Mission Editors 3:4

   Both games also include mission editors, which are very detailed and capable and allow players to create single scenarios as detailed as any in the games themselves, or even more so.

   Red Baron 3D’s editor allows one to take advantage of the game’s historical data about the different forces that were historically present. For any day, all of the flights from each airfield in the selected area of the front will be part of the scenario, and can be examined and edited at will. Most of this data is clearly invented and computer-generated, as such detailed historical records for all squadrons surely don’t exist, but it is very interesting and useful nonetheless. I imagine this is the basis for the missions generated by the campaign game. It certainly makes it easy to generate new scenarios with plenty of incidental traffic and support for flying off the intended course. Essentially, all you need to do is choose a date, an airfield and a flight - there’s your new scenario! Dates allowed are as early as August 1, 1915.

   Of course, you can also make all the changes you like, or start without any activity and build a scenario from the ground up, making it historical or fantastic. There are some limits. For instance, each squadron can have at most nine planes. For the most part, however, one can create practically any scenario.

   Red Baron 3D’s mission editor can be a bit slow and cumbersome, due to its somewhat confusing hierarchy of different menus for flights, waypoints, squadrons, and so on. One can easily get confused about which flight or waypoint one is editing, because to change a different kind of value one must change screens and sometimes contexts, losing the previous view and relying on memory to keep track of which flight is which, and so on.

   All said, the Flying Corps Gold editor seems to be a bit more capable and easy to use. The interface is much more sensible, being based on a large detailed map with plenty of button controls and drop-down menus. This way, the user can edit everything about the scenario from one screen. The editor allows you to edit a few more things than the Red Baron 3D editor does, including exact altitude and airspeed between waypoints, ground object and unit positions and movements, mission objectives, AI personalities, wind speed and direction.

   Flying Corps Gold

The mission editor.

   The only thing you can’t do with this editor that you can do with Red Baron 3D’s is automatically fill the skies with historically appropriate flights. It will provide appropriate towns, airfields, hospitals, artillery, balloons and so forth for different periods, but the aircraft flights must be specified by the user. The scenarios’ dates and plane match-ups are of course more limited than in Red Baron 3D because the game has fewer plane types, mostly for 1917-1918. However, the scenario editor and the game do more easily support larger battles with more planes engaged at once.

   Flying Corps Gold’s editor has two other features that the Red Baron 3D editor lacks, especially tempting for the fanatical player: campaign creation and compiler script editing. The editor allows one to create new campaigns from the ground up, which is very nice but does require a lot of work. Compiler script editing is the ability to examine and edit the text script for a mission that the editor creates, before it is sent to the mission compiler for conversion into a game file. This is quite interesting, but no document exists explaining the script format, although it’s fairly easy to intuit what some of it means. Potentially one could control things that the editor doesn’t provide a way to change.

   For the adventurous hacker: The text scripts for the game’s campaigns are in the BFIELDS directory. Start with the file called battle.src, and follow the #INCLUDE statements, which name other files that are part of the scripts. Changing any of the files in this directory may cause the program not to work correctly. In that case you should uninstall and reinstall the game (and then reboot) - fortunately that’s rather easy to do.

   The Flying Corps Gold editor can be confusing when you ask to open a new mission - if you haven’t made any changes to the current mission, it won’t let you cancel the request to load a new mission (you can of course load the mission you already have loaded). If you have made changes, it nicely warns you to save first or lose data, and in that case you can cancel.

Campaign Mode 4:4

   Flying Corps Gold and Red Baron 3D offer different kinds of campaign games. In both games the player creates a character who joins a particular squadron as a rookie or an officer and flies a series of missions on specific dates, with various events in-between, gaining new awards alongside the other squadron members and surviving as long as they can.

