There is no such thing as "ACM" when it is pitte against gunnery. This is true both in real life and in the game. Anything other than the basic pitch up/down, roll clockwise/counter-clockwiseright, yaw left/right, is basically adding more and more unnecessary stuff to make up for the lack of gunnery. If ACM was so really important, the evolutionary process of WW2 planes would have been very different from what it was.
An ideal 1vs1 situation with both opponents being equal in E-status rarely happens. Everything is based on multiple engagements of all sorts of circumstances springing up at the same time.
These sort of fights where ACM really becomes important simply doesn't exist, or is much too rare to ever be considered important. It only exists in controlled environment. A fantastic wet-dream for people who just don't understand, or cannot accept that things don't work that way anymore.
Even in 1vs1 situations the odds are different everytime with very different variables. One can laugh and ridicule someone as a "bore-and-zoomer" all day long, but he'd still never even get a single shot landed on him if the BnZer knows what he is doing.
Everything else the defender can do is so obvious that basically everybody with some experience in aircombat games know about it. Lure him in? Equalize E-states? Same old trick every time.
The only reason ACM works in these 1vs1 is because usually, and thankfully, us gamers don't really care about living or dying. We want some wild goose chase fun, so we'll jump into a close-quarters fight after a couple of E-wise, secure passes, and then go risk an unnecessary risk by trying to latch on to a target.
The only reason good ACM works in this game, is because the other guy who's falling for it, basically let's you have a chance in the first place.
What's so scary about guys like Levi, Fester, Drex? Oh sure, these guys could (and maybe would) say that they personally think ACM is more important. But that's really totally irrelevant. On the receiving end, how these guys fly the plane is frankly nothing special at all. It doesn't matter if its a n00b or a super-ace, or how they fly their plane, when somebody is already lacthed on.
The real reason these famed aces are so scary in the game, is because their first merge is usually the last merge.
They don't even give you an ACM chance. You can't even drag them down low so your friendlies shoot them down right after he shoots you down. Wiggle all you want, tuck under his nose, go into -G, invert plane, break as tight as possible, stall on purpose, ... yadayadayada - nothing works. First pass, and boom, your wing falls off.
Shane often says that he doesn't back out from a fight. But I've never seen Fester back out from a fight either, unless its already something like 5vs1.
The difference is, Shane quite often gets caught up by multiple bogeys and dies a lot. Fester on the other had almost never makes this kind of mistake. Why? Because, Shane ACM sometimes backfires on him. Fester hardly even uses any real ACM in the first place, because he doesn't need to.
