Not too long ago I was at the point of utter frustration in spotting distant contacts online. My mates on Teamspeak were calling them out long before I could discern them, including large AI bomber formations. It seemed like I was continually getting bounced by opposing fighters no matter how frequently I checked six. I tried the low resolution route and it does work -- but it's soooo UGLY which runs counter to the inherent beauty of the graphics which this sim offers. What to do?
I've read through Zapatista's excellent and very knowledgeable posts on monitors, and how their quality and setting can directly influence our ability to spot tiny dots on-screen. My take was that ironically the better your monitor the less likely a single pixel is likely to stand out from the others - by design! Similarly, graphical-smoothing effects like FSAA, FXAA, etc tend to BLEND the odd single pixel into the background....again by design.
A couple of things I've tried on my system (Asus 27" monitor, GTX 680 card):
I run at the monitor's native res: 1920 x 1080 @ 120 Hz, using adaptive Vsync with the latest Nvidia drivers.
I set FSAA in-game to 0
In the Nvidia Control panel I disabled FSAA and FXAA
I use SweetFX (using Les' "Neutral 6 setting)
Many monitors have their own menu settings which can be adjusted "on the fly" (pun intended) while actually playing Cliffs of Dover. I found that the otherwise-beautiful "theatre" setting actually was too saturated in rich colours and high contrast and hampered me in tracking targets, even close ones, against a dark early morning/late evening sky, not to mention terrain or ocean! In my case I simply flipped through the settings menu and settled on "standard". A little drabber than the "theatre" and "gamer" settings, but the increased dynamic visual range lightened up the shadows a lot and toned down the glaring mid day sky. I still lose an opponent in the sun, but can readily track the dot against the bright sky as he approaches the sun, then pick him up again after he's traversed it and emerges on the opposite side.
The trade off to the above is 1) a slight loss in richness of colours (which actually still looks very good with SweetFx), and 2) distant terrain is slightly jaggy/shimmery. However, these two downsides are offset by picking up opponents (and friendlies) at what I consider to be reasonably "normal" distances. Certainly early enough to avoid a bounce (if you diligently check 6 constantly....and it's not directly out of the sun). Also you can spot an adversary early enough to position yourself tactically, rather than always being on the defensive in a disadvantageous position.
Good luck!
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