   Red Baron 3D offers a huge number of possible campaigns, although they are all basically the same - you fly a series of missions from a fixed number of types, and may occasionally change squadrons, rise in rank and receive medals. Red Baron 3D’s campaign engine sometimes feels a bit like a random scenario generator. Differences arise from enrolling with different nationalities and squadrons, and from changing conditions at different times during the war. The player’s actions don’t seem to have a major effect on the game world except for one’s own casualties. Your own squadron can easily run low on planes, or on good planes, which can make things very difficult. Surviving a crash may result in a lot of time passing before the next mission as your character heals, escapes from imprisonment and/or finds his way back to base. Hopefully you and some of your squadron-mates will survive the war… probably not. To an extent, your characters’ histories are recorded for remembrance and comparison, although each game upgrade has moved all the old campaigns into another folder the game can’t see, because in some cases old campaigns were incompatible with new patches.

   Flying Corps Gold

   Twenty-four hostile planes meet at high altitude.

   Flying Corps Gold offers only five specific campaigns - two German, one British, one American, and one French, but these are considerably more detailed and varied than Red Baron 3D’s campaign options. The manual contains twenty-four pages of background history and discussion on the first four campaigns, discussing the various historical factors, events, and notes and tips on the game’s version. Each campaign presents a different story with different conditions, different goals, and different kinds of decisions to make:

• The Flying Circus campaign puts the player in command of Manfred von Richtofen’s squadron in the Spring of 1917 while he vacations. Your goal is to catch up to his kill record in his absence while keeping squadron losses and morale under control in a war of attrition amidst rumors of the “anti- Richtofen squadron.” Usually each game day presents a choice of three missions in sectors with different activity levels.
• The other German campaign charges you with stopping the decisive British surprise tank attack of November 1917 at Cambrai. This campaign is particularly interesting because it requires the player to decide how to meet the threat from several different kinds of enemies including tanks, aircraft and artillery that actually maneuver and fight German ground units during play with meaningful effects. The player must decide whether to defend German troops and guns from Allied airstrikes, or to attack enemy artillery and/or guns, depending on what happens during the game.
• In the Spring Offensive campaign, the player is a new British pilot who reports for action in February of 1918, just before the Germans’ critical last-gasp attack. The goals of the campaign are to see the German advance stopped, and to rise to command your own squadron. This campaign involves a variety of different missions including training, balloon attack, and ground attacks including helping out in the first tank versus tank battle of the war.
• The Hat in the Ring campaign’s goal is to match US ace of aces Eddie Rickenbacker’s service record, starting in April of 1918 as a rookie. The campaign features tough battles against late-war Jagdgeschwaders - large groups of experienced pilots flying the formidable Fokker D.VII.
• I was surprised to discover the French campaign, The Stork’s Nest, under Custom Missions! It takes place during the 1918 Spring Offensive, with your squadron flying in support of British troops. The scenario has the interesting goal of building your squadron’s reputation as an elite unit. As squadron leader, your goal is to lead your men so well that ten of them survive to become aces with at least five kills each, in two weeks of intense fighting. Fortunately, your men aren’t all rookies!

   Flying Corps Gold offers more detail and control in squadron management as well - fliers have different skill and morale levels and even different personality types, and can be assigned different pre-flight fighting orders. However, in both games the combat is so deadly, and the difference between a good and a bad AI pilot is so small, that AI losses are always high, and the effect of other AI aces small. See the section on AI.

   Unfortunately, Flying Corps Gold keeps no record of past exploits, either in single missions or in campaigns, unless one counts saved campaign games.

Multiplayer 3:2

   Both Flying Corps Gold and Red Baron 3D include multi-player modes of play which include modem, serial cable, local network, and Internet connections. In each case, the detailed campaign aspects are unavailable, although the new World Opponent Air Corps offers this through players’ manual efforts. Both games offer simple dogfights between human-controlled fighter planes, including the popular but less historically-interesting option to play what even in Flying Corps Gold has been called “Deathmatch” (at least Red Baron 3D calls it “free-for-all Mêlée”): all planes fly against all others regardless of nationality, with scores for kills but little penalty for dying. Despite this simplicity, it can be quite fun to dogfight other humans. Very skilled players can be quite difficult to beat. It’s most interesting with more than two players, however. Two players alone in the world can become less interesting when a good dogfighter like the Fokker Dr.I meets a less agile high-speed plane like the Spad XIII. In this case, the faster plane must usually attempt hit-and-run attacks while the dogfighter waits, the contest becoming a series of brief head-on shootouts.

