Recent air combat sim recommendations?

The third-party Pat Wilson Campaign Generator will probably get you closer to WOFF. The built-in campaign is a little sterile sometimes.

Iā€™m in the middle of Clashes, a history of air combat over North Vietnam, and man, this would make for an epic flight sim.

Picture it: soaring over Hanoi amidst the SAMs and MiGs, launching your half-useless American missiles to little effect as you try to keep the strikers safe.

Something medium fidelity, to allow for the whole roster of fighters, your Thuds, Crusaders, and Skyhawks along with your Phantoms. A dynamic campaign, with all the politically-motivated target selection, home front morale, and pilot exhaustion concerns to consider. Those pesky Chinese bases, where the MiGs can retreat and regroup beyond your range.

Maybe carrier ops in the Gulf of Tonkin, roaring off the catapults in your Crusader, the last gunfighter, and mixing it up down on the deck over Haiphong, or even climbing into the cockpit of the alert MiG at Phuc Yen, following your GCI controllerā€™s directions to get in position behind an American attack, and making a supersonic dive on the back of the formation, launching your missiles even as you blow past the escorts, escaping before the Americans can react.

Sounds like a good time. Wish someone was making it.

You are describing Strike Fighters; Vietnam. A little dated, but serviceable.

Yup. The dinamic campaign engine is a bit limited, but itā€™s mostly enjoyable if you are aware of its limitations.

The Strike Fighters series is pretty good, actually. If you have all the games in the series, itā€™s pretty fun to have a ā€œfirst-handā€ experience on how technological advancement changed the air war.

I wish the guy who made em would take his head out of his mobile ass and make a strike fighters 3 with modern dx12 gfx and VR. oh yeah.

Yeah. Yes, please. Though not going to happen.

And it was really the only survey sim in town for jet-age stuff, right? I canā€™t think of another, though maybe Iā€™m being addlebrained.

I had quite a bit of fun with Strike Fighters 2, but itā€™s hard to look at anymore.

Wait, the Strike Fighters 2 games have dynamic campaigns?!

Sort of. Itā€™s basically a mission generator that keeps track of changes in the OoB (though not very accurately). Itā€™s a bit like the dynamic campaign generators for IL-2 1946 back in the day, perhaps a bit more primitive than the best of those.

Itā€™s adequate at best, and it doesnā€™t come nowhere close to the fantastic dynamic campaign engines of Falcon 4 or Mig Alley or Battle of Britain 2, but itā€™s still better than nothing (or just the same old static missions).

Sigh, not sure thatā€™s enough to get me to fork over $30 for just one of their games. I paid $20 for Battle of Britain 2 and, as you said, that dynamic campaign is amaaaaazing.

Iā€™ve had BOB 2 paid for and downloaded forever. I really should actually play it.

You may experience problems on Win10. I donā€™t know if theyā€™ve done a release recently to fix it.

I actually have a copy of the source code on my HDD, and was working on the problem earlier this year. No joy from me yet, though.

Hmmm. Thatā€™s a bummer. Well, one less in the backlog I guess.

If you have it paid and downloaded, itā€™s worth a try. I donā€™t think it affects everyone, and there might be a dll fix in the works, looking at the beta forums. Itā€™s one of my favorite flight sims, even if my early experience was haunted by another bug, and itā€™s nearly worth playing as a pure Battle of Britain strategy game from the German side.

One thing Iā€™ve struggled with with BoB2 is spotting and identifying enemy fighters. Is there a method for making a dot appear over a distant aircraft? In RoF I can have a dark dot appear over any airplane in visible range, which then resolves to a colour once I can IFF.

Fascinating you should say thatā€”BoB2 is one of a very small number of games in which I donā€™t have trouble with spotting. I think thereā€™s an icon system with fading in and fading out which you can control by editing config files, but I may be confusing that with DCS.

With all this talk about flight sims, I decided to get back into the cockpit. Rise of Flight is my usual choice for such things, since it doesnā€™t take a ton of effort to remember how to fly a WWI crate (unlike, say, the F-16 in Falcon 4). I am Jarvis Cole, Sergeant in the Royal Flying Corps, currently based at Sombrin, halfway between Amiens and Arras. We fly the Bristol Fighter, a superb two-seater which is more than capable of mixing it up with single-seat fighters. Which is good, because across the lines is Pronville, currently home to Jasta Boelcke, Germanyā€™s squadron of aces.

