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Red Baron 3D vs. Flying Corps Gold
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Introduction Installation 4:4 Documentation 4:4 Graphics 4:4 Sounds 4:4 Flight and Combat 3:5 Situational Awareness 3:4 Computer Opponents 3:3 Between Combats 2:3 Buglessness 3:4 Single Scenarios 4:3 Mission Editors 3:4 Campaign Mode 4:4 Multiplayer 3:2
The so-called “artificial intelligence” (AI) that flies the computer-controlled planes is another critical element in a good combat flight simulator. Ideally the computer-controlled planes should be challenging opponents for a wide range of different-skilled players, should be able to fly the planes competently, react reasonably, and represent a wide range of skill levels from ace to novice. Flying Corps Gold’s AI is quite impressive in most respects. It flies the game’s difficult planes skillfully, shows distinct differences between different enemy pilots, behaves differently according to pilot personalities, the situation and pre-flight fighting instructions, performs ground attacks, and tries to bait and gang up on enemy planes. The AI will run away from a bad situation, will not pointlessly pursue crashing foes, can recover from aerobatic accidents, and can sometimes be snuck up on. One skill they are unfortunately not so good at is managing to land safely when their airplane becomes seriously damaged. Specific historical aces are present and have their own ratings and quirks. Two scenarios (one for each side) pit the top aces on both sides against each other, including the player. I find it quite fun and challenging trying to outmaneuver Flying Corps Gold’s AI pilots at the Regular and Ace settings. The problem I repeatedly encounter, however, is that they are deadly shots once they get lined up. Even with a split-second to make a difficult high-deflection or ranged shot, they quite often hit me and do crippling damage. This is my number one criticism of the game - the AI is too good a shot! If only there were a way to adjust this accuracy down on a sliding scale! I’d set it down below ten percent of the current level, which is about how good I am at lining up shots in a split-second. The other major effect of this is that the battles are very bloody, and even the computer-controlled aces can’t do a lot to dodge their deadly AI counterparts, so the very nicely-detailed squadron management aspects of the game become rather depressing and unrewarding, because the death rate is much higher even than it was historically. For ace players who can never find a good enough opponent, however, this may be what they want. Flying Corps Gold The Regular AI blows my wheels off with a Flying Corps Gold’s Novice AI is almost as good a shot when it gets lined up, but is otherwise fairly pathetic and uninteresting to fight. It’s not bad to represent the many inexperienced pilots that were sent up historically, but since this is a general adjustment to all pilots, using it turns most enemies into mediocre flyers who remain deadly marksmen once lined up, which is not what’s needed. There should still be a decent number of very good flyers - they just shouldn’t be able to score hits with divine accuracy. The One-On-One single scenario illustrates this well. The description of this scenario reads “Your opponent will pass your right side, heading in the opposite direction. You must get on his tail quickly if you are to be the victor.” Indeed the planes start out facing opposite directions with a good distance off to the side from one another, so they shouldn’t be able to do what the Ace AI does: what actually happens is he almost invariably wipes you out with a frontal shot in the first half-second, unless perhaps you start with a wild dodge. The Regular AI can sometimes do this too, depending on his airplane. The Novice AI can’t, because his best maneuver seems to be a slow turn, but if you do approach him from head on, he can shoot you apart almost as easily as the others. In campaign games the pilots show more variety of skill because in addition to the general settings, each pilot has their own skill, personality and morale ratings. However, the fact that they all have superhuman shooting ability tends to even the field in a multi-plane dogfight, and death rates become extremely high, even for aces. In sum, Flying Corps Gold’s AI is very good at flying its planes and presenting different types of flyers, but they’re all given superhuman shooting ability, which undermines many of the game’s outstanding qualities. I imagine this was done to keep the games exciting and challenging for expert players, but in that case it should still be given a wide scale of optional adjustment for regular and novice players, and also when the AI fights itself. Flying Corps Gold Both humans and computers have a hard time flying
planes without tails. Red Baron 3D’s AI is generally well done. Usually it behaves quite well and I’ve had a very hard time defeating the better AI pilots, especially when outnumbered. Even the worst AI fighter pilots are often quite good at dodging and evading attacks. I have heard many expert players make fun of the AI and call it an easy opponent, but it’s not always easy at my skill level (and perhaps also with my CPU speed), after months of play. Red Baron 3D’s pilots are rated for skill level, rank, and number of kills. As in Flying Corps Gold there’s also an overall AI skill level one can set, and individual historical aces are available. The AI attacks aggressively, but will also run away from superior enemies, particularly when it's flying bomber or observation planes. The Red Baron 3D upgrade has also improved the game’s AI in some ways - for instance, mixed-type formations can now stay together; the faster planes will use less throttle, instead of leaving slower partners behind as happened in Red Baron II. Also as in Flying Corps Gold, Red Baron 3D’s AI pilots are all extremely good shots, given an opportunity. This causes the