Ok, one more time to bring in the New Year. The anti-pick sentiment is a pure contrivance of gaming. Purists of WWII combat aviation (most of us that hearken from the pre-2000 era of this genre) know that 90% of all Air to Air victories were scored by unseen enemy...IE: A Catastrophic failure of SA on the part of the victim. Virtually all tactical air combat dogma is predicated upon mutual support and the manipulation of position and energy to exploit an advantage. The mythology of the 1 vs. 1 hermetically chaste engagement is pure, unadulterated, gaming fiction. The only time it happened in WWII is if there was a massive bloodbath whereby wingmen had died and a single plane of an element accidentally became isolated or there was a massive and mutual failure of navigation whereby two opposing aircraft found themselves alone together, or if some gung-ho hotshot pilot disobeyed orders and went out alone in which case he would probably be court marshalled if by some miracle he was lucky enough to find a lone aircraft to engage and survived the engagement.
Combat aircraft after WWI were not designed to fight individually, in isolation from one another. Cooperative wingman, element, flight and squadron tactics evolved as a result of and were the inspiration for new aircraft design throughout all phases of the war. Post-WWI Air combat was never and will never be about the mythical single vs. single duel to the death. After the chivalric days of WWI and the very similar performing and armed aircraft which embodied the golden age of the tight turn radius the symphony of faster paced complex engagements prevailed. WWII and the technological maturation of aircraft design brought a much wider variety and disparity of plane characteristics, weapon packages, ballistics and design philosophies into play. The only thing they really had in common was the need for mutually supportive tactics for mutual security in complex engagements. The wide variety and disparity of aircraft characteristics meant the logical development of tactics specifically for the purpose of the systematic exploitation of the deficiencies of the enemy's aircraft while maximizing the advantages of one's own to maximum efficiency and effectiveness.
The AH MA is an even more extreme caricature of the real life match-up scenarios that occurred in WWII as all major country's dramatically dis-similar aircraft are represented and potentially involved in every complex engagement. This makes the tactical consideration of strength vs. weakness even more important. Most people I see complain about pickers are people that fly slow turny birds and choose to latch onto a single foe in single-minded 100% aggressive fixation. While I admire the aggressive spirit, that uncompromising, un-yielding mindset is ill-suited to multi-plane engagements, real or gamed. Air combat at its core is a delicate balance between offense and defense. Too defensive minded and you fail to kill, too offensive and you fail to live. I have just as little remorse for the one who is too conservative to kill as I do for the one that is too reckless to live.
Cherry picking as we describe it today is actually underrepresented as a form of dispatching foes in the game relative to real life. The reason being, we don't actually die in AH so people tend to do things no sane pilot in WWII would even consider. Also, your average 15+ year air combat game vet has thousands upon thousands of combat flight hours of experience, as opposed to the 100 or less your average WWII combat aviator may have had.
Personally, I have just as much respect for the AH pilot that can fly with surgical tactical precision as I do for the one that can fling his bird around like a rabid racoon on crack. To put oneself in a position to perfectly exploit an enemy's weaknesses while not revealing any of yours to be exploited in the same fashion is a thing of beauty, akin in essence to the flawless playing of a musical instrument.
Contrary to popular opinion, no successful tactical pilot ONLY cherry picks, it's impossible. One of two things will happen either of which denote a lack of success. 1) You'll fail to kill quickly enough to be worth consideration or 2) You'll over-commit in an effort to kill more time effectively and get killed in the process forced to mauneuver with an intrinsically more manueverable aircraft. The timing required against generally more maneuverable enemy, the minimal legitimate opportunities presented in an average engagement and the constant influx of new enemy that present an immediate threat make cherry-picking alone nonviable as a one-dimensional approach to air combat in AH. Anyone who says otherwise is delusional.
