews that don’t really mention the balance much.

Sounds like a missed opportunity by the dev. Arcade style VR ww1 pewpew would make a fun game indeed.

Have you tried Flying Circus and its SP content? I found the allied scripted campaign doable and fun. Beyond that, the mission generator is sheer endless.

My gaming machine died about 4 years back , so the last I had played was Wings of War, which I loved dearly. This is my first foray back into plane flying, along with Ultrawings in VR. If I can somehow justify a couple grand on a new VR PC to tether to, I’ll be picking up all the flight sims that are VR compatible… it’s pretty clear I can’t ever go back to pancake.

But yeah, I feel like this game can’t decide if it’s an arcade game (it’s not, it really feels quite nice to fly, just forgiving in landings and stalls etc) or simulation (it’s not, the mission odds are stupidly weighted against the player , as above). But to be clear, I really don’t want this to be an arcade game, their base gameplay is almost there, it’s just the sheer quantity of baddies, or sparcity of allied planes in a mission, that are killing it for me.

I’ve played both the VR and Switch versions…and I think it’s more fun on the Switch.

I dunno what game this is, but what I meant to write was RoF, Rise of Flight. Yeesh.

Played a bit more of WW1 Fighters VR, and it got a bit better: The mission I was stuck on required me to kill all the fighters, but most missions don’t, meaning you can finish them by taking out your primary targets only, like boats or bombers. Also, your number of wingmen decide the opposition (typically 6/12/24 fighters against, something like that), but because your wingmen suck it just means way more waves than you care for… not sure when your squaddie number no longer is a mulitplier, since with 5 planes it’ll take you forever to clear a mission at that rate. If you want to play sim physics, but actually survive, removing damage effect on your plane is pretty much a necessity, so your turning etc won’t degrade against that fresh wave of fighters, and then turning off enemy aggesivity will again make it be possible to last 20 enemies long… but make it a turkey shoot. So there are lots of silly things going on here to complicate the enjoyment of this game… but being in a prop plane in VR shooting things so far for me is worth it, for a time.

Flying Circus is a direct descendant of Rise of Flight. Start saving for that gaming PC bro. You know you want to ;-)