On the 16th of July, my first day with the new squadron, I was slated for no flights in the morning, but we got the scramble call at five in the evening, and went up to fly a patrol over the front. Our five Brisfits came across four Albatroses from Jasta Boelcke, and we dove in to mix it up. As we circled toward the deck on our side of no manā€™s land, I latched onto the tail of one of the German kites as he leveled out a hundred feet above the trenches, and finished him with a long burst to the wing root. His lower left wing folded up, and he nosed over into the dirt. At some point in the fight, or maybe on takeoff when the wind rocked me hard to the right, I lost my lower right aileron and a good chunk of my wing, so I headed home while the rest of the flight continued the patrol.

Rain on the 17th and 18th saw No. 48 Squadron grounded, but on the 19th, we had a full slate of missions: two reconnaissance flights in the morning, and two patrols over the Boschā€™s side of the line in the afternoon. I ended up flying in the first offensive patrol, which would circle squarely over Jasta Boelckeā€™s airfield. Sure enough, they came up to fight. Our flight chased a trio of German two-seaters for a few minutes before turning back to face the Albatrosses: three Brisfits against three Albatros D.IIIs. We had the height edge going into the fight, and managed to keep it through the first few minutes. After some ineffectual diving passes, I found myself locked in combat with a single German plane, separated from our respective flights. Iā€™m afraid to say he got the better end of it, even fighting from an altitude disadvantage. We ended up in a near-vertical climb, the Albatros a hundred yards behind me blasting away, as my observer returned fire with his twin guns. Bullets thudded into the spars and bracing all around us, a solid two-second burst, but by some miracle, the Bosch didnā€™t hit anything vital.

Iā€™d had about enough of that, so I put my nose a little beneath the horizon and pushed the throttle as far open as it would go. The Brisfit is faster in level flight than the Albatros, steadier in a dive, and less prone to lose its wings at high speed, so I was confident I could end the engagement. The Albatros fell back, and eventually gave up.

I took stock of the damage. ā€˜Severeā€™ covers it well enough. The summer sun was still high in the sky, and I could see it on the lower wing through the gaping tears in the upper wing. Of the eight wooden braces between the wings, three were intact. Unsurprisingly, the old bird was a bit squirrelly at speed, but I didnā€™t dare slow down with the Hun no doubt waiting to pounce. I started a climb back toward the front: if German plane found me, I wanted room to dive away.

As I crossed the lines, a German balloon crew saw me and frantically started winching down to the ground. To ensure that they kept at it, I made a halfhearted firing pass, skimmed the bottom of a cloud, lost sight of the balloon, and nearly hit it. Aware of the potential ignominy of tangling with Germanyā€™s best and escaping, only to crash into a fixed object in the sky, I left the balloon alone and limped back to the airfield. I circled once to get a good look at the windsockā€”no reason to make the landing harder than I had toā€”and floated the Brisfit down.

I discovered during the debriefing that I was credited with a kill: either my observer had scored on the Albatros that nearly downed me, or I had fatally damaged another German earlier in the fight. Surprising, perhaps, but a victory nevertheless, and weā€™re off to (if youā€™ll forgive the choice of words) a flying start.

Good start - keep it going. I loved flying the Bristol - really pretty plane.

I managed to land this one onceā€¦

I should actually play Rise of Flight. I bought it a long time ago as part of some bundle or sale but never gave it a fair chance. It didnā€™t run all that way on my PC at the time, which might have something to do with that, but I never tried it on this one.

21 June, 1917
No. 48 RFC flew protection patrol over a pair of Harry Tates today. Glad to be out of those.

If the Bosch was in the air, we didnā€™t see him: a pleasant flight over France.

I hit the hangar on landing, and was in hospital for a week.

27 June, 1917
No. 48ā€™s flying an airfield raid today, targeting the field at Havrincourt, south-southeast of Jasta Boelcke at Pronville. We took off a little past sunrise, at 5:30 in the morning, hoping to catch the Hun unaware.

A little light archie did little to dampen our enthusiasm to get at the Bosch as we closed in on their field. We came in at about a thousand feet and full throttle, but as we got closer, we could see German planes rolling across the field.

Major Davis, the flight lead, rolled in, then broke off. I pressed my attack instead, diving on one of the hangars.

I discovered why Davis turned away. Suddenly I found myself mixing it up with three Albatrosses, a terrible place to be, even if the Brisfitā€™s a better kite.

Fortunately, I had the speed to get away, and made it home safe and sound. Until I flipped the old Brisfit over on landing. Oops.

I was digging through my screenshot directory and found this, which is probably the best screenshot Iā€™ve ever taken. Completely unrelated (thatā€™s me in the Gotha), but cool nevertheless.

All quiet on the Western Frā€“nope, wait. Sergeant Cole of the No. 48 clipped the hangar again.

Great screenshot! Maybe theyā€™ll do another competition.