Flying & Combat

Reading the HUD

The HUD is the information drawn over the view. In the cockpit view, your hull strength and ammunition also appear on the instrument panel.

Heading tape (top centre)

Your compass heading in degrees, marked with N, E, S and W. North is 000. Use it to hold a course to a target or back home.

Airspeed and altitude (bottom)

AIRSPEED is in km/h and ALTITUDE is in metres above the sea. The throttle bar is at the bottom-left.

Weapons count (bottom centre)

Rounds of ammunition left, plus bombs or your torpedo. AMMO OUT means your guns are empty. On practice missions it reads UNLIMITED.

Objectives (upper-left)

Your tasks for this mission. Each one is ticked off as you complete it, or marked as failed.

Kills (upper-right)

Aircraft you've shot down this sortie. Below it, the kill feed reports hits, kills, ships sunk and torpedo results.

Radio (under the heading tape)

Your wingman's calls. "Break! Bandit on your six!" means an enemy is close behind you: turn hard now. "I'm hit, could use some help!" means your wingman is in trouble.

Aircraft target box and lead pipper

Corner brackets around the enemy aircraft closest to your nose, with a small bar showing its remaining health. The amber pipper shows where to aim so your bullets meet it. See Gunnery.

Ship box (blue-green)

Your selected ship, with its name, range in metres and a health bar. T changes the selected target.

Ground target diamond (khaki)

Your selected vehicle, parked aircraft or building, with its name, range and health bar.

IMPACT circle (orange)

Shown while you carry bombs: where a bomb dropped right now would land.

LEAD diamond (amber)

Shown while you carry a torpedo and have a ship selected: where to point your nose so the torpedo meets the moving ship.

Zones

Mission zones, such as the fleet you're defending or the base you return to, are drawn as blue-green rings on the sea with a faint glowing wall rising above them, so you can see them from a long way off. A defended zone turns red when enemy aircraft are inside it.

STALL – LOW AIRSPEED

A flashing warning that you're too slow to keep flying. Lower the nose and add throttle.

Flying the aircraft

The flight model is arcade-style, so there's no take-off, landing, fuel or engine management to worry about. Only a few rules matter:

• Speed is life. Every aircraft has a stall speed, from about 85 km/h for the Oscar up to 150 km/h for the P-38. As you slow toward it, the controls go soft. Below it, the aircraft sinks no matter where the nose points. Climbing and hard turning both use up speed.
• Altitude is stored speed. Diving trades height for speed, and climbing trades it back. The pilot with more height can choose when to fight.
• Roll, then pull. To turn hard, roll into a steep bank with A/D, then pull the nose around with W. Use rudder (Q/E) for fine aiming, not for turning.
• The sea and the islands are solid. Touching the water or high ground destroys your aircraft. The enemy AI pulls up automatically when it gets low, but you don't. Keep an eye on altitude, especially when diving at a target or flying a torpedo run at 50–90 metres.
• You can't repair. Damage stays with you for the whole sortie. When your aircraft is badly hurt, fight carefully or head for home.

Gunnery

Two markers matter when you're shooting at aircraft:

• The fixed sight: the ring or cross in the centre of the screen, or the reflector gunsight in the cockpit. It always marks straight ahead of your nose.
• The amber lead pipper. It appears when an enemy aircraft is ahead of you and in range. It's a real firing solution, calculated from the target's speed and direction and the speed of your bullets.

Put the pipper on your fixed sight, then fire. Against a turning enemy the two markers separate, and the gap between them is how far you need to aim ahead of it. Straight behind a target they sit on top of each other.

Bombing

Press B to drop a bomb. Bombs have no altitude or speed limits: you can drop one whenever you have one. The orange IMPACT circle shows where a bomb released now would land. Fly so the circle sits on the target, then drop.

• Dive-bombing is the most accurate method. Start high, about 1,500–2,500 m, and roll into a steep dive (60° or more) with the target ahead. In a steep dive, the bomb falls almost along your line of sight, so the IMPACT circle hardly moves away from the target. Release, then pull out.
• Level or shallow bombing needs lead. The bomb carries your forward speed, so it lands well ahead of where you release it. The faster and higher you are, the further ahead it lands. Trust the IMPACT circle rather than guessing.
• Plan your pull-out. Nothing pulls you out of a dive automatically. If you release low and fast, pull back on W immediately and cut throttle (`) if you're going too fast.
• Bombs damage anything within their blast radius. A hit near a ship still does some damage, but a direct hit does the most.
• Dive bombers carry more and heavier bombs. The SBD Dauntless has four 500-damage bombs and the D3A Val has three. Fighters that can carry bombs take two lighter ones.

Torpedo attacks

Only the TBF Avenger and B5N Kate carry a torpedo, and only one. There's no second chance, so it pays to learn this properly on Torpedo Training first.

1. Get into the drop envelope

A torpedo is only released if you're low and slow. If you press B outside these limits, nothing drops, and the kill feed tells you which limit you broke and by how much, for example TORPEDO NOT RELEASED – alt 140m (need <= 90).