same problems as it does in Flying Corps, but in general the problem is much less severe in Red Baron 3D, partly due to the slower bullets which give dodging and target deflection greater effect. Selecting the lowest Red Baron 3D overall AI “skill level” seems to help, but even with Novice pilots at minimum skill levels, I have found myself quite readily riddled by AI gunners with what would be quite difficult shots for me. Although this is much less of a problem than it is in Flying Corps Gold, I feel this game would also benefit from a “marksmanship” slider option that had no other effect on the AI. Red Baron 3D The AI got me again. Note the torn wing, dripping The behavior of Red Baron 3D’s computer pilots sometimes lacks in other ways - the AI isn’t always able to fly the planes competently, although this has improved a bit over earlier versions of the game where failed takeoffs and crash landings were commonplace. A continuing deficiency is the AI’s inability to effectively conduct attacks on ground targets. Instead, AI planes generally circle around getting shot up by enemy ground batteries. My own experiments trying to set up an airstrike scenario showed that the “dodge incoming fire” behaviour has precedence over attacking, to the extent that a entire wing of heavy bombers will break off an imminent attack to wiggle left and right when a single machinegun fires on one of them. Other disappointing behaviour includes chasing and attacking already-crashing opponents to low altitude, and occasionally ignoring the player flight leader and leaving him to his fate as he is attacked by multiple enemies. AI pilots can see through clouds except the “scud level” type, and according to the readme this simple comparison of altitudes can greatly slow the program… it suggests possibly turning off clouds during combat. Another AI weak point in both games is mid-air collision avoidance. Fortunately, mid-air collisions are optional in both games, because in both games the AIs crash into the player and each other quite frequently. They’d never get insurance. Red Baron 3D in fact never allows friendly planes to collide with each other… with good reason. One noteworthy Red Baron 3D AI performance is the “interlocked wing” Spad formation (pictured below). Attacking this group with a single plane, I found that they continued to fly all together (although they stopped actually touching), allowing me to stay on the tail of five enemy planes at once.
So except for the one critical issue of AI superhuman marksmanship, I found Flying Corps Gold’s AI somewhat better done than Red Baron 3D’s, which also suffers from that problem but to a lesser degree. In both cases, converting the existing “vulnerability” option from an on/off setting to a % reduction would seem to be a simple and elegant fix. Ideally there would be a second slider for “AI vs. AI vulnerability” which would allow toning down the general death rate to a more historical level, and would allow AI aces to survive a bit longer. A more complex approach that would require more testing would be to modify the AI’s ability to aim with precision by the pilot’s skill factor. The player’s gun’s ability to damage enemies could also be adjustable - Flying Corps Gold in fact has three “target size” options that allow this, although the Small setting may be a little bit generous in comparison to the accuracy of historical World War One machineguns.
Between Combats: in-flight maps and accelerated time 2:3 Red Baron 3D’s in-flight map is a little easier to read and use than Flying Corps Gold’s. The main advantage is that it comes up almost immediately, whereas requesting the Flying Corps Gold map pauses the game and requires a considerable wait before it appears, followed by another wait on exit before the game returns to flight mode. Red Baron 3D’s maps also show your plane’s direction and all landmarks such as ground troops and airbases, while Flying Corps Gold’s don’t show these during flight, and only via an awkward “one kind of landmark at a time” system when one studies the map before flight. On the other hand, Flying Corps Gold includes fairly nice physical maps and the detailed landscapes allow one to try to navigate using these actual maps, compass and visual observations, if one enjoys such things. Flying Corps Gold’s accelerated time does have the advantage of being faster than Red Baron 3D’s, which is particularly noticeable on a slower system - I spent a lot of time creeping along the Red Baron 3D map waiting for action and sometimes not finding any, whereas Flying Corps Gold zooms along to the next encounter at just the right pace. The Flying Corps Gold map also scrolls to show new areas when one flies near the edge, whereas in Red Baron 3D flying off the map means precisely that, and one can get truly lost, although the autopilot will bring one back to the map eventually. As for autopilots, neither game has the simple ability to select new waypoints during flight, or to skip waypoints on the flight plan. Therefore the autopilot can become useless if the action takes one off the planned path, or (as happens frequently in Red Baron 3D airfield attacks) if the AI insists on lingering over a target after an attack is finished. Suddenly one has to do all the remaining navigation oneself, in real time. Red Baron 3D does at least have a “fly straight and level” autopilot mode, so you can use that to good effect with time acceleration, but one should periodically slow it down and look for foes, or you might get killed in accelerated time before you know it. Flying Corps Gold has a button that tells the autopilot to skip all waypoints and go home, which is also very useful, but if enemy planes are in range and you try to use the accelerated time to move on, you get a glimpse of the map between two long loading delays as the game switches back and forth from map and flight, accomplishing nothing but wasting the player’s time. To avoid this the player should check for enemy planes in range using the padlock option before trying to use accelerated time. All in all, Flying Corps Gold’s accelerated time system wastes less time and causes less frustration and boredom than Red Baron 3D’s. Flying Corps Gold The in-flight map
