Wednesday 2 September 2015

Avoidable head-on / frontal encounters


The head-on or frontal fight seems to be the preferred tactic of most players. They simply fly straight to some red red dot, do not need to aim with lead and seek to kill.

Most of the time this seems to be wasteful, and newbies often even do it with inferior armament.

It's quite outrageous that players even do it too often in matches such as squadron battles, where individual performance shouldn't matter.

Here's what I observe all too-often.

A single red fighter approaches two blue fighters, which both seek a head-on fight - result: One red and one blue down. 
What should have been done: The blue one who has the red's attention dodges or evades entirely (away from the 2nd blue fighter) and the blue fighter that's got no red attention kills. Result: Blue kills 1, red kills 0.

Another outrageous example is that a smoking, even a burning red fighter will all-too often still get a head-on fight as a gift - even with one or multiple blue fighters on his tail. There's no need to engage it whatsoever, but most players will voluntarily accept a head-on with this dying plane even though the risk of severe damage to or total loss of the own aircraft is very high. There's even a substantial risk of fratricide (unintentional teamkill) in such a situation!


Players should switch some "tactics" lever to "on" in their brain. All too often their behaviour is the behaviour of a simplistic bot that's been only coded to turn straight towards the nearest red dot and shoot at it.
Sadly, I've seen stupid air combat tactics even among players who were the best of the best in ground attack tactics.

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