Multiplayer tips

[Zap Rowsdower]

This is my second time playing through the game, and decided to try multiplayer for the first time in order to get quick RP because I accidently bought the wrong plane but....I guess I am clearly doing something wrong because I seriously cannot do anything in multiplayer. My missiles get broken by the player doing the slightest maneuver, meanwhile the entire match missiles keep following me no matter what I do, continually circling me and staying locked untill i just blow up. I also cannot for the life of me seem to be able to stay behind someone long enough to actually shoot while other people do not seem to have any problem whatsoever no matter what I do. Rinse and repeat numerous times until the match mercifully ends. It also seems to be a common theme that most of the lobby gets no points or maybe a few thousand while the game is continually dominated by one person who has 10 times anyone else.

Any tips on how to actually do anything in multiplayer? Specific parts, missiles, planes I should stick to? Because at this point I am basically just joining lobbies and going AFK just to farm the 60k reward at the end.

[Useless Bunny]

First thing you should do is unlock all the multiplayer parts, they are mandatory.

[Zap Rowsdower]

Originally posted by BEEP BEEP BEEP MISSILE ALERT:

First thing you should do is unlock all the multiplayer parts, they are mandatory.

Which ones? All of the ones at the bottom of the tree that just increase MRP gains?

[Zap Rowsdower]

Also I've noticed that playing any F-15 variant seems to be like playing the game on easy mode because in every game that has a sub 2500 restriction they end up at the top of the list by several miles.

[Useless Bunny]

Originally posted by Teyrn of Highever:

Originally posted by BEEP BEEP BEEP MISSILE ALERT:

First thing you should do is unlock all the multiplayer parts, they are mandatory.

Which ones? All of the ones at the bottom of the tree that just increase MRP gains?

No...

All of them except those.

Originally posted by Teyrn of Highever:

Also I've noticed that playing any F-15 variant seems to be like playing the game on easy mode because in every game that has a sub 2500 restriction they end up at the top of the list by several miles.

Not really.

[Zap Rowsdower]

Originally posted by BEEP BEEP BEEP MISSILE ALERT:

Originally posted by Teyrn of Highever:

Which ones? All of the ones at the bottom of the tree that just increase MRP gains?

No...

All of them except those.

Originally posted by Teyrn of Highever:

Also I've noticed that playing any F-15 variant seems to be like playing the game on easy mode because in every game that has a sub 2500 restriction they end up at the top of the list by several miles.

Not really.

Well it's what my experience has been almost exclusively.

Eh, doesnt really matter though, I eventually got the hang of it enough to where I did at least decently enough consistently and got enough money to get the last plane i wanted and i dont think I'll be coming back to multiplayer again. Every match is just the same thing where everyone is in a knot in the middle of the map doing 10G turns avoiding missiles that pull off 180 degree turns and have a flight time of like 30 minutes so they just keep circling you and then coming back. Theres almost never any actual dogfighting, unless you consider just flying back and forth doing said 10G turns over and over again dogfighting. Overall I just find it incredibly monotonous and disappointing. Strike planes are rendered completely useless and they really should have had some sort of coop missions or scenario type things where they could come into play.

Love the single player, kind of hate the half baked multiplayer.

[Useless Bunny]

So you hate multiplayer dogfighting but love single player, huh? Kinda hard for me to understand how shooting down braindead AI that barely moves which only chance of survival is your own garbage missles that track nothing is fun. From the way said things, I think it's easy to assume you never really engaged into a high skill level MP session because the way you described it doesn't really match how it works.

Let me guess, you're playing mostly on sub 2500 points with SPW off?

[Zap Rowsdower]

Originally posted by BEEP BEEP BEEP MISSILE ALERT:

So you hate multiplayer dogfighting but love single player, huh? Kinda hard for me to understand how shooting down braindead AI that barely moves which only chance of survival is your own garbage missles that track nothing is fun. From the way said things, I think it's easy to assume you never really engaged into a high skill level MP session because the way you described it doesn't really match how it works.

Let me guess, you're playing mostly on sub 2500 points with SPW off?

Considering that on the high difficulty dogfighting is actually more than just turning back and forth in a tiny radius in a knot while swarms of eternal missiles keep looping you and you're playing actual missions with objectives within a pretty cool world and story...uh...yeah I have to say I enjoy it alot more than the monotonous and bare bones multiplayer. Sorry, I guess?

