well, i got it, finally. Taking the advice of an above poster, i settled into a low hover and waited for the bastards to show, then nailed the lead ship at 8k. i noticed when he went down, that his wingman made an evasive manuever, which gave me more time to get the shkval on him, and my second salvo turned him to shrapnel in the air.
two of my wingmen committed suicide though, and the third lacked enough fuel to RTB. see attached track for hilarity of #4 flying into a hill.
made it back to nalchik, and my engines ran out of fuel during shuttdown O.O, talk about close.
C1-07-CLOSE-CALL.trk
now that i've chilled out a bit and can think of a better response than "blow me".... here we go:
been playin' BS for a few months fooling around with quick missions, only recently started in campaign once i was confident that i had a good feel for the way the bird handles and a modest grasp of weapons employment.
Hawx was cute, though hardly a simulator.
never tried Ace Combat.
my very first was the original Microsoft Combat Flight Simulator.
Secret-Weapons Over Normandy was another cute non-simulator.
A-10 cuba was awesome when it ran.
the old DOS F-117A Stealth Fighter game was all kinds of fun, especially since i didn't have a joystick.
The old DOS RAH-66 Comanche game is diretly responsible for my interest in helos (again, played with no stick).
Comanche 3 was also fun, though the flight model was less realistic than the original was.
Freespace 2, while a space-fighter game without terribly realistic physics, has a huge amount of pilot workload effectively managing threats and keeping a high sit-aware level. i've got more time in that sim than the rest i have played combined, and it's still a challenge to complete several of the missions.
played a handful of other more recent ones but until DCS, haven't been able to find one i really liked (CFS3 is a bug-riddled beast, wing's of pery's idea of high-fidelity simulation is "all planes to a snap roll if you so much as think about touching the elevator, and don't even -try- to make a coordinated turn ya bugger, i'm onto you're shenanigans", etc etc)
So yeah, this is my first truly high-fidelity sim, but i'm hardