I-16 was a roaring powerhouse, could handle 109 Email, but not the Femail.
Luft advantage was early training and tactics.
Which shows pilots were more important than performance then, and players more important than flight models today.
The key is modelling the air war environment which would allow most kills to be surprise or bounce kills, and the core gaming challenge should be finding and stalking the enemy, or escaping, using the air war environment. Like the ground warfare environment is mostly stalking and setting up for the kill.
All combat flight sims are at the level of a ground combat sim with no buildings, no rooms, no trees, no ditches, no hills, etc... That's why ground combat sims are successful, and air combat sims are failures.
Have a few computer soldiers in a ground combat game standing tall a few feet away from each other in a flat parking lot blasting away until only one is left. That is the "dogfight" model of combat flight sims. Detailed FM and Detailed Polygons don't make up for that, as sales and customer longevity show.
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