Since most missions involve an encounter with the enemy, I started doing a maximum of 1 mission per day & skip the other if there are two.

I'm also going to skip a day or two at my discretion if the previous mission resulted in squadron mates being shot down, or getting damaged myself.

Fortunately we have the option to advance time in the campaign to control the rate at which you get into fights over time and the pilot losses. I'm glad most missions end up in a fight because I'd quickly get bored watching my plane fly around on autopilot over & over. Just gotta advance some extra time in between to your preference.

Stop using autopilot and it will become less boring !
If you are flight leader you will have to decide about how the mission goes. If you are wingman, staying in formation while looking around for threats keeps you busy.
( I must admit I use autopilot + time acceleration x 4 for the circling and climbing at waypoint 1 when I'm not flight leader. )

The outcomes aren't totally unrealistic - they are damn sight more realistic than most sims out there. Most sims don't have AI that try to break off and go home for morale, fatigue and other reasons. But yes they will vary a lot with squads, date, locations etc.

If you are flight leader and use no aids you will likely engage less, and have less action. But if we make WOFF totally and utterly real, you will be bored witless. It is still a sim, and for 90% of people they want some action sometimes. We could make more enemy flights happen at other times in the day when you "aren't there" but you'd be more bored of course.

I would say try flying with absolutely no aids at all, Olham. No labels. No dots. No auto-pilot. Deaths will be reduced because the number of combat contacts will plummet. So will user interest most of the time.

It's not really the Devs place to try to reduce combat deaths after the player artificially inflates them by pumping up the chances of engagements every mission through the use of unrealistic in flight sim aids.

You can also do as Creaghorn does and change guns to Less Accurate. That should also reduce squadron deaths.

Well, these are two pairs of shoes.
The whole behaviour of the AI is very "human" and unpredictable; and I have repeatedly praised that.
It is NOWHERE else to be found this way, and it is a great work.
The other pair of shoes is the outcome. When 5 of 6 aircraft in my flight - flown by historical aces -
are getting shot down, wounded and killed, then the mission outcome regarding the pilots' statuses
are yet unrealistic. But I can imagine, that it might just be impossible to script the AI beyond this;
and their actions and decisions are undoubtedly top-notch.


Okay - I have so far always been just a mid-ranking pilot in all flights; never lead.


That is surely true, and I agree. If we had to fly the many eventless missions which the real life pilots
had to fly, we would soon get bored (maybe with the exception of Hasse and Creaghorn ).

Hellshade, I never lead my flights so far; so I didn't lead our gang into these outcomes.

That point about setting guns to "less accurate" might be an interesting idea.
I hadn't read that post by Creaghron. I will give it a try.

I'm curious about the gun accuracy thing. I have always had mine set to normal. I would like to know what Creaghorn, Hellshade and You have yours set to in comparison. I find the "normal" has a fairly good spread of bullet trajectory so you don't get all hits on your adversary unless you are right on his tail.

I don't know which guns would have to be set to "less accurate".
I think there are more than one frame for gun settings.
Maybe Creaghorn or Hellshade can tell.

When flying OFF last year I was using RSS SIA settings (still available at Combat Ace I think) which included "less accurate guns" for main and rear guns, as well as "light regional activity". My last german pilot had 8 victories for 60 missions, while still seeing action.
For the moment in WOFF I use "normal" settings for main guns and "less accurate" for rear guns.

That's what I used. But now I'll try out "less accurate".

Dunno what you mean Olham. It's simply the workshopsetting where you can set the guns to less accurate. That effects all aircraft guns, yours and AI's.

I like less accurate for various reasons. First of all it makes shooting harder. You have to get quite close to have a good punch. Otherwise you will hit them here and there, but they can still fly away with many bulletholes, as it was in real. Vice versa too, you can get shot at here and there, but you don't get necessarily wounded that quick and you can receive more punishment because the bullets are spread around a bit more. Especially since the WOFF damage model is much better than in OFF and it doesn't necessarily slow the hit aircraft automatically down (of course depending of where you hit them).Of course you can still get wounded or go down in flames or disintergrate in the air, but there is more efford involved from you or AI. You can still have victories with 5 hits, but also the enemy can escape with 40 hits and stay alive and vice versa.
Another reason is that aiming in a simulator is much easier than in real. One reason is because you have a twodimensional screen in front of you, and because of that you automatically use your wires, your engine or whatever as crosshairs for your aim. In real you have a 3 dimensional view and therefore you either focus on an object 100 meters in front of you, or an object some inches in front of you, so you couldn't use that as good as crosshairs as it is in simulators.
Also because of the stress of your body, the g-forces etc. aiming is tougher in real, wou will have more tunnelvisions, blurred visions during manouvres, the objects are dancing more in your view etc.
So even if the less accurate setting should be more inaccurate than the real guns have been, i think it makes up a bit for everything i mentioned.

