Yes, the basics. "How" you fly has everything to do with how well you fare against other pilots. In Comanche Gold in multiplayer
mode, the faster you fly, the better the chance you have of out maneuvering and evading incoming projectiles, guided or not. One of the problems with flying fast at low altitude is that your cannon &
your tail rotor tend to take allot of abuse.
There are basically 3 types of Flight Profiles
1) NOE or Nap-Of-the-Earth.
Instead of flying low over obstacles like trees or buildings, you fly around them. Because your primary concern is safety, NOE is the slowest of all three profiles. When flying NOE,
remember toe 30-30 rule. Stay below 30 feet and under 30 knots.
2) CONTOUR FLIGHT
You are still flying relatively close to the ground but not so low that you have to weave in and around obstacles. When flying
Contour, you want to stay between 30-100 feet above the ground. Your risk of detection is raised slightly. Hopefully it’s off-set by your increased speed.
3) ALTITUDE DASH
Basically, you are flying high enough off the ground to cause commercial airliners to swerve. Maybe not, but certainly,
you’re high enough that anyone for miles around could spot you with a pair of binoculars. This is the fastest of all three profiles. With nothing standing in your way, you can put the “pedal to the metal”.
My Comments
Most pilots flying in Comanche Gold kinda borrow from all three of these flight profiles. Typically, everyone flies at or around 20 feet off
of the deck. (kinda between profiles 1 & 2) Everyone typically flies at or around bladestall. (definately the 3rd profile) Staying as close to the deck as possible is crucial. If you let your altitude climb & you
top even only at 50 feet, you become visible on radar much sooner to nearby prowlers. I see it, & do it, all the time, two pilots engage & start that “dance”. One or both almost always start to gain altitude.
Why? Because in typical flight, your altitude lock is ingaged & you’re just clocking along. The “alt lock” will automatically disengage when you move the collective. When you break from your flight path
to engage a target, you may add collective to gain or maintain speed throught a turn. This will cause your “alt lock” to break. This is when you start to climb. This is where you become a target to others.
You will also see high fliers. Remember the commercial airliner thing? Yup! Same thing here. These guys fly around at the top of
the envelope and look for you. Both visually and on radar. If they see you, they pounce. If you lock them, they see you & they pounce. It is very difficult to combat these flyers because of something
called the “pogo” or “bounce”. High flyers have a little more trouble when they are playing with 4 or more opponents but they can still wreak havoc. They drop out of the sky with the nose down, hurdling
at you at bladestall speeds. When they get to about 35 feet, they slam on the gas giving max collective. This causes them to catapult at speeds in excess of 400 or 500 knots. Bladestall? Yes
but they have time to recover from this since they are rapidly climbing in alitude. By this time, you may have already launched 2 or 3 Stingers or more & maybe one or both of your Hellfires. Now
you are only throwing rocks & they are droping in to finish you off.
Yet another style you may find in the Gold arena is what we affectionately call “campers”. People who sit & wait for someone to
fly by. This annoys many fliers simply because the game switches from a boxing match to a game of hide & seek. This is especially the case with low fliers. Low fliers can fly within 50 feet of another in
some places on the map & neither pilot knows the other is anywhere near. This means that a low flyer could end up searching for a long time before finding a camper. The speed at which most
low flyers overtake a camper is usually why a camper is toasted over his own fire pit flames. High flyers end up facing campers a lot because if you are in a good location, the hi guy may never see you.
If you use the quick lock technique with your weapons system, you can get off a couple of carefully timed shots without giving your position away. (Until they see the vapor trail from the missile.) This
gives the camper some additional survivability against high flyers but as I said above, you are now playing hide & seek. High flyers for the most part know the best camp sites, and they are very hard to
hit when they are bouncing around like the energizer bunny, so it is usually suicide to “camp” against them or anyone else.
No matter which style you fly, the opposition is fierce. When the games get 5 and 6 players or more, they get really hairy! You will
see some fantastic flyers doing some spectacular manuevers. If you play long enough to learn the in’s & out’s, you may become one of the elite pilots of the Comanche Cult!
Read about
Offensive & Defensive
manuevers.
Teams play is allot of fun. It gives you the chance to build technique in areas that normally don’t get the time of day.
Obviously flying as a team means
communication. Comanche Gold doesn’t have a vocal communication
package integrated but all is not lost. Roger
Wilco is a 3rd party software package that allows users
to communicate over the internet in real time. If you modify
the Comanche Gold Wsetup.exe
file you can use “RW” & fly at the same time. This opens
a whole new world of combat in Comanche.
One area that is good to develop is formation flying. As you can see to the right, there are several different modes & each one has it’s purpose. I haven’t a clue as to what they are, but they have a
purpose. :)
Most often used in Comanche is the column. One flyer is in the lead & the other is watching his six. Cruising over the landscape looking for something or someone to gang up on. Just hope you’re not alone
when they find you. And they will find you.
