Recent air combat sim recommendations?

What schurem said. Don’t use Steam for DCS, if you use the version direct from the developer you can try planes before buying, and various other advantages.

Hey bud, how’re you getting on with the game? You got it to load?

Let me dump a little random tidbits on ya.

In the main menu, click the cog wheel to go to the options. Here you can tune and tweak your graphics settings. It’s fairly well explained. There’s also a menu where you can set certain game options. Stay away from ‘easy avionics’ and ‘easy flight model’. They suck, don’t work, and don’t really improve the accessibility of the game at all. Do keep labels on, but perhaps not the full ones, as those easily become a mess. Try ‘dot’ or ‘short’ labels. Later you can hack into a file and tweak it to your hearts’ content. This is PC gaming after all.

Allright. Now. Don’t click Mission, Quick Mission Generator or Campaign just yet. Either Training or Instant Action. When running the training, for the love of all that’s unholy and metal, don’t force yourself to do them in numerical order. Brrt first, or at least second after ‘making turns and flying straight’. In the instant action menu there’s things like ‘Runway take off’. Use that to do your regular ‘I wanna go fly my hog’ thing where you just open up the throttle and fly the thing.

Now there’s going to be some terms. AoA is an important one, angle of attack. It’s the angle at which the air hits your wing. The slower you fly or the harder you yank on the stick, the higher that gets. It has an upper limit, above which, your plane will go ‘fuck it’ and become a brick. Or a leaf. Or some unholy abomination that combines the worst traits of both. So. Respect your plane when it starts beeping at you for pulling too hard and/or flying too slow. Take it easy. It’s a big truck you’re driving, almost as big as a boeing 737. Your hog will talk to you. It will go ‘beeeeeep’ in a highly annoying fashion to tell you you are pulling for maximum turn performance. The beeping will become a more annoying beep-beep-beep-beep if you are starting to pull too much AoA and you need to back the fuck off or Bad Shit™ is going to happen to you. There is probably a volume control on a panel down by your left leg somewhere where you can turn its volume down and just listen for the wind over your wing. When that starts to sound rough, you are in the ’ beep beep beep’ part of the flight.

Another acronym I want you to know is CCIP. Continuously Calculated Impact Point. It’s a very fancy bit of tech where the hog’s computer figures out from knowing where it is, where it is going and how fast, what the world is shaped like and what the ballistic properties are from whatever murderous bit of metal you’re hurling at the bad guys, where it will end up. And it indicates that point on your HUD (heads up display). It does it for guns, rockets and bombs. It can be freakishly accurate. Especially compared to the olden way of doing it (being all nerdy and precise about speed, dive angle, altitude and dropping a whole fucking carpet at once). Find out how to do this, as it’s fun and it’s useful. CCIP. FTW.

Now soon there’s going to come a point where you can take off, navigate, make something explode, navigate home and land. It will take patience and perseverance getting there, especially if all you know is War Thunder or some ancient sim you flew when you were a kid. When the basic stuff is starting to come easy, go look into more high tech ways of putting warheads on foreheads. Maverick missiles. Laser guided bombs. JDAM. Most of that is operating the target pod and this is wild mad fun, but also heavy on the switchology. You will need to learn a whole language of TMS and TGP and LGB and WHOT and whatnot. Worth it? Oh yeah. Nothing beats getting a pinpoint hit with an LGB.

Yep, got it to load. Followed the initial A-10C tutorial up to the point where I spun up one of the engines and then closed it down. The HOTAS arrives today, and I didn’t want to try flying with my mouse and keyboard (or fiddle around with trying to configure my 360 controller). Figured I’d wait to learn it proper the first time.

And I appreciate the advice! I’ll be returning to this post. I put in maybe 30 hours in the most recent Microsoft Flight Simulator, and entirely with small prop planes. As a kid, I played a ton of Aces of the Pacific and Secret Weapons of the Luftwaffe (and in both, ground attack was always my favorite activity, appropriately enough) but haven’t really touched a combat sim since.

While I do want to get into the combat, I also genuinely want to learn how to fly the plane, and so I’m looking forward to properly digging into the tutorials.

Well, beyond the tutorials, there’s a ton of DLC scripts that you can buy for like a tenner that will go into exhaustive detail on all of the switchology. Alternatively, time zones and schedule permitting I’d be more than happy to talk you through some basic hoggery.

There’s a lot of hog to eat for you!

CBU-97. Do not youtube or anything. Just drop one on some vehicles and press F-6 or keep watching as you circle. They do take some time.