I find Creaghorn's logic sound, and am switching the gun settings (main and rear) in my workshop to less accurate. I think dogfights were probably a lot of shooting done by nervous flustered pilots, with a lot of wild spraying bullets.

That setting change should result in more fights were everyone goes home with ruffled feathers and a few bullet holes in their plane, and less fights where a large bunch of pilots get killed. If so, I think it will be closer to reality.

I have the following setting and I find that the bullets have a fairly good spread but I will try the less accurate setting just to compare the results.

Yes, got it meanwhile.
I had seen another frame for Player's guns only" - but that wasn't for accuracy;
that was for the strength. Maybe the impact or effect of hits.

LOL! The logic in that sentence made no sense to me. I require action!

Then I'll just skip two or three days after every mission I'm in a dogfight.




I try to avoid being flight leader because I've had problems with the commands in the past, along with my flight abandoning me numerous times when I turned or strayed from the mission path. Perhaps there were conditions of which I was unaware, but I have had some frustrations keeping a flight together in the past. That's no biggie for me since I just get in formation, hit the highest time compression I can without it getting chunky (usually 4x or 2x over the lines), put it in external view, and look about for enemies while waiting for some action.

Action always comes to my flight, not the other way around. I've had a small amount of missions end up with no contact at all but the large majority do just by following the mission waypoints in formation. We don't have to go off the beaten path. I'm quite happy with that situation since if this combat sim was just about flying around looking for specks in the sky over & over, I'd quickly lose interest. Although my 1918 campaign mission experiences have overwhelmingly involved being jumped by multiple enemy flights, as a German pilot, in each mission. Even at the same time. But I'm afraid that turning down air activity will be too much so I just arbitrarily skip some days in between missions resulting in combat to try and keep the frequency at a good level regarding the campaign time span. It works well enough.

I am curious as to how much the gun accuracy settings lower/raise them. I'm finding that the AI pilots often critically damage/wound other AI pilots with very few bullets from behind, and most of my dying wingmates are usually done in as soon as combat starts. There is definitely a precedent for that as pilots often mentioned diving from above, literally targeting an enemy pilot in his cockpit, and downing that one in the first pass. My AI flights just tend to get bounced like this constantly, at least in 1918, so the turnover rate is pretty huge. Luckily the historical aces don't permanently die.

" if this combat sim was just about flying around looking for specks in the sky over & over, I'd quickly lose interest. "

That's what most of us have been doing for a few years ! We also look for flak bursts, you can see them from further out...

The strong point of OFF/WOFF being that there is a war going on around you, you often find more targets (and therefore more action...) outside your pre-determined set of waypoints than by following it blindly.

Indeed.

I do look for specks in the sky.. but with time compression going.

I like the developers' attention to detail. The flak bursts is a good example. I was impressed to see that the Allied flak bursts are white and the German ones black. Makes it as helpful as it historically was. Well done, sirs!

I don't require action in every mission I fly. It's quite fun (and more historically accurate) to fly missions that often have no combat at all. You'll never know when something happens, so the tension is always there, even in otherwise uneventful missions. In my opinion, it makes combat all the more intense and satisfying when it's something unexpected that doesn't occur every time you take off from your field. I often fly two-seaters, so the less fighter action I experience, the better! But even in fighter careers, I don't want to see every sortie turning into a massacre. It hurts the immersion.

Now if only the two-seaters had working cameras and wireless equipment for those recon and arty co-op missions...

I agree. Action-less missions are okay and helps put things into perspective. I just don't want uneventful missions taking up a lot of my play time. Occasional ones are nice.

Perhaps we'll see more bomber & two-seater specific stuff in a future expansion? If nothing else, I'd pick up a bomber expansion just for getting extra types to shoot at.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch...

Someone called it. Hans' second mission in his brand new Fokker Dr.I ended in his demise. During a dogfight with two SPAD XIIIs he fell. After putting some holes in both SPADs, he was doing fairly well and was keeping them off his tail. The poor guy did not perish under enemy fire, but his wings broke off in a tight turn and he plummeted to his death, which seemingly took forever to meet the ground.

(as with the tendency in turns with Nieuports, the wing creaking had stopped for two or three seconds so I slowly put on a bit more elevator, thinking I now had some room to safely pull a bit more, and it just snapped without further audio cue. I'm still having trouble finding "the edge" for those.)



He had 15 confirmed kills & a promotion, surviving just barely over a month (with a few manually skipped days in there). But we had such plans!