Originally Posted By: Polovski
You can't say a human wouldn't do something totally irrational - even driving on the roads you see all sorts of nutters day in day out, who would easily kill themselves let alone you. Many pilots were lost through accidents, live with it, that's war in the air WW1 style.


Truly I don't want to belabor the point, but there are definitely some things that a human wouldn't likely do that lead to undesirable behavior in the sim. Simo runs still happened when I was flying mil, though they were thankfully less common than in the early days of flight. In game, I have no beef with calling it bad luck when you swap paint in a furball or fixate on a target as I did the other day.

Having said that, there are absolutely some AI behaviors where the AI is trying mightily to do the smart thing, but can't quite decide what that is. The big whifferdills that the escort flight does if the escorted aircraft is substantially slower is one example that comes to mind. Leading a flight of 5 or more at a couple of knots above stall speed is just not good flight leadership. And it yields predictable results like stalls and midairs.

As always, I'm really not looking to slam the AI or WOFF as I pretty firmly believe it is one of the best sims ever made. But I always have a hard time accepting that its few vices are secretly virtues. I accept the occasional head scratchers for what they are and try to work around them. So my pondering over the last couple of days has not been in the way of aggravation at WOFF, but more of considering whether your flight lead running your flight into the mountains is a fortune of war to be accepted or a rare AI glitch to be recovered from.

In any case, I don't mean to get into a Luf on the point. I'm still undecided myself. Should I ever decide to resurrect a pilot after my personal BS light comes on, I will be more than happy to courteously recuse myself from the DiD campaign.

I don't really play for points and my pilots never seem to live that long anyway. wink