I think i'll set realism options to maximum (except the externals, i'll keep those to snap pictures and show to my friends so that they get jealous and buy a copy as well
) and just fire up QMB missions in succession for the first few hours, with a different aircraft each time, just to see the details in the new complex engine management and the various aircraft systems.
While doing so i will be able to gradually familiarize myself with the cockpits and decide what's best to map to keyboard and stick and what to use with the clickable interface, just to settle on a control scheme i'm comfortable with so that i won't have to fight against the interface on top of the bandits when i start flying combat.
Then i'll fly a couple of missions with some ground targets that shoot back, to see what happens when some of these systems in the aircraft are damaged and fail. Afterwards i'll do the same with and against some AI aircraft to see how easy or hard it is to manage it all during air combat, as well as to see the work done on the AI and the radio commands system.
I'll finally try my hand at the twin engined birds and then i'm ready to start a single player campaign until the first dedicated servers start popping up, after which i'll probably be dividing my time between offline and online.