what Allied aircraft are the best in this game?

[Laurwin]

Originally Posted by MaxGunz

I wish I had ended the handle with an s instead of a z, back in 1998. Oh well.

Flying the egg is mostly for teaching though I have used it to reverse a fight or two when I had slower, better turning enemies behind me.

You can use an Immelman coming out if the top at stall but I don't recommend that in a combat area at all. If you're going fast enough to come out of a vertical half loop with speed enough to dodge shots then tilt the loop and do a wingover, which btw is what Immelman much more likely did in his Eindekker than the maneuver that got his name.

Practicing the egg will teach you when you have the speed to do what, for one thing. It ceases to be theory in a while and you can transition in and out with more ease and success.

If you have alt and not enough speed, the half loop can go down(wards).

Every turn with a vertical element even if done 30 degrees to horizontal has some gravity-avoiding elements to it simply because your path is not crossing gravity at 90 degrees. You still slow down if you're rising but that is a separate factor you can regain when you descend.

From a 45 degree to vertical zoom or dive the slick trick is to roll to point your canopy where you want to go and then pull out *with care to not stall which bleeds your E terribly* on the new heading.

I don't remember exactly but I think that Shaw covers these things in his book Fighter Combat.

If you don't have speed greater than best turn it is still good to drop in a shallow descent in the first half of a turn and regain height in the second half rather than flying a purely horizontal turn. You can turn a bit tighter +and+ come out faster using the down and up. It's a great way to catch up to an opponent sticking to turning on the flat because he knows you can't turn as well and a good way to begin to learn the turning yoyo tactic.

There's a whole bag of tricks that become apparent once you've practiced the egg enough times. Call it The Vertical, I can't recall seeing the AI use it but that's no surprise since it usually involves stringing maneuvers together to achieve an advantageous outcome.

When I fly energy, every pass I make where the target loses more than I do is a step towards my victory whether I fire a shot or even make a hit or not. The energy game is mostly about relative energy but it's also about not getting yourself below your best turn envelope no matter the temptation of an easy shot he presents. Once he loses speed or height you've already made your gain. That's something the AI hasn't a clue about.

I just flying, as long as you can keep decent trim and close to zero slip and fly with a light touch the AI having perfect trim and zero slip and excellent control won't be enough of an advantage to cover the AI's lack of tactical ability. They're also lousy at angle shots as long as you don't hold a straight or steady turn too long probably because they don't get the cycles to do so but maybe because of lack of code routines altogether.

It's like starting out in IL2 one of the first campaign frustrations is catching up to your flight. Then you learn to not just point your nose at them until you have your speed up and then you will have to slow down before you do catch them.
Slow and nose high just eats power and gets you nowhere. They don't have rockets, you have the bad habits drag chute is more on the mark. That's the lesson anyone should learn after a while and maybe with a few pointers like "get your nose down" and "build up speed before you shallow climb".

The Ai are not a terror to the better pilot players here. At least not until you're outnumbered badly in a LaGG 3 vs 109-F's and then only the really good ones think "challenge" instead of "sphincter check".

Thanks for the expansive response.

Haha, indeed, sometimes I feel like human players are a little bit easier than ace AIs. Maybe you just get the feeling because of the long range shots that seldom hit anything online.

Against humans you definitely need the good positive attitude I think.

Usually in QBs offline, I just put 16 bandits and something like 8 friendly, with us having alt advantage. It can be tough at times, so it seems. (maybe you're on to something; maybe I could learn more still, about fighting the AIs)


I prob can still take on the AI ace 1v1 hopefully at least lol

Probably it just has to do with like, how you "train" for online. Mostly these bnz and ambush type of tactics work quite well in big dogfight server.

The idea being, train as you would fight. Don't surrender yourself into long lasting dogfights where you get target fixated, even if you are gaining advantage vs one bandit. Who's to say, online, the guy on the defense might have a friendly coming over to his rescue, from above clouds. Then the 1v1 with attacker advantage becomes 1v2 disadvantage.

It was actally raelly funny because this was what happened last week with F4Fs with us vs zeke. We went something like 8v3-5, local superirity. We were just a marauding pack of wildcats there and mowing down zeke left and right with bnz and effective radio comms.

Obviously it doesn't mean too much about individual skill perhaps, but it was great seeing historical tactics being used so nicely with wildcats. And after all, isn't war a team effort indeed? I say no mercy to the enemy, with these classic dogfight situations. Your own team should strive for every possible advantage

[IceFire]

Originally Posted by Laurwin

Thanks for the expansive response.

Haha, indeed, sometimes I feel like human players are a little bit easier than ace AIs. Maybe you just get the feeling because of the long range shots that seldom hit anything online.

