"Yes = Recon Fun
No = Recon SUCKS!"
This reminds me of another game I used to play,
Combat Mission. It's a complex WW2 wargame of the old school, a bit like the old Close Combat games but more hardcore. An ongoing problem with computer wargames is that you, the player, has a God's eye viewpoint that no-one would have in real life. If one of your units sees the enemy,
you see the enemy. If one of your jeeps goes over the top of a hill twelve miles away and is blown away by a hidden Tiger, you know immediately that there is a Tiger behind that hill. In real life you wouldn't know anything until the jeep failed to report, at which point you would still be in the dark. Perhaps the jeep broke down. Perhaps the driver eloped with a local farmgirl. Jenny Agutter is very pretty.
Aces High would have the same problem if a recon system was implemented. There is no need for cameras because the player himself can see the enemy territory. If the player has to land back at base before the recon information is available, it will be out of date. As a means of getting real-time data about enemy fields the recon idea would add no more information that we already have from the radio channels. And I imagine that a lot of players don't even bother with field stats etc, they just fly to the target with some bombs and then strafe to their merry hearts' content. Even real-time recon information would not help players who are already in the air - it takes a while for bombers to reach altitude, and it takes forever for C47s to get to their target.
If the game was set up so that you have to "paint" the enemy terrain with a recon aircraft in order to make it visible, then there would only be room for a handful of recon sorties at the beginning of a new map. One of the veteran players would probably cover the entirety of the enemy terrain on his own in one sortie. HTC would need to implement a random terrain generator so that we don't just dial up a website that has all the clipboard maps.
We would also have a situation where the enemy target would be in plain sight to non-recon sorties, but would not appear on the map because no-one has called up the Magic Plane of Seeing. That would be ridiculous.
"I'm over A44", "Where is that?", "It's right underneath me. I can reach out and touch the tarmac. I can smell bacon, frying on the stove. But you can't see it on the map because we haven't called up the Magic Plane of Seeing." "Oh."
