but when im in aces high im looking for my next target and not my ENG lights all the time
Agreed, the main focus when fighting should be(and is) all about keeping your eyes on the enemy. But, don't you think it would add to the pucker factor and make combat more challenging to be aware in the back of your mind that you know you can't run around on WEP for too long, lest you damage your engine?
I mean, is this game supposed to be a simulation of World War II aircraft, or space ships? If it's going to be a simulation of WWII air combat, then don't you think that some of the challenges those pilots had to deal with should be replicated to a greater degree?
banana I'd be interested what you think of the FM's, the gunnery.
Well, it was an early war IJN vs. USN rps, so all I flew all night was the A6M2 and A6M3, and yes, the FM's were very similar, although the A6M2 seemed lighter and slightly more manueverable than the Hamp. I did feel a little of the "mush", but to me it felt like the early AH FM before it was "fixed" to what we have now in AH. I can't say it moved me one way or the other. It was just different.
The gunnery colors were odd, with red colored cannons and white machine gun tracers. Just about every sim does that better. I'm surprised to find that you found the gunnery so easy, nopoop, as I found it much harder to hit targets with it. And I found the lethality to be similar to AH, at least when I got hit. It didn't take much to bring down a Zeke.
The WB terrain is definately not much to look at, being very dark. I did like the coloring in the sky, however. I thought the sky color was better looking in WB than AH or WW2OL.
There were 86 people on when I was flying last night, and everyone was fighting in the same general area, so I was able to get into a couple of huge furballs. It was a lot of fun. I bet even Lazs would've enjoyed himself last night.

There was one guy online who twice accused the same guy of warp rolling, but other than that, there was much less smack than what you see on the AH open channel.
Overall, I think WB is probably the weakest sim out there between AH, WB and WW2OL. But it certainly wasn't a bad experience I had last night, and I think I'm going to keep my account open there and see what happens.
Nopoop - you criticise WB as though AH were the holy grail of flight sims. It is not. Certainly, it beats WB 2.77, but the gunnery is not real. Those 800 yard shots are BS, and smack of a dumbing down of the skill element to accommodate the noobs/dweebs. In my view, one of the reasons we see such dweebery in this game (HO, spray & pray, 4 plane subset (P51/La7/Spit ix/N1K)) is because the skill element has been dumbed down and therefore folks don't need to learn much ACM or gunnery or early war plane types. Don't denounce the characteristics of one game, only to replace it with how you think things "should" be modelled based on nothing more than your own utopian vision of a how a flight sim should look.
So why bother with all the other "annoyances?" Trivial chores such as throttle, flaps, stalls, compression, torque, blackout/redouts or spins?? All of those, along with landing and/or taking off, most certainly don't ADD to combat at all.
And FWIW there are far more ARCADEs in boxes than there are sims.
For the longest time my opinion was AH was "THE" WWII aircombat sim featuring the most reasonable fascimile of WWII fighters available. Anything less was Air Warrior and Fighter Ace.
But IMO AH never had an online atmosphere conducive to WWII era aircombat - beyond your "BFM" and ACM. With the icons and radar it was more akin to "Spitfires over Iraq: 1991". I'd always hoped HTC would progress AH and add features to promote a WWII environment and also model more "nuances" which players could choose to master. Or not. Things that would permit players to feel more like a real pilot flying actual aircraft battling it out in a hostile a sky reminiscent of WWII.
IMO AH is now the one that's been left behind by other games/sims such as WWIIO, IL2 and Target-Rabaul. And it's saddened me, and others I can see, that AH has fallen into the vacant slot left by AW. A joust-a-bout, fantasy melee arcade rife with pork'n'auger land-grab dorks.
I agree with a lot of what Beetle and Westy said in their above posts. Although I'm not ready to say that AH has fallen behind WW2OL or Target Rabaul yet, and I don't think IL2 is a fair comparison, I do think that AH has become the new "Air Warrior". It caters to the "yank & bank" crowd, whereas games like Target Rabaul are definately more geared to the "realism nazi's", the ex-WB crowd.
No disrespect intended to any of the AW guys, because every AW guy(and gal-Hi Flossy!) I ever met in person have been friendly and fun to be with. But I think it's a fact that the Warbirds crowd was into more realism than was the AW crowd.
I'm really looking forward to see where HiTech's vision takes him in AH2-TOD. On the other hand, I'm just as excited to see what the Targetware folks end up with whenever they can get around to releasing Target Rabaul. It might not have as pretty eye candy as AH2, but if the gameplay, features and FM are of a more realistic nature than AH, then we may be witness to yet another mass exodus that we saw when AH went live.
Competition is good, though. We all need to remember that.