For DCS, I tend to focus on a single plane at a time. IL-2 is much easier to switch between different aircraft, since they share a common user interface and simplified systems.

But I find DCS the much richer gaming experience. Started in 2016 with the P-51D Mustang, and I’ve been working my way forward through history, trying to master each plane in sequence. It’s been a fantastic journey, and I’ve learned a huge amount about aviation by experiencing each step forwards in technology. Spoiler alert: the leap from warbirds to the F-86 Sabre is something you’ll never forget.

Currently deep into the F-14A Tomcat, about to start the SP campaigns.

Panavia Tornado IDS announced. So many new toys coming.

Ohhhhhhhhh, love the Tornado.

There’s been a whole slew of announcements of 3rd party work for DCS lately. It’s been explained by ED as a way for 3rd parties to come out and claim a subject in order to keep from doubling effort (something like that happened with the Su-22/Su-17M)

So there’s going to be a Kola peninsula (northern scandinavia) map, A Sinai desert map and some strong hints about a jungle by the sea.
There’s been announcements about the A-1 Skyraider, C-130 Hercules, F-100 Super Sabre and the Tornado IDS. A little earlier in the year the F-4E and F-15E mudhen have been announced. Mudhen pics are being dispensed on an almost daily basis and bits of video showcasing progress on the strike eagles’ radar.

The Tornado is confirmed to be a 1989 German IDS variant. So no LGB’s or brimstone missiles. Dumb bombs, HARM missiles, the Kormorant anti ship missile and the MW-1 bomblet dispenser.

image

Work is also on-going on improving the AI. Next patch it’s BFM should improve a lot. A little further out is a rework of the AI’s flight modelling, which should enable a more unified AI code. And that should make work on the Dynamic Campaign go a little faster.
Yeah it’s been a long time. And it aint here yet. But it’s not quite vaporware yet.

Edit: I was just googling about looking for a certain DCS screenie and came across this wiki:

https://www.airgoons.com/w/Main_Page

They have some fairly useful shit there, such as the glossaries.

OH SHIT NO WAY.

Way!

AAHHGHGGHGHGH okay I’ll have to buy that. Even if I never use it.

Well if they’re going to release that, I’ll definitely need a set of rudder pedals.

It better have a toilet bomb.

Indeed to the both of you! XD

Laying waste to some motherfuckers:

(aftermath of the Nevada map CAS instant action flight, took me all of ten minutes to cause this)

And here’s some more light reading for those who are about to rock:

Chucks’ guides are good.

I decided to take the plunge and get back into DCS after all of the talk in the A-10 thread.

I had bought flaming cliffs on steam a while back and messed with it.

Protip:

Uninstall the game on steam, install from DCS’ website, and then run the game. You will get a 50% off coupon for any module.

I bought the F/A 18 hornet, on the recommendation of everyone saying basically it is probably one of the better first planes to learn, as it is an all-rounder, plus it can do carrier stuff. It also is apparently decently easy to learn to at least get airborne, and has a lot of depth to learn after that. 40 bucks with the coupon!

I then was able to import my FC3 purchase into the DCS launcher.

I believe that if I would have linked my steam first, I wouldn’t have gotten the 50% off coupon. So, make sure you use that wisely.

The uhh… F/A-18 is certainly a lot more complicated to start up than the FC3 F-15. I have basically only done cold start/take-offs to this point on the F/A -18 but it seems fun. I buzzed the tower at mach 1.1

Disappointed that the “Top Gun” pack wasn’t part of the first module 50% deal. As that is 120 for the F/A 18 hornet, F-14 and the supercarrier mod.

I was tempted to buy the F-14 for all of my top-gun childhood dreams, but I went with the F/A -18 hornet, because I think I probably should learn on one of the most played/solid planes first. Plus, the hornet is pretty effin rad.

I will have to pick up the A-10C during a future sale.

Oh really? Time to buy the Hind perhaps.

The hind is amazeballs. Just sitting in that pit in VR is a treat. So big, so Russian. It’s also hella fun to fly. I can blow shit up with it, do a takeoff and landing, but no navigation or cold starts. Only so much room in that tiny mind of mine :(

Protip for any of the machines in DCS: Just because you can put twelve tons of ordnance on the thing, doesn’t mean you should. A hog with just two mavericks, the gun and a couple of 500 pounders is far more agile and fun to fly than one loaded with 6 mavericks, nine cluster bombs and six 500 pounders. This goes for hornets and hinds as well. A flanker at 100% fuel is a pig, but at 60% or less, it’s a butterfly.

Nah, load up that baby. You can always dump if you need.

War crimes ftw!