2. Aim at the LEAD diamond, not the ship

Once dropped, a torpedo runs dead straight at a slow, constant speed of about 21 m/s (75 km/h). You can't steer it. If you aim at where the ship is, it will have moved by the time the torpedo gets there. The amber LEAD diamond already allows for the ship's course and speed, so point your nose at the diamond, not the ship.

3. Release at the right distance

The torpedo has to run a short distance (the arming run above) before it can explode, so a drop right under the ship's side won't work. Don't drop from too far out either: at 21 m/s a torpedo takes nearly a minute to cover 1 km, and the ship has more time to move out of the way. A good release range is 300–800 m, with the LEAD diamond on your sight.

4. Get away low

After the drop, stay low and head for your home zone. Climbing back up just puts you among the enemy fighters that cover the ships (the CAP).

Strafing ground targets

Trucks, tanks, parked aircraft, gun pits, hangars and huts can all be destroyed with guns as well as bombs. Ships can't: only bombs and torpedoes damage ships. Parked aircraft and trucks break up after a short burst. Hangars and buildings take much more.

• Line up from a few kilometres out in a shallow dive (10–20°), and use T to select each target in turn.
• Fire as the target grows in your sight, then pull up well before you reach it. The ground comes up fast.
• Choose your line so several targets sit along it, and you can hit more than one per pass.
• Don't circle low over the target area. Climb away, turn, and come back for another pass.

Flak

In the Wake missions, ships and gun pits fire back at you. (In the other missions they still don't.) Heavy anti-aircraft guns fire at where you will be when the shell arrives, which can be several seconds away at long range, and the shell bursts there as a black puff. Machine guns only reach about 1 km, fire quickly, and show as small bright flashes.

• Don't fly straight and level near the guns. That's exactly what they aim for. Rolling and pulling spoils their aim, and so does crossing their view quickly.
• Make your attack dive steep and short. A dive straight at a gun is the one steady line they get, so don't give them a long, shallow one.
• Close in, about 300–400 m, the heavy guns can't track you any more. The machine guns still can.
• Flak hits add up. One pass is survivable, but circling over a defended target isn't. Make your pass, leave, and come back from a different direction.

Wingmen

On many missions you fly with one or more friendly aircraft. A wingman flies loosely beside you until an enemy comes close, then breaks off to fight it and rejoins you afterwards. You can't give wingmen orders, but you can use them:

• Drag a pursuer onto your wingman. Every AI pilot, friendly or enemy, attacks whichever opponent is closest to itself. If an enemy is on your tail, fly toward your wingman. Your wingman will attack it, and the enemy may switch to your wingman instead of you.
• Press V to show a marker for your wingman at all times, so you can find them quickly.
• Split the work. Take a different target from your wingman, rather than both of you chasing the same one.

How the enemy fights

Knowing the AI's habits makes it much easier to beat:

• Patrol. Enemies fly toward their goal, such as your fleet or their own base, until they spot a hostile aircraft within about 2.1 km.
• Attack. Then they commit to attacking the nearest hostile aircraft, and open fire from about 600 m.
• Evade. If you get your guns on one, or hit it, it breaks into a hard evasive turn for about three seconds, then comes back at you.
• Disengage. If you get more than about 3.8 km apart for a few seconds, they give up and go back to their patrol.
• They pull up automatically. Near the sea or high ground, enemy aircraft are forced to climb, and below about 90 m they pull up hard. An enemy chasing you low over the water has less control left for aiming at you, so diving for the deck is a real way to shake one off. Just don't hit the water yourself.

The bombers you're told to stop head for their target no matter what. They don't dogfight. Their escorts will, though.

Objectives & winning

The Objectives panel lists what you need to do. There are a few different kinds:

General tips

1. Know your aircraft's strengths. Japanese fighters (Zero, Oscar) out-turn everything. American fighters (Hellcat, Corsair, P-38) are faster, climb better and are much tougher. See matchups.
2. Don't turn with a Zero in an American fighter. Dive through, shoot, and keep going (boom and zoom). Climb back up and repeat. Speed is your advantage, so don't waste it in a turning fight.
3. Check your six. Hold / for a quick look behind you, especially after a firing pass. The "Break!" radio call means act now.
4. Break, don't run straight. If something's behind you, a hard turn into it spoils its aim. Flying in a straight line away from a faster aircraft only gives it an easy shot.
5. Save height and speed for the fight. Climb before you meet the enemy, not during the fight.
6. Hit bombers first on defence missions. In a protect-the-fleet mission, the escorts can't fail the mission for you, but one bomber getting through can.
7. On strike missions, deal with the fighters first, while you still have height and speed. You're at your most exposed when you're low and slow, working on ground targets.
8. Use Recon and F9. Look at the map before you fly, or fly the mission once in invulnerable mode to learn where everything comes from.
9. Try the cockpit view. It's harder, but the gunsight is excellent for precise shooting. The chase view gives you a better sense of what's around you. Switch whenever you like with C.
10. Watch your replays. F8 after a lost fight shows exactly where the enemy came from.