aces-high

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Gameplay

The Knights, Bishops, and Rooks are the three teams you can choose to fly for in Aces High. The documentation for flight and radio controls in Aces High is great, but when it comes to gameplay, for the moment you are somewhat on your own. HTC is on top of this problem, and they are adding help pages shortly to correct this. For now, the best thing to do is ask players in the game for help or read the forums on HTC's site.

Each country has a headquarters and city, in addition to a number of airfields. The strategic object of the game is to knock an enemy country out by capturing his airfields. Once the enemy is down to one field, the map will reset. Again, we are a little confused regarding the scoring in each tour and reset, but information on this will be included in the pre-mentioned help files. Bombing the enemy HQ will take out their radar, while bombing factories in the city will slow repair times at the airfields. Dropping 10 troops from a C-47 on top of the base captures a field, however before you can do this the defenses must be taken down. The AAA (ack) is quite powerful in AH, and until it is suppressed the chances are that a C-47 drop will fail. Bombers at altitude are out of AAA range typically, and they work great for flattening fields as well as cities and HQ's. Once the troops capture a field's map room, the field then becomes the property of its new owners. The strategy and tactics used in the on-line arena are very complex, and there is often many squadrons of players working together towards a common goal. We've flown in a formation of fifteen B-17's escorted by ten P-51's before, and using Roger Wilco for live voice communications adds a huge immersion factor to an already heady experience.

While the strategy involved in flying in the on-line arena is complicated, the in game interface is actually very user friendly. There is a map available at all times in the game, and unless your team's radar is knocked out, enemy aircraft will be visible on it depending on range and altitude. If an enemy is close, he will be a bright red dot, and this dot represents his an exact position. If the enemy aircraft moves out of radar range, it will be displayed as a red block on the sector map.

The player can move between a field's tower, hangar, and map room, and different options are available in each of these locations. Aircraft selection and configuration is done at the hangar, while configuration options are handled in the tower. The map room gives a more detailed look at the game map. Once an aircraft is selected and the "fly" button is clicked, the player will be sitting on the runway ready to take off. There is a series of "dot" commands available, and these shortcuts can be type into the radio chat window if desired (i.e. ".fly").

Once you're up in the air, climbing to a higher altitude is always a good idea, since air to air combat engagements in Aces High are often decided by who has the most energy. There is ample material in the Aces High forums on HTC's website regarding ACM tactics, as well as an corp of instructors and veterans who will gladly take you up for some secluded 1v1 training. We've found pilots on-line in Aces High who have absolutely incredible skills, and the competition can get pretty fierce. A common tactic once a field's defenses our down is to "vulch" the field. This occurs when several enemy aircraft proceed to fly a low cap over your field, just waiting for you to be dumb enough to try and get airborne. This typically results in high kill totals for the vulching team. This is a tactic that is required due to the C-47's vulnerability. Once it gets close to the intended target base, it's dead meat if an enemy fighter gets airborne. Luckily there are some new units on the way to take on vulching aircraft.

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