| Coming Back Alive: European Air War
by Jim "Twitch" Tittle |
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I thought I had everything figured out in Microprose' European Air War until the upgrade patch came out. I believe the patch tweaked in favor of the A.I. (artificial intelligence) too strongly. But that's open to conjecture. Whatever your assessment of the overall impact of the patch, these elementary observations on tactics should assist you if you are new to EAW. ROLL & DIVE The most often used maneuver by the A.I. is the split S. It seemed faithful enough to real accounts at first. When you take on the Luftwaffe fighters and follow a 109 or 190 through a Split S, you will grey out/black out. When you recover you'll find that the enemy has had the same strain put on him and must recover too. No cheating here! The P-47 generally can't get lead on a 109 or 190 in the nose-down pull-up move, but the 109 and 190 can pull lead on the '47. The P-51s, on the other hand, can stay with the German planes without difficulty. What about the P-38s? Unfortunately, these aircraft in EAW get control compression too early, at 440 mph TAS. It should be more like 500 mph. The Spits, Hurricane and Tempest fly fine. The Me110s, as in real life, are just meat on the table. Modeling is so stong in EAW that the Typhoon even models the weak tail design with compression at a bit past maximum speed of 412 mph. Don't plan on doing much diving or tight turning with this aircraft.  The Me 262, on the other hand, with its superior speed is excellent for running through bomber formations with the 30mms pumping. This will get you kills and keep you almost invulnerable, as did the real thing! Anyhow, so far so good. COVER ME! The most important area of tactics in EAW is control of wingmen. Learning to command and monitor your flight is not merely a matter of understanding tactics, but also of learning how the simulation designers have modeled the various responses. Everyone has different expectations of what should happen. In EAW you have to keep your fingers flying on the keys to direct your guys. "Cover me" is a command for the wingman or the whole squadron, but I don't feel any safer when sending this command to my wingman. Often he acknowledges my orders even though he's too far away to be useful. |
 Click for 1024x768 So what do you do if you've made a bad move and the bandits are thick and heavy? Well, you could email me for help, but you'll be down in flames before I respond! The best move seems to be to use the "Anyone Help" command, which seems to get multiple, quick responses. If you wingman is near enough you can direct him to kill your target. In fact, if he is very close to you your wingman is smart enough to fire on the enemy without being told. As in real life, there are some disadvantages here since several people have been shot down by friendlies. I've taken a few rounds from my wing, but never yet been disabled.
 The 1.1 patch addressed the bomber armor and gunner ability and both have been upgraded. The heavies take more hits to die and you will take more rounds from the Allied gunners as well. The good side is that with the 1.1 patch you can direct one of your sections to attack ground targets while you take on interceptors. One of the lesser used calls that you should not forget is the call to ground control for help. Sending this request will call in the reinforcements, and when they are available they will save your butt. If you are in a weakened squadron with four A/C instead of twelve, issue this call while on the takeoff runway. The Luftwaffe and the Green A puzzling thing, both pre and post-patch, is the ability of your squadron mates. In Aces Over The Pacific/Aces Over Europe if you waded into a battle and began scoring, it was infectious. Your A.I. mates did well too. In EAW you can take out five bombers, get your 190A shot to hell, limp back to base and find your kills were the only ones scored! What the hell were those guys doing? You kept telling them to concentrate on the bombers but to no avail. Eight pilots with 30+ victories each consistently fail to score! Now I know why Hermann Goering was always pissed! Go to Page Two
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