Aces High Bulletin Board
General Forums => The O' Club => Topic started by: Martlet on April 25, 2003, 08:18:43 AM
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Ok, just got the game. Any setup/play tips/suggestions?
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umm, beware the AI gang bang... ;)
seriously. I started a campaign with a 109E group down in Crimea. We escorted (4 of us) a recon plane. We get jumped by 4 higher I-16s, and as we deal with them, 4 more higher I-16s jump in. I try to clear a wingie's 6, and tracers fly all past me and there are about 5 on my 6. LOL. Needless to say, no one survived that campaign. ;)
Heh, I did the single mission for the 109. You follow this guy around and attack some Pe-2's. The mission is to protect the guy. We go in and he lights up the first Pe, and it goes down. He reverses to attack the second one... MISSION FAILED! What??? The dumb AI pilot flat out rammed the Pe-2. Umm, how is that my fault? lol there isn't a radio command to tell your wing leader to not be a handsomehunk! :D
Hardest thing for me to get used to is not having the AH view system. can't look around canopy frames, and can't check your 6. Gunnery is a lot harder unless you fly the lend lease Hurri IIc, then it's kinda easy. Hispanos are Hispanos I guess! Though I do better in the Yak9T in IL2 than I do in AH with the 37mm. Strange. *shrug*
Anyways, I just did a lot of the quick mission stuff to get used to the flight model and gunnery before trying missions. And then I went back to it because just dogfighting is fun. The missions aren't as fun for me, I guess because I'm spoiled by the Mongrels, and you just can't simulate those guys with AI. ;)
This is all single player. If I want multiplayer, I just fire up AH.
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what nifty said, I'm trying to survive the hungarian campaign lately and it's the roughest I've done so far. you are usually very out numbered and the main tactic seems to be to send in a first wave of AC (usually a fairly close match to your squads strength) about 10 minets ahead of a much larger wave, which comes in at a higher alt.
the first wave drags you down to a lower alt then breaks off and re-engages clean after their high-e gangbang buddys arive.
nice little tactic, makes you hesitate a bit before jumping planes even in your own teritory. it's also got me so jumpy I'm calling for back-up at the first sight of an nme plane.
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You guys know you can change it by setting the campaign difficulty?
It's set to hard by default I believe, which means that you will almost always be outnumbered and the enemy will have more alt on you.
You can also change the air and ground intensity from low to hard, it's "normal" by default I think.
Add these lines at the end of your conf.ini:
CampaignDifficulty=Easy (or change to Hard)
AirIntensity=Low (or set to High for more flights)
GroundIntensity=Low (or set to High for more AI units on the ground)
For the two Intensity settings it creates more objects throughout the world on High, setting to Low just creates units on your flight path.
I play on Normal Intensity settings, but High Campaign Difficulty and was forced to deselect the option "No Instant Success"... this meant that I didn't have to complete arbitrary mission objectives (get 33% of your escorted flight safely to base, destroy 100% of the artillery, etc) to go on to the next mission. Lets face it, the chances of you getting all your escorts or keeping your wingmen alive are slim to none when you are running into over double your strength that have much better AI than the tards you have for friendlies.
If you have a GeForce 4 Martlet, I can post my settings up here to get the best performance (and best graphics too- I run on max settings except Landscape isn't "perfect" because today's GPUs simply don't have the power to do pixel shading yet).
-SW
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The wingman tards are the worst part. The enemy AI is so aggressive against the player if they can see him that if you just had one wingman with a brain he could just fly up the congo line and kill the whole enemy group.
If you tell your wingmen to engage they start to die almost imediatly. The I16s can easily turn inside you and every one is the 2 20mm version that will kill you with one ping. Of course they go for HO ever time. And they seem to have unlimited ammo.
I think they really droped the ball with the campaign in FB.
I flew the first mission of the russians and shot down the whole enemy unit 4 ju88s and 4 109s with one ammo load. The first time I flew it. But you think I could land that dam I16...lol
I flew the mission successfully never losing a wingman 3 times but could not get the I16 down without it totally exploding.
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It seems really hard to fly the plane. Not like AH.
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Like any game I play, I say as a "tip" play it on a LAN. IL2FB is terrific single player but has some annoying things as mentioned. LAN just rocks.
Setup suggestions?
Well, it is not practical for a casual gamer, but worth a mention. My friend just put together a nice little rig with a ATI 9500 PRo card and a gig of RAM and can run the full grafix (including the full realistic setting on the ground) and it is just incredible. Smooth, and the water graphics are so good you look past the plane skins and cockpits which are just awesome, and want someone to make a military naval sim with this stuff.
As far as playing AH and then going into FB, you have to find the web links that tell you how the plane varients engines and props behaved realistically, and read the posts like a actual aircraft manual. It's not as daunting a task what you would think. And like a real plane, it takes alot of flying around by yourself offline, figuring out what makes it fly.
If you want to put on auto-takeoff, grab a beer, and then go full throttle into a AH furball for 15 minutes till your fuel runs out, you will hate FB for the most part. Be forwarned.
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How is your friend running the "Perfect" landscape option on an ATI 9500Pro, did he do the driver tweak/overclock to make it a 9700Pro?
Even if he did the latter, it wouldn't make much of a difference in terms of the pixel shaders as they are bringing people's machines with 9700Pros and 2.5+ Ghz CPUs to their knees.
What kind of CPU/Mobo is he running? As the pixel shaders are very reliant on the GPU, I don't see how he's running the "Perfect" landscape setting with the FPS above 25... unless of course there is absolutely no AI on the map?
-SW
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Yup, it's the "Perfect" setting.
He bought one of those little LAN boxes, it looks like a toaster. He added a Gig of RAM, and a ATI9500 PRO.
I watched FB last night on it, just a single quick mission, it was smooth as silk. Made me want to fire up Das Boat.
If you add planes, i dunno, sure it might slow down. I run FB on a GF3 at 1280 and it is incredible, but not like what I saw last night. Add planes, it might hickup, sure. But the demo from that system and one plane was just amazing.
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The RAM has little to do with the "Perfect" landscape option, but helps a lot on the Leningrad/Finland map because of the maps size and use of many varying textures.
I'm just surprised he can run the "Perfect" landscape option using Pixel Shaders when many people with very fast systems can not (over on the Il2:FB boards at SimHQ, people with 9700Pros and 3.0Ghz systems can't run it)... Admittedly, I'm not sure if many of those people really know how to tweak their system and get the most out of it...
It runs slow as keerap (between 15 and 20fps) on my system, AMD 2000+, 768MB PC133 SDRAM and a GeForce4... even with no planes on it, but that's because either the drivers that run the pixel shaders in the GPU are poorly written, or the GPU simply can not handle that task...
I wish they would of made the pixel shaders only do the water, to be perfectly honest it looks like toejam on the terrain. Also, you lose the individual trees on land and can't see their reflections in the rivers.
-SW
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Get a ATI card and $20 more RAM is all I can suggest.
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I really don't think the 9500Pro or 9700Pro will solve the issue... the generation of video cards after these probably will... and the RAM doesn't figure into the equation for running "Perfect" landscape.
-SW