Mitsubishi Stuka and Thunderbolt

[majorfailure]

Originally Posted by horseback

Breaking off at 300m when you are attacking with a 200kph speed advantage and are just shooting the hell out of your target would be considered premature against anything less than a formation of 16+ American heavies in real life, regardless of the angle of your attack. Under those conditions, accurate return fire from your target should be next to impossible, and the angles imposed for gunners in flanking aircraft would make it a matter of very poor chance that they would hit you at all, much less hit you anywhere important, like the 'head-sized' magneto that comprises less than 5% of the area you can aim at inside the cowling of a P-47, Hellcat or Corsair, or the considerably smaller reflector sight in your cockpit (and how do they do that without breaking the bulletproof glass in front of it?).

No, with 6'clock attacks I meant really lazy attacks, with not enough speed difference. And the way I see it I'm an easy target even if I close with 200kph excess -only change is distance, and that's a shot an ace gunner from 200m away should be able to do most of the times, and a rookie should be able to judge by his tracers if he's shooting too high or low. And even if he's leading for 500m distance, and I'm only at 300m, then he will highly likely still hit -as that shot needs no lead in angle left/right and no lead in up/down motion.

Originally Posted by horseback

There are those of us who don't fly LW vs the USAAF or RAF, and while I understand the tendency of some people to romanticize the German side in that contest, I just can't sympathize with the tendency to 'baseline' your campaign experiences with the comparatively nerfed gunners of the in-game US heavies against my complaints with the gunners on He-111s, Stukas, Bf 110s, Pe-2s, Sturmoviks and more recently, Vals and Betties. All of these aircraft have Rookie gunners superior to any Terminator model James Cameron ever made a dime from, even the hot little blonde one.

Usually I play both sides of the medal, so I did the US/Brit side before, and I found the German/Italian bombers nowhere near the capability of a B-17.
The only real danger is the Do217, because they are so fast you are sometimes forced to attack from behind. And when flying planes with .50cals the He111 can be tough, though it is vulnerable to attacks from the front. Strangely enough, the most troublesome Axis bomber for me is the Ju87, because it is so small and usually evades and its gunner shoots below where IMHO he shouldnt even be able to see me. Upside is if using a very low 6 or side/front attacks next to any hit on that thing makes it burn.

Bettys, I've shot countless out of the sky using P-39 (awesome game moments: head on passes with 37mm that connect and blow that thing right out of the sky) or P-40s and F4F.
P-39 is easy, either stay behind and snipe them from a distance or use your superior speed and head-on tactics, high attacks from nearly directly above also work fine.
F4F/P-40 is more difficult, the speed advantage often is not enough to make an intercept possible using head-ons. High 6 attacks work okay, and high sides attacks too. High 6 attacks are better IMHO, its easier to hit the wing tanks, and thats the Bettys vice, its basically a big unprotected flying fuel tank. I would guesstimate that nine out of ten I got were due to fuel tank fire, except when flying the P39, and even then when 37mm ammo was out the .30 cals light them good.

Originally Posted by horseback

Take your 'red' Fw 190A up against a flight of Betties and see what happens. It will shock you.

Will do.

Originally Posted by horseback

Only eight out of forty missions sounds like heaven to me; I've had several individual campaign missions where one specific gunner gets me every damned time from every angle and distance imaginable, even after being demoted (do you think that they might be bitter about it?). I hit the 'Refly' button four or five times in a couple of hours and then I just have to walk away for a few days (or months).

That reminds me of the game before 4.10, when gunners were godlike (and were able to survive 20mm hits). I can remember a BoB campaign, where Ju87 shot you out of the sky with 90% probablity when anywhere within 500m behind.
He-111 and a 6'o clock approach was certain doom, when they appeared, the only surviving member of my squad usually was me - head on tactics worked.
Bf110 had to be left alone, attacking them was suicide, they could turn so you nearly blacked out turning with them, and still the gunner fired with pinpoint accuracy.

Originally Posted by Pursuivant

This is another good point, but gunners should have a slightly better chance to hit based on the amount of time that the target remains within their firing cone. Targets that veer in and out of the cone should be harder to hit, since the gunner must reacquire his target and track it prior to opening fire.

That may be one of the reasons we do get strange results, the AI gunners acquire targets at any angle at about 5km, even if they can not see it. Without confirmation from anyone that can read the game code, I'd speculate that any gunner already has your speed and distance and heading estimated before you come into his FoV. If that's the case, that shouuld be changed.

[ElAurens]

OK, let's stop speaking about the AI as if they are beings. OK?

The AI is the computer program that runs the sim. It doesn't have to "calculate" anything. It already "knows" evey parameter of your aircraft's performance, and it knows how you have set your gun convergence. It "knows" where you are at all times, it knows when you make a control input, and has a perfect solution for hitting you at all times.

All that the settings can do is either slow this process down or limit the range that it picks you up as a target.

[MaxGunz]

Originally Posted by ElAurens

OK, let's stop speaking about the AI as if they are beings. OK?

The AI is the computer program that runs the sim. It doesn't have to "calculate" anything. It already "knows" evey parameter of your aircraft's performance, and it knows how you have set your gun convergence. It "knows" where you are at all times, it knows when you make a control input, and has a perfect solution for hitting you at all times.

All that the settings can do is either slow this process down or limit the range that it picks you up as a target.

I don't know how much of that goes into the AI calculations. What can be is not necessarily what is. But I can say that the AI is only predictive to a simple level and that a constantly changing path is beyond any AI in-game.

[Janosch]

I find that in most cases, the AI gunners have more difficulty in shooting an attacking fighter if the speed difference is indeed great. Try, now, a Me-163B against B-17s, it's wonderful! They might score a lucky hit, though, but it's acceptable imho.
I understand that 9 cases out of 10, one won't have such a huge speed advantage, but then it's better to go against the escort fighters instead. Who's to say it's not important to shoot them down over hostile territory (to them)? Carrier ops are another matter, of course.

Originally Posted by ElAurens

OK, let's stop speaking about the AI as if they are beings. OK?

I don't think we should do that... at least it's ok to speak as if they are in fact beings. As technology advances, AIs become more and more "beings" with real emotions, ambitions and dreams. As such, they should have the same rights as human players do. For now, however, they don't even get to decide whether or not to play in the first place, so they should in fact have some advantages over Joe Regular Player.

What we say here and how we say it will set a precedent on how we treat artificial intelligence beings, and our words will echo untold centuries into the future.

[ElAurens]

Quash the robots now!!!!!

[MaxGunz]

Originally Posted by Janosch

As technology advances, AIs become more and more "beings" with real emotions, ambitions and dreams. As such, they should have the same rights as human players do. For now, however, they don't even get to decide whether or not to play in the first place, so they should in fact have some advantages over Joe Regular Player.

What fantasy do you live in? Does it cost extra to send mail that far?

There is no such AI as you describe except in fantasy. There is nothing that can fake it well enough to pass a Turing test.

[MiloMorai]

A Japanese robot got emotionally attached to a female tech and wouldn't let her out the room. Engineers had to shut the robot down so she could leave the room.

[MaxGunz]

If that actually happened then someone put a label on a simulated behavior. Nice machine.

Now how about fooling an intelligent adult human in an extended phone conversation?

[Pursuivant]

Originally Posted by ElAurens

All that the settings can do is either slow this process down or limit the range that it picks you up as a target.

Maybe it's a subset of "slowing the process down," but the AI can also introduce random errors and do other things that reduce the probability of an accurate targeting solution.

[Igo kyu]

Originally Posted by ElAurens

OK, let's stop speaking about the AI as if they are beings. OK?

The AI is the computer program that runs the sim. It doesn't have to "calculate" anything. It already "knows" evey parameter of your aircraft's performance, and it knows how you have set your gun convergence. It "knows" where you are at all times, it knows when you make a control input, and has a perfect solution for hitting you at all times.

All that the settings can do is either slow this process down or limit the range that it picks you up as a target.

That is more or less correct in my opinion, but you don't have to mess with the AI at all. What you have to do is make any round fired not along the exact bore of the gun, but an random point in a circle around that boresight. This is called a circular area of probability, usually it's given as the radius that 50% of the shots fall within, but as a simplification in a sim one could plausibly use a circle within which 99% of the shots would naturally fall and make all of the shots occur at random points within that. Then the AI could be as accurate as they like, but they wouldn't be pulling off 100% headshot kills at 750 metres, because there would be a random element in there, which would counter their unnatural non-randomness and make the whole game a lot fairer overall. It wouldn't affect the scores of humans, because we're not accurate enough to get headshot kills by other than random chance anyway.