The original version of Red Baron Multiplayer, though no longer available, must be mentioned. For at least several weeks after Red Baron II was first sold, multiplayer mode was a rare pinnacle in the history of game bugginess. Every so often wings would rip off for no reason. Frequently one player would be unable to see his opponent, while the opponent would see him as an invulnerable smoking fireball zooming over the battlefield. Players could shoot down enemies on their tail by firing forward, due to network synchronization problems. Drops and crashes were extremely frequent, and the most amazing part was that there were still hundreds of players trying for hours to get a few fleeting seconds of dogfighting in between the bug attacks. Red Baron Multiplayer has come a long way. Crashes, drops and other bugs have slowly been reduced and removed, so that now it more or less works as intended. Flying Corps Gold As in Red Baron 3D, a Fokker
triplane missing its upper wing can be safely landed… Single-player Red Baron 3D has always been much more solid than multi-player, with fewer bugs that have been slowly addressed by patches. Problems have included anti-aircraft firing at the wrong side, after-action reports (and scenario damage results) that had peculiar ideas about what had happened, damaged planes landing behind enemy lines and taxiing home across No-Man’s Land, resurrecting aces, and a host of others. For the most part, those that remain aren’t particularly serious. Without 3Dfx, night missions with clouds mean practical blindness, except for the AI pilots, who can “see” just fine. Therefore, without 3Dfx these are suicide missions and make playing the British or French (who are the main ones to assign them) in campaigns rather unpleasant once this occurs. Another annoying bug-provided way to end a Red Baron 3D campaign is via a court-martial, which come up when one shoots one’s own men or does something else naughty, or apparently randomly and for no reason sometimes. They never tell you what you were accused of. Fortunately, they usually don’t end a campaign. In my experience Flying Corps Gold has far fewer bug problems than Red Baron 3D, although I have had less experience with Flying Corps’s earlier versions. I have seen video choppiness, slowness, and crashes, but only when I have tried to play the game immediately after installing it, or after installing a game patch, and occasionally after having run several other programs. Rebooting the computer after installing the game or a patch seems to prevent these problems, although the program doesn’t prompt you to do so. The program may also run slowly if other programs are running in Windows at the same time. These tips are of course also worthwhile for most Windows games, including Red Baron 3D. Flying Corps Gold Oh NOOOoooooo… (Did I mention the AI is a good shot?) If you don’t have 3Dfx, run Flying Corps Gold in DOS mode - in Windows mode it will be quite slow and difficult. To use 3Dfx, you must use Windows, but without other programs running the game runs quite quickly, even on a 133MHz computer.
Red Baron 3D offers a configurable Fly Now mode, in which you start in the air with one plane of any flyable type, and enemy planes appear ahead of you every so often for you to fight. You can specify the number of minutes between each foe’s appearance, the type of plane they will fly and their skill level (all the same, or all random - including all planes and nationalities). This provides quick arcade-style dogfight practice, and an easy way to try different plane match-ups. I spent one night enjoying giving myself unlimited ammunition and rockets, and seeing how many giant bombers I could shoot down, arriving at one a minute so that the sky was full of lumbering bombers trying to dogfight with me. I also spent some time laying waste to ground installations with unlimited bombs and rockets. The computer enjoys this too - I once set Combat Auto-Pilot during an air attack with unlimited bombs, and the computer took out its frustration by dropping hundreds of bombs with its super-human trigger finger. It didn’t hit anything but there were so many explosions that it broke the game’s ability to play the sound effects in sync for a while.
Red Baron 3D also includes twenty-seven well-designed single-player scenarios, ranging from tutorials to historical encounters. Flying Corps Gold’s single scenarios include eight types: First Flight, Follow Leader, Turkey Shoot, One on One, Ground Attack, Squadron Encounter, Stalking Prey and First Patrol. Each type can be played with each of the seven flyable planes (against different opposing plane types), plus a French Spad, making sixty-four scenarios of eight types. There are also nine other single scenarios included, two of which are the same except for which side the player is on. Both games give an account of what happened at the end of every flight. Red Baron 3D’s includes a map showing the player’s flight path and where each event took place, even for non-player aircraft. Sometimes however, particularly in single-mission flight, it gets confused about who did what to whom and what nationality, how severe a crash was, and so on. Flying Corps Gold’s is generally accurate, but includes no map and fewer details, particularly about what happened to non-player planes. Flight sims in the past have included options to save recordings of the action for later study and enjoyment. Unfortunately, neither game keeps any permanent record of what happens in single scenarios, rendering Red Baron 3D’s scoring system more meaningless than it already is, and leading one to forget one’s exploits and more quickly lose interest in this type of play.
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© 1998