Aces High is primarily an air-combat game and not a flight simulation. For all of the complaints about poor gameplay, part of the blame has to placed on the kind of customer base that shoot-em-up games attract versus true flight sims.
Let me list some of the easy-mode concessions that we have in AH:
- Combat trim
- Aileron trim for aircraft that did not have it, e.g. a lot of Spitfire marks, 109, etc.
- Ammunition counters
- No mixture controls
- No supercharger controls
- No radiator/cowl flap controls for engine cooling
- No engine overheats
- Weak engine torque
- 360 degree head swivel
- Flaps auto retract when airspeed increases
- No weather
- Automatic bombsight calibration
- GPS clipboard map
I'm sure all of you could expand on the list. The thing is, AH would have been a flight sim if it had been introduced 20 years ago. In fact, when I first tried Warbirds offline in 1996 it wasn't just an air-combat game; compared to the standard of the day it was a high fidelity air-combat flight simulation. But AH is pretty much the same thing in a different sand-box, and 13 years have gone by...
We have all of these concessions so that it's not too hard for a new player to get in the air and enjoy the action, and so that more experienced players can also focus on the action and not on tinkering with their radiator flaps. At least, that's the usual explanation for it. But these concessions play right into the hands of the instant-gratification, never-read-the-manual crowd.
I have asked for high-fidelity engine controls in the wishlist and around 90% of you rejected it. That's fine, but
don't complain about the quake-style main arena gameplay in the next thread; since 90% of you complain about gameplay, I'm sure there's a big overlap.
A lot would change if some of these easy-mode concessions were done away with (the GPS map would probably stay). Learning to manage engine temperature would be the easy part, but combat tactics would have to change. For instance, prolonged furballing on the deck at 180mph with WEP would require the full opening of radiator flaps, which would degrade performance. Level bombing accuracy would decrease. I don't think these changes would spell the end of air combat in AH, but they would require you to RTFM and put a little effort into learning to fly in order to succeed, and that would be better for gameplay.
