SimHQ.com - Air Combat Zone - Feature: Total Air War: A Brief Retrospective

A lot of players in the past have panned TAW for its God's eye view of the world. Your cup runneth over with situation awareness, that's true. Your avionics do most of the job, and the F-22 is state-of-the-art. You can see it all, all the bad guys around you. The DID team all had military simulation backgrounds and boy howdy, it shows here. Using Lockheed's own non-classified material, Whiteford, Hunt, and their team made an educated guess as to how the F/A-22 works, and it holds up from what we've seen of the real Raptor now in service. You have a helmet targeting system that points you to the bad guys, and your IRST camera will help you identify them if you're close enough. Your in-cockpit displays update with Quickdraw, and you can see them for the most part updating in the widest virtual cockpit view. You have one for defense that is like a super TEWS, and it even fires chaff and flares for you when you have an incoming missile. Your attack display shows you a volume of effectiveness for your AMRAAMs, and you're datalinked to them even if you're not locked directly onto your prey. The big middle display is a JTIDS display that can overlay a full color map showing useful terrain features. You can engage multiple targets almost simultaneously. But all that wonderful SA only happens when you have your trusty E-3 and your JSTARS up there linking data to you, and your flight-members are linking data to you. Lose them and you're bat-blind and relying on your own sensors...and you go from predator to prey pretty fast in TAW's action-packed world. The lone aircraft's systems limits were modeled in TAW. You will really appreciate the AWACS / JSTARS / EWR / wingman links after a couple of close calls. From demos of the F/A-22 cockpit I have seen, they came close as could possibly be expected in 1997. The only thing that doesn't really feel right is the air to ground modeling. There are no automatic bombing modes at all, no dive/toss or CCRP, and it just doesn't feel finished outside of the interceptor role.

There is a lot of bad guy for you to take on, though — you'll never feel lonely in Total Air War. The TAW universe assumes that the poor nations of east Africa are suddenly flush with oil cash (in a world of more than $3.00 a gallon gas in the U.S., is that too far off in the future?) and buying weapons like mad. The bad guys have GCI and AWACS too and if yours are down they'll find and kill you before you ever know they are there. And they have friends. Depending on the mission, you may find yourself taking on the Russians... the Chinese... the French... along with the usual suspects you find in the nasty Third World backwater wars of today. And in this bad new world, even the lowly MiG-21 is the MiG-21 / 93 or better in TAW's world and it's armed with deadly R73 and R77 missiles. God help you if you let one get too close, because the artificial intelligence is still among the best I have ever seen in a combat simulation. As far as I'm concerned, on Hard level it ranks easily with modern titles such as IL-2 and LOMAC. Details like the ability to apply the Doppler notch to incoming radars, and to spoof both radar and IR missiles by aircraft placement, make fighting air and ground threats both challenging and fun. Countermeasures work, but don't control the game; you must by your flying. Stealth doesn't work when they can see you and know you're there, or betray yourself with laser or radar emissions when you're supposed to be in EMCON. Enemy aircraft will scissor you, they'll maneuver for your six, they'll chase you till they hit bingo fuel, they'll anticipate your maneuvers, and they'll make near-human mistakes. I don't know how Steve Hunt and Don Whiteford managed the AI way back when, but everyone who does modern sims needs to take a long and hard look at the granddaddy of 'em all when they start designing AI routines. You can use terrain to spoof the bad guys and hide from them, and they'll lose you. The enemy can guess where you are when you vanish over that ridgeline into a valley and reverse on them — but I have seen enemy aircraft guess wrong more than once and I've taken advantage.

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