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Preview: Rowan's Battle of Britain
by Bob "Groucho" MarksFlight Modeling
Let’s start with the flight model, which is the best I've seen this side of Aces High. The black art of dogfighting as modeled in BoB requires patience, finesse, a keen eye, and aggressiveness---not to mention a small amount of luck. According to all I’ve read or heard on the subject of air-to-air combat (and that's a lot), these are all ingredients of a successful fighter pilot. Crank up the realism in BoB, and you’ll need all of them. Much has been posted on message forums recently about how “artificially” difficult most of the aircraft in BoB are to take off and land, let alone engage in close-quarter battles with the enemy. I most wholeheartedly disagree. Challenging, yes, but definitely not in a contrived way.
These are not fly-by-wire super-machines to which many of us have become accustomed. The airplanes in BoB must be given almost as much respect and attention as their real-world counterparts. Trimming your aircraft, for example, is not just something to make it easier to hand-fly your steed, it’s an essential part of successful combat. Setting the trim while in high-speed cruise before the fight goes an extraordinarily long way in improving the way the aircraft in BoB will turn, climb, and dive.
A suppertime kill
Engaging in ACM while being forced to carry a substantial amount of drag-producing elevator, for example, will only get you killed by unnecessarily bleeding off energy.
When it comes to actually throwing the airplane around in a dogfight, a light touch is key. In the tradition of MiG Alley, the onset of an accelerated stall is heralded by plenty of rumbling or buffet noise. It is key to listen to the airplane in order to squeeze the best turn radius versus velocity; if you don't you won't have enough energy for the end-game maneuvering. The modeling of cockpit shake and rumble is exceptionally well done, as it must be in a decent dogfighting simulator. Glancing at the instrument panel to check to see if your airspeed is at the best cornering velocity was just not done; as the old fighter pilot adage goes---lose sight, lose the fight. A few rounds of dogfighting practice in BoB teaches the fighter pilot wannabe to heed these informative cues and eventually get the nose on the target.
Scalable Difficulty
I mentioned the need for trimming your aircraft a few paragraphs back. The difficulty of trimming out a constantly bucking airplane, however, can be distracting for new sim pilots. And so, lest I scare off those wanting to experience simulated air combat for the first time, there is a setup option that relieves you of this trimming task. Setting the “Stick Mode” toggle to “Sim” rather than “Realistic" is the cure. This can be done without impacting the difficulty rating on the flight model itself. What this seems to do is eliminate some of the twitchiness, and hence the need to trim. Is this a cheat? Who cares? It works.
In fact, BoB is one of the most scalable sims I've seen as of late, so the newbies can have a great ol' time knocking other airplanes out of the sky using relaxed physics and unlimited ammo. The marketplace is crowded with lighter sims, however, and it’s in the hardcore arena where BoB stands out as one of the best.
So many targets, so little ammo. The amount of iron in the air at once is staggering.
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