I guess I am also really sorry I haven't joined any of your elite skills lobbies but, as with anything I have to go with my actual personal experience and not the experience of others when it comes to how much I enjoy something. Sure there have been a few games that have actually been really fun and that aren't just making the same circle over and over against hilarious cartoon missiles, but they haven't happened very often. My experience with multiplayer overall really hasn't shown me anything really exciting or engaging. It gets really old really fast for me because there really is not much to it.

Sorry, you guessed wrong. More often than not the rooms I join have the options both set on unlimited. Though it is refreshing to not have everyone using Black Widows, Raptors, and SU-57s every now and again, so I do join some that have lower point caps here and there.

I am just giving my honest opinion based on my impressions and experiences with it, and my personal preference is the single player experience. I'm not really sure why that has seemed to generate so much hostility from you, as if this is somehow a personal attack on you and not just, you know, me saying what I find more enjoyable. If you enjoy the multiplayer more yourself, more power to you. Me not liking it is not somehow saying you and others are wrong for liking it.

[Useless Bunny]

Originally posted by Teyrn of Highever:

Considering that on the high difficulty dogfighting is actually more than just turning back and forth in a tiny radius in a knot while swarms of eternal missiles keep looping you and you're playing actual missions with objectives within a pretty cool world and story...uh...yeah I have to say I enjoy it alot more than the monotonous and bare bones multiplayer. Sorry, I guess?

I'm strictly talking about dog fighting, not the many more things single player has such as a whole campaign, story, radio chat, etc. You can't tell us that fighting the awful AI the game has, which is bad even on Ace difficulty, is more fun than dog fighting humans. Remember that I'm strictly talking about dog fighting, not adding anything else to it. Your definition of "back and forth tiny radius knot" is basically the same for any kind of dog fight, even against AI, the only difference is that you don't escape a missile with a simple high-g pitch in multiplayer, you need to be better than dodging a missile with poor tracking. You need to often use the ground to destroy them, clouds have much more value, doing a proper PSM makes the difference between good and very good, machine gun becomes more relevant and your awareness as a whole needs to be in a much higher gear too as to knowing when to stop chasing someone and whatnot, all of that comes with a lot of experience that you learn eventually. In single player if you watch how the AI behaves, both friendly and enemy, you will notice it looks like they are pretending to be fighting.

Originally posted by Teyrn of Highever:

I guess I am also really sorry I haven't joined any of your elite skills lobbies but, as with anything I have to go with my actual personal experience and not the experience of others when it comes to how much I enjoy something. Sure there have been a few games that have actually been really fun and that aren't just making the same circle over and over against hilarious cartoon missiles, but they haven't happened very often. My experience with multiplayer overall really hasn't shown me anything really exciting or engaging. It gets really old really fast for me because there really is not much to it.

Please don't be like that, you can even enjoy eating feces for all we care, no one is telling you to NOT enjoy single player. I'm just making a case as to why multiplayer is more engaging than any single player dog fight as matter of mere difficulty, which is really not comparable between the two.

I only mentioned a high skill match because there can be vastly different experiences in the game based on the lobby's skill as a whole.

Originally posted by Teyrn of Highever:

Sorry, you guessed wrong. More often than not the rooms I join have the options both set on unlimited. Though it is refreshing to not have everyone using Black Widows, Raptors, and SU-57s every now and again, so I do join some that have lower point caps here and there.

Okay, so I assume the "cartoon missiles" you talk about are QAAMs from those Raptors, some couple of deaths from Black Widow HVAAs and then PLSL SU-57. Boy you should be glad you didn't experience the EML empire era.

Originally posted by Teyrn of Highever:

I am just giving my honest opinion based on my impressions and experiences with it, and my personal preference is the single player experience. I'm not really sure why that has seemed to generate so much hostility from you, as if this is somehow a personal attack on you and not just, you know, me saying what I find more enjoyable. If you enjoy the multiplayer more yourself, more power to you. Me not liking it is not somehow saying you and others are wrong for liking it.

You let your feelings take over the text. Just read the text in a literal sense and there's no hostility, it's just your own impression. In advance, one of my paragraphs here will probably sound "hostile" to you but it really isn't, it's just not sugarcoated with unicorns on top. If I wanted to be hostile I would straight up insult you so don't worry.

Going back to your point of "cartoon missiles", dodging missiles is not really the hardest part of a fight, as they usually only hit you when a good player is chasing you very closely to the point of there being little to no chance of dodging due the short distance (while they keep using machine guns to slowly kill you) or when you are swarmed by many different people and eventually one of them will hit you, but that is just a 2v1 type scenario which there isn't much to be done about regardless of game. If you are having trouble with missiles I would recommend staying low and using the ground in your favor, as clouds will also hinder your own attacks.