Against humans you definitely need the good positive attitude I think.

Usually in QBs offline, I just put 16 bandits and something like 8 friendly, with us having alt advantage. It can be tough at times, so it seems. (maybe you're on to something; maybe I could learn more still, about fighting the AIs)


I prob can still take on the AI ace 1v1 hopefully at least lol

Probably it just has to do with like, how you "train" for online. Mostly these bnz and ambush type of tactics work quite well in big dogfight server.

The idea being, train as you would fight. Don't surrender yourself into long lasting dogfights where you get target fixated, even if you are gaining advantage vs one bandit. Who's to say, online, the guy on the defense might have a friendly coming over to his rescue, from above clouds. Then the 1v1 with attacker advantage becomes 1v2 disadvantage.

It was actally raelly funny because this was what happened last week with F4Fs with us vs zeke. We went something like 8v3-5, local superirity. We were just a marauding pack of wildcats there and mowing down zeke left and right with bnz and effective radio comms.

Obviously it doesn't mean too much about individual skill perhaps, but it was great seeing historical tactics being used so nicely with wildcats. And after all, isn't war a team effort indeed? I say no mercy to the enemy, with these classic dogfight situations. Your own team should strive for every possible advantage

Humans are more unpredictable although they are also often easily predicted. It just varies that much more.

It also depends on the type of pilots you're flying against and what the crowd is like. I know three or four people who have the gunnery abilities that outreach what the Ace AI can do. I've seen dozens who shoot far worse than the Rookie AI. The range in humans is that much greater.

I would echo the sentiment when you get a great team thing going. I've been there... I remember quite clearly a group of four of us flying on Warclouds years back with FW190D-9s. We spotted a furball ahead, lined our formation up and swept through line abreast shooting at whatever Spitfire or Mustang was in our general path. We regrouped back at our original altitude and two minutes later we swept through again. A trail of Allied fighter debris was left in our wake... devastatingly effective and completely reliant on our team tactics. Any time a Spitfire would try and lock on to the formation the rest of the team would re-position for a shot. No matter where he would try and turn away from there would always be a FW190 with a firing solution.

That was awesome and it was all the more apparent what would happen where you would avoid the dogfight and instead focus on the hit and run where the other guy may not even see you and even if he did there was someone else right there to shoot at him.

[Laurwin]

Indeed. As it often happens online, 2 average pilots can fairly easily defeat one il-2 pro player.

This brings to my mind what was said about la5fn vs focke a4-5

Why did you guys mostly agree that la5fn is best at lower alt, vs focke wulf keep in mind?

What ive heard, is that la5fn is a top tier russian fighter (only worse than kingcobra and la7)

Best speed for la5fn comes at medium alt 5km, this altitude focke wulf engine power also diminishes.

Perhaps reason for failure with this lavochin is simly low alt turn and burn, and weaker russian team tactics usually.

[JtD]

It can't dive well enough, and it is slower at high altitude than a Fw 190. Which means if you meet a Fw and you have the altitude advantage, it enters a shallow dive and you can't follow. Essentially, it is safe. On the other hand, if you get caught at a disadvantage, you cannot run away, you'll have to fight it out. And this means some low speed turning, as at high speed, you cannot outmanoeuvre a Fw. And survival at low speed turns is pretty much depending on the skills of your opponent, and luck to some extent. There's no way skillful turning will save you every time.

[MaxGunz]

There is or at least were at least 2 good sites that gave translations of Russian Ace's accounts of the war that shed a lot of light on how things went. It was by far more than just a simple matching of performance figures like war buffs so often play with copies of Jane's books.

Find the story of the creation of USAAF Fighter Command and the change that made for USAAF fighter pilots. Germany had no Fighter Command and I don't know about Russia. Galland had stated post-war that the lack of a dedicated Fighter Command type structure is one of the reasons Germany lost the Air War. That bit of doctrine, and who had it, made a big difference.

Fly low over your side's flak or low over the other side's. IRL it made a difference, in game we don't get such concentrations as there were.

There were many factors that good mission design can begin to simulate.

I was watching a documentary made in 1945 that told how the USAAF fighter relay system worked. On long runs only 10% of the fighters covered the bombers at any one time if they made the connection which sometimes weather did not permit. People who only go by relative numbers sortied have been telling for years how the USAAF escorts outnumbered the LW for so long, it was only true near the end when the LW became unable to achieve the local superiority which they had been used to. Even when the USAAF did get superiority their pilots were often 3+ hours flying to get to the combat while the LW pilots were fresh. Again, raw numbers and performance comparisons don't tell much of the real story.

As a pilot/bombardier of that war used to say at the Delphi FSF, he didn't feel sorry because "they started it".