From The Air Combat Wiki

As with any game, particularly an online game against other people, learning the game and practicing it are essential for success. If you want to win at Fighter Ace ®, you should spend as much time as possible playing the game.

Game Arenas

The game “Arenas” represent the various environments in which you can play the game. Offline arenas include Training, Practice, and Sample arenas. Online you will find Dogfight and Territorial Conquest arenas, as well as any special event arenas that may be available.

Training arenas are only available offline and present you with a series of flight and combat “lessons” that will teach you the basics of controlling your plane and fighting against other planes and ground targets.

Practice arenas are designed to give you a specific combat objective against AI components, such as tanks and ships that help you hone your combat skills in a free-form environment, unlike what is found in the Training arenas.

Sample arenas are fully configurable basic arenas that allow you to see the effects of various changes on the physics and other game options. These are the best way to learn the details of a game map.

Arcade arenas are found online only and are geared towards straightforward head-to-head combat. The rules of the arena are simple, kill or be killed. These arenas exist for those who prefer to just fight, without much time spent worrying about strategy.

The true heart of the Fighter Ace ® game online, however, is Territorial Conquest, or TC, as it is commonly known. In the Dogfighting arenas you fight for the joy of the fight itself, but in TC you are involved in a total war in which you will have the opportunity to fly a variety of fighter, bomber and ground support missions.

Territorial Conquest Details

The mechanics of TC are pure simplicity itself. Each team starts with a certain number of installations, or scenes, and must capture a certain number of enemy installations to win the game (the specific objectives needed to win are listed in the arena description on the Arenas screen).

The first step in capturing an enemy scene is to soften it up by attacking the buildings and defensive positions with bombs and/or rockets. Once you have inflicted sufficient damage (again, specific values can be different for each arena) a group of tanks will form at the nearest friendly installation and will then drive toward the enemy installation to attack and hopefully capture it. This is known as ‘triggering a scene’.

At the same time as your tanks embark for the damaged scene, a group of enemy tanks will form for the purpose of defending that scene from your tanks. Left on their own, the two groups of tanks would eventually encounter each other and fight until one or the other is destroyed. If even one tank manages to get into an enemy scene and destroy its defenses, the enemy scene is captured and starts producing or working for your team.

To make it easier for your tanks to capture the scene you’ll want to go out and destroy the enemy tanks before they can get there and put up a defense. However, the enemy pilots are thinking the same thing about your tanks. At this point in the game, good teamwork comes in mighty handy. The team that can organize a defense or combat air patrol (CAP) for their own tanks while simultaneously attacking the enemy tanks will stand the better chance of owning that scene at the end of it all.

Now the one problem with this model is that tanks are slow compared to aircraft and it can often take a long time for tanks to travel between scenes. If rail lines are available between the tanks and the desired scene, the tanks will form a train, which will then proceed along the tracks to the nearest point to the objective scene.

While trains travel faster than tanks there are two drawbacks to an entrained tank column. First, trains follow train tracks and thus may follow a very roundabout route to the objective. While this will result in a shorter trip time-wise, it may require extensive efforts to provide a CAP for your tanks.

The second problem is that trains, being larger and less armored than tanks, are much easier to destroy. Each time a train with tanks is destroyed, one or more of the tanks will be destroyed along with it and all tanks will detrain. The tanks will then travel a short distance before again forming back into a train. And because trains can be easily damaged by heavy machine guns, this is one way of killing heavy tanks with HMGs.

Because the enemy scene will be repairing itself while the tanks are driving, you will probably want to make another attack on the scene just before your tanks get there to ensure that they have an easy time of it. Pay special attention to the defensive gun emplacements, as they will shoot at your tanks when they get in range.

Another way to deal with slow tank speed is to rely on air assaults instead! Paratroopers can be loaded onto a cargo plane and dropped on any enemy scene. Once they hit the ground, they will seek out and destroy the nearest enemy tank or defense. If they can destroy all defenses at a scene, they can capture it for your team. However, paratroopers are very vulnerable to enemy fire, so it is best to soften up a scene with a fighter-bomber or two to destroy its defenses before the troops arrive. This is a good point to mention resources and what they do for your team. Each scene under your team’s control generates basic supplies, which are converted to metal, fuel, and ammo supplies by factories. Factories also take metal supplies and build plane, tank, and ship units for later use. Whenever you take off in an airplane, your team is charged a certain amount of metal, fuel, and ammo units, depending on what plane you take and what loads you’re taking (note that paratroops are taken from ammo units).

If an airfield is low on ammo resource, you won’t be able to use rockets or bombs or take a full ammo load from that field. Similarly if it runs low on fuel resources you won’t be able to take a full fuel load and if it runs low on metal, it won’t be able to create tanks for defense. This is where air supply can come in handy.

In addition to loading them with paratroops, cargo planes can be loaded with supplies that you can fly to another of your installations to help it re-supply quicker than it would without any help. You can load your plane with metal, fuel, ammo, or a mix of all three. When you load up you will need to decide if you are going to be able to land the supplies at the installation or will want to drop them from the air. Cargo planes can carry only half the load size if it is to be air dropped.

• Note: If you have too much airspeed when you drop paratroops or supplies, their parachutes may fail to open. To ensure that parachutes always open, you should drop at less than 180 mph. As speed increases, the chance of failure increases until a 100% chance of parachute failure is assured at speeds over 250 mph.

If you elect to use a normal cargo load (non air drop), you will need to land at your destination in order to deliver the supplies. One advantage of this is that if you return to the menu after landing and unloading, the metal/fuel/ammo value of your cargo plane is also added to the installations supplies (this is true any time you land a plane and return to the menu).

It is of utmost importance to protect your team’s supplies in the TC game, particularly if it is low on a particular supply type. Almost as important, however, is destroying the enemy’s supplies, which is where ‘strategic’ bombing comes into play. Heavy bombers can make high-altitude penetrations into enemy airspace to attack their factory installations where the majority of supplies are stored. The large bomb loads of the heavies increase the amount of damage even a single plane can do to the enemy’s supply levels, so these are preferred for this role over the lighter attack planes and single-engine bombers.

As you can see, the TC game is one in which teamwork is of paramount importance. It often happens that a smaller, but better organized team, can overcome a larger, disorganized team. Additionally, the game requires players of all types and skill levels to assume the various roles. Hotshot fighter pilots are needed to fly top cover for tanks and friendly installations as well as to escort bombers deep into enemy territory, while the patient bomber aficionado is needed to deliver ordnance on a variety of target types or to delivers troops and supplies.

So jump into TC to help us move some mud! It gives a whole new dimension to air combat!