[Waggy]

Is there any loss of MRP for losing a match? I remember way back in the day my friend and I on some RTS game, maybe Total Annihilation, used to let each other win a few times after playing the early game for real so we would stay together in ranking.

If you can find yourself in a lobby with a friend you can do that. Feed him MRP, then he feeds you MRP in the next game, down with the system, we rebel.

[Useless Bunny]

Originally posted by Waggy:

Is there any loss of MRP for losing a match? I remember way back in the day my friend and I on some RTS game, maybe Total Annihilation, used to let each other win a few times after playing the early game for real so we would stay together in ranking.

If you can find yourself in a lobby with a friend you can do that. Feed him MRP, then he feeds you MRP in the next game, down with the system, we rebel.

You don't lose MRP for losing.

[Zap Rowsdower]

Originally posted by BEEP BEEP BEEP MISSILE ALERT:

I'm strictly talking about dog fighting, not the many more things single player has such as a whole campaign, story, radio chat, etc. You can't tell us that fighting the awful AI the game has, which is bad even on Ace difficulty, is more fun than dog fighting humans. Remember that I'm strictly talking about dog fighting, not adding anything else to it. Your definition of "back and forth tiny radius knot" is basically the same for any kind of dog fight, even against AI, the only difference is that you don't escape a missile with a simple high-g pitch in multiplayer, you need to be better than dodging a missile with poor tracking. You need to often use the ground to destroy them, clouds have much more value, doing a proper PSM makes the difference between good and very good, machine gun becomes more relevant and your awareness as a whole needs to be in a much higher gear too as to knowing when to stop chasing someone and whatnot, all of that comes with a lot of experience that you learn eventually. In single player if you watch how the AI behaves, both friendly and enemy, you will notice it looks like they are pretending to be fighting.

I never even specifically mentioned liking the single player dogfighting on its own compared to the multiplayerin the first place anyway, I just said that I love the single player in general. And, yeah I can tell you that I enjoy it more in single player. Probably because the "many more things" in the campaign are taken into account with it by default, and you cannot really remove them and separate them like they are not at all complimentary to one another. All of it combined make it enjoyable and entertaining to me, despite the rather mediocre AI. Mostly because it is a bit more realistic feeling and immersive, even if the AI is not perfect. Multiplayer having everyone do 10G turns over and over is ridiculous and silly, and pretty much impossible to do in real life without everyone passing out after the second or third one, so it just makes it feel arcadey and uninteresting to me. I play AC for the immersion and the campaigns so, the fact that multiplayer deviates so much from realistic aerial combat is a big deal for me personally. I know it is a game and everything and games are hardly ever like real life, but at least in AC for me, thats a big deal.

So, yeah I am going to have to maintain that the dogfighting in the campaign for me is far more entertaining and fun than the silly and pretty much impossible movements in multiplayer. Sure, if you put them in a vaccuum then fighting with players is of course far superior to the AI, as it is with any game, because people are smarter than AI. But nothing exists in a vacuum, and all the things in single player put together make me enjoy the dogfighting in that far more than the barebones multiplayer where that is all that there is.

Originally posted by BEEP BEEP BEEP MISSILE ALERT:

Going back to your point of "cartoon missiles", dodging missiles is not really the hardest part of a fight, as they usually only hit you when a good player is chasing you very closely to the point of there being little to no chance of dodging due the short distance (while they keep using machine guns to slowly kill you) or when you are swarmed by many different people and eventually one of them will hit you, but that is just a 2v1 type scenario which there isn't much to be done about regardless of game. If you are having trouble with missiles I would recommend staying low and using the ground in your favor, as clouds will also hinder your own attacks.

I never said that they were the hardest part of the fight, but that they completely ridiculous and even sillier than the aerial movements. The AAM's in multiplayer have the flight distance and homing capabilities that would not be out of place in a silly cartoon, and seeing them act like that is just hilarious to me and completely takes me out of it. AAM's carried by jets do not act like that whatsoever. They do not have such insane homing capabilities, the ability to make hairpin turns, nor can they circle round and round and come back for another pass like they do in Multiplayer. Large ground based SAMs behave a little closer to that. I feel like that is why the upgrades that make them be able to do this are restricted to multiplayer.