   Red Baron 3D’s simpler flight model and extreme difference in abilities between some of the planes also limit the interest to certain plane types. In each version of the game, players have quickly learned which half-dozen planes are currently superior to all the others, and exclusively fly those unless they get bored and decide to try some other match-up.

   The best part about Red Baron Multiplayer is WON, Sierra’s World Opponent Network. All Internet play is through WON, which may sound limiting but in practice provides a convenient forum for meeting other players and receiving news and new game upgrades. Thanks to WON, you can join a Red Baron Multiplayer dogfight pretty much any time you want.

   Since soon after the game appeared, some Red Baron Multiplayer players have organized into “squadrons” who will challenge each other to team games with certain arranged rules. In September 1998, WON announced the start of the World Opponent Air Corps, which is an attempt to organize more interesting games and give them a campaign game context. Players sign up as a character on either side, and multiplayer games are organized and then played out using Red Baron Multiplayer, with the results being tracked for each character and squadron, and recorded in a history on the web. Their intention is to recreate the entire war this way. For more information see the WOAC web page. 

   Red Baron Multiplayer has had a terrible history with bugs. Thankfully, most of them have been worked out so that getting a working game seems to be a likely proposition these days, although sometimes there are still problems. Supposedly, up to thirty-two players can now fly at once.

   In Red Baron Multiplayer, every plane has an extra supply of a silly number of rockets and bombs (15-60, depending on difficulty level). These are mainly for fun, perhaps useful if one plays the less-popular Team Mêlée mode and decides for some reason to persecute enemy airbases rather than planes, which the game offers little reason to attempt. The rockets are potent if they hit, but they’re very inaccurate and in multiplayer mode you can’t fire them in rapid succession. There is a (ground) Target Destruction game mode, where the goal is to destroy a certain number of enemy ground targets. I’ve never seen anyone suggest playing this, however.

   Just as the best part of Red Baron Multiplayer is its service for quickly finding opponents, the worst part of Flying Corps Gold multiplayer is its lack of any such feature. Empire Interactive hasn’t provided any way to find other players, leaving it up to them to find each other and schedule games however they can. The game doesn’t even provide a feature or instructions on how to figure out what your own IP address is (in Windows, I suggest running WINIPCFG), which one needs to know for TCP/IP mode. Flying Corps Gold supports up to eight players at once, if you can find them. The Wargamer does offer Flying Corps Gold on its Opponent Registry.

   Flying Corps Gold’s multiplayer options are quite similar to Red Baron 3D’s, without the Target Destruction mode: you can play with historical teams, or everyone against everyone else. Flying Corps Gold does offer quite a few more options for configuring flight: different starting positions, game length, unlimited ammo, gun jams, and over a dozen flight model parameters. Flying Corps Gold also offers access to the paint shop for multiplayer play, whereas Red Baron 3D only allows you to pick from schemes you happen to have memorized the squadron code for.

   Resurrection in Flying Corps Gold multiplayer involves pressing a key after a five-second delay… an explosion sound notifies other players and your new plane spirals up to a certain height automatically before you can start fighting again. This is perhaps slightly more elegant than the Red Baron 3D system, where new planes appear on the ground at airfields… in Free For All Mêlée often the same airfield as their foes!

   One serious omission in Flying Corps Gold multiplayer seems to be a chat mode for sending messages to the other players once in flight. However the time limit does bring players back to the multiplayer configuration screen where players can communicate using a very crude chat interface.

Flying Corps Gold

The smouldering end of an Albatros.

Buy Red Baron II	Buy Flying Corps Gold

System Requirements:

Game screen captures presented in this review were made with HyperSnap-DX by Hyperionics.

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