Let me just say that i'm with Feathered on this one. His ideas about communication with the AI are excellent and remind me a bit of a mix between the old European Air War and B17 the mighty 8th.
Both had detailed communication routines, EAW for your wingmen and B17 for the crew members. I distinctly remember that in EAW i would orchestrate coordinated attacks against bomber formations by combining orders. For example, if you told the flight to disengage it meant to abandon combat, but if you told them to rejoin it simply meant to keep in formation without revokig previous orders. So, you would tell them to drop into a wider formation to avoid collisions, switch them to line abreast and then order "attack bombers" and immediately after "rejoin".
This was the equivalent of attacking without breaking formation and it was awesome. The AI wingmen were going wherever you were and attacked the targets you guided them to. Imagine this with a line abreast of 12 Fw190s on a head on attack against 36 B17s. That game is way old (older than IL2) and i still haven't seen such a clever system of controlling your AI wingmen in any prop sims since.
Similarly, in B17 the mighty 8th, the gunners were calling out contacts and even made heated remarks in combat. I didn't get to see all of the messages, but there were people posting what they got over the internet and they would really set the mood. In one case someone was having an encounter with Me262s, the gunner called it out and as it come near he exclaims "Did you see that?!". Or another gem "i'm can't die, i'm still a virgin!" by a squeaky 19 year old voice muffled by the oxygen mask, as the other guy who's giving him first aid examines his wound he says "you're going to be fine, it's just a scratch". It was a single player game and yet i felt bad whenever one of my crew would get injured or killed.
There is no need to over-dramatize things though. Simply following feathered's ideas and using clever dialogue for each option would do.
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11-18-2009, 11:20 PM
Hybrid Mode