I guess it just all comes down to the reason I play games like Ace Combat which is immersion and solely a single player experience, so all of the mechanics added in multiplayer with the missiles and such that are just pretty unrealistic really take me out of it. Might seem silly to other people, but it just prevents me from enjoying the multiplayer very much.

[Useless Bunny]

Originally posted by Teyrn of Highever:

I never even specifically mentioned liking the single player dogfighting on its own compared to the multiplayerin the first place anyway, I just said that I love the single player in general.

Here, your exact quote:

Originally posted by Teyrn of Highever:

Considering that on the high difficulty dogfighting is actually more than just turning back and forth in a tiny radius in a knot while swarms of eternal missiles keep looping you and you're playing actual missions with objectives within a pretty cool world and story...uh...yeah I have to say I enjoy it alot more than the monotonous and bare bones multiplayer. Sorry, I guess?

Originally posted by Teyrn of Highever:

I can tell you that I enjoy it more in single player. Probably because the "many more things" in the campaign are taken into account with it by default, and you cannot really remove them and separate them like they are not at all complimentary to one another. All of it combined make it enjoyable and entertaining to me, despite the rather mediocre AI. Mostly because it is a bit more realistic feeling and immersive, even if the AI is not perfect. Multiplayer having everyone do 10G turns over and over is ridiculous and silly, and pretty much impossible to do in real life without everyone passing out after the second or third one, so it just makes it feel arcadey and uninteresting to me.
I play AC for the immersion and the campaigns so, the fact that multiplayer deviates so much from realistic aerial combat is a big deal for me personally. I know it is a game and everything and games are hardly ever like real life, but at least in AC for me, thats a big deal.

Are you really gonna bring the "realism" argument to the table when you are a mute one-man-army that turns the tide of the war completely on his own, flying a jet figther capable of carrying more than a hundred missiles and all kinds of wacky, sci-fi weaponry in a world with even more sci-fi superweapons, which goes into huge wars every 5 years or so one place or another as if there aren't any costs, consequences or anything? Your more "realistic" and "immersive" single player experience is not really any different than impossible high-g maneuver in multiplayer, come on now. You can just prefer one mode over the other no problem, but that's a silly argument at best.

Originally posted by Teyrn of Highever:

So, yeah I am going to have to maintain that the dogfighting in the campaign for me is far more entertaining and fun than the silly and pretty much impossible movements in multiplayer. Sure, if you put them in a vaccuum then fighting with players is of course far superior to the AI, as it is with any game, because people are smarter than AI. But nothing exists in a vacuum, and all the things in single player put together make me enjoy the dogfighting in that far more than the barebones multiplayer where that is all that there is.

Okay, we already went through that many times. Not gonna point out why that is an unfair comparisson again, like comparing a whole movie to a single clip. I'm sure no one will disagree with you, myself included, that the entire single player campaign or maybe just a well scripted mission with a story, voice acting, characters and much more is more fun than a 5 minutes multiplayer match.

Originally posted by Teyrn of Highever:

I never said that they were the hardest part of the fight, but that they completely ridiculous and even sillier than the aerial movements. The AAM's in multiplayer have the flight distance and homing capabilities that would not be out of place in a silly cartoon, and seeing them act like that is just hilarious to me and completely takes me out of it. AAM's carried by jets do not act like that whatsoever. They do not have such insane homing capabilities, the ability to make hairpin turns, nor can they circle round and round and come back for another pass like they do in Multiplayer. Large ground based SAMs behave a little closer to that. I feel like that is why the upgrades that make them be able to do this are restricted to multiplayer.

Again the realism thing, I'm not gonna mention all the absurd and unrealistic aspects of Ace Combat as a whole here. If you are gonna stand by that, you need to also realize just how cartoony the single player mode is too.

They are restricted to multiplayer because if people were to play multiplayer with just the stuff single player offers you, it would be absolute garbage. No one would hit anyone. Also another reason is that if those parts were allowed in single player, the already easy campaign would become extremely easy.

Maybe you would enjoy simulator but those don't have any campaigns like the silly, arcadey ace combat here does.

[Useless Bunny]

Originally posted by Pragmatic_Hero:

JFC, in every thread you manage to get triggered over anyone with a dissenting opinion erstwhile holding your own as gospel. Get a life and pull your head outta your ass, weeb.

I'm not triggered, I'm merely responding to the thread in which I'm free to do so. It's sad that it seems that way to you, maybe some more reading skills would help you, I don't know. Maybe it is you that should do what you told me to, would do you good, honestly. Thanks for showing us what kind of comment is good though, jumping into a thread to insult someone else.