oh yes, the times of the manual report to the host on the debriefing screen in IOW1 and VEF1.
ancient times
it took a lot of time till the COOP online wars had reached thier last abilites. It took some effort ion logfile programming and some smart community propgramming of these OnlineWAr status programs !!
But dont think such COOP based onlone wars will appear again , at least not with this , limited in my opinion, BoB scenario......
The future , as already mentioned, will be 24/7 dedi servers with scripted missions. The game and the smart guys in the community just have to get behind it
And, i would miss the AI.... i think about the last build missions for VOW R , when we had 16 bombers, 12 escort fighters and 16 interceptors in the last build missions. Huge immersion.
The coop missions of the first online wars were much smaller in planenumbers , they had to be
but even in these early days we had most time 9 AI bombers in escort/intercept missions.