Hell yeah. Great write up, and a great update to a legend.

Now that the original goal of Falcon 4 has been completely achieved, it's time to tackle a new goal. May I suggest that we have here the makings of a classic strategy game that's on par with Chess or the card game Bridge. If Falcon 4 is to equal of surpass the other benchmark of hard core simulations, namely iRacing, there has to be a better way of giving a score for performance and keep people striving for better and better scores.

What I have in mind here is what I'll call "Falcon 4: The Art of War", which takes elements from both Chess and Bridge to become a great strategy game. Falcon 4 Art of War has two phases, like contract bridge. You start with two teams. Each team is given a budget to go out and buy military hardware. Each team sets up that hardware in such a way as to protect its home base. The second phase is, of course, a tactical engagement/war between the two teams. The beauty of this is that to get the maximum bang for the buck each team will have to go through the entire Falcon 4 catalog looking for bargain weapons systems. This way you'll have all kinds of interesting matchups between, say, a few advanced fighters vs. dozens of cheap older generation fighters. As with chess, you can set up a tournament and find a champion.

It's not enough to be a good with a joystick; you've also got to choose your weapons carefully before the fighting starts. This is what makes Falcon Chess a more interesting war simulation. To quote "The Art of War", every battle is won before it's fought.

Mine were exactly the same except for quality level 6 instead of 7. I bumped it up to see. The outside view of the Viper looks nicer now. I have to try the Landing TE, because the last time I ran it, I could barely tell there was an airbase ahead of me, vs the gorgeous shots in your writeup and video. Another odd thing. The UFC doesn't seem to have that 3 Dimensional aspect when I am in the pit vs. your shots and vids. I NEVER REALIZED IT STUCK OUT LIKE THAT!!!

Will play around some more. Of course, the danger is that if I get the graphics tweaked I am going to have to learn to fly in

And to say that I was going to ditch my copy of Falcon 4 for a pittance on Ebay, and spend around $30 for Aerosoft's F16. And then yesterday, I came across this!

Very nice. Very, very nice!

Nice review Beach, covered most of the things that made me say wow when I installed it.

BMS 4.32 basically takes all the badassness that was OpenFalcon and pumps it up on super steroids with a side of crackrock for good measure. It's that awesome.

meh

Nice to see BMS getting SimHQ's treatement. Nice first part of the review, too.

I had tried out BMS a month ago or so, I admit I did not test it much, but very quickly only, but that is because I immediately noticed the other planes' flight models. Bombers and big birds trying to dogfight and dpoing split-S (almost), and fighters behaving as if they were heavy 737s. I admit seeing that behaviour spoiled it immediately for me.

But not one word of that in the review, so I wonder if maybe I must take into account that I had a flawed installation, or something?

Whatever, I would like to get reviewers' thoughts in the next parts about both the fighting AI and the campaign AI, and the flight model behaviours (hint-hint).

I doubt you had a flawed installation. The install is point and click and doesn't overwrite anything else - so it is what it is. Whether we are talking about EECH, Falcon 4, or pretty much any other sim the AI is always going to display questionable behavior. I have yet to find a sim that doesn't do odd things with AI aircraft.

Of somewhat interest (not for me personally) is the campaign control improvements listed on the BMS site HERE!

• Create flights after Day 1
  
• Add Naval Units
  
• Change Squadron - Yes, the virtual pilot can change squadrons mid-campaign!
  
• Decide squadron control
  
• Delete flights safely
  
• Security of User Interface (for example: Unable to delete a flight after it's already airborne)
  
• Abort Packages in real-time after takeoff
  
• Add Packages in real-time
  
• Squadron Scheduling - Slots available vs not available[/i]
  
• The user can now fully control a squadron(s) by 'disconnecting' it from the ATO. You will have full control of planning missions.
  
• A pilot now has more opportunities to join a flight, package or squadron without having to reload the campaign.
  
• There is more flexibility in managing and creating a package.
  
• The user can now set up packages by take off time or time on target.
  
• The user can modify flights / packages up to 2 minutes prior to takeoff. An abort option is present to have a package RTB before carrying out a mission.
  
• Each squadron has a schedule manager, broken down into time slots of 15 minutes. This has been revamped in BMS and made more robust.

In my scanning the many pages of the BMS website I see little in the way of mention regarding AI improvements, so I don't know if they've made any changes to it or not.

Regards,
BeachAV8R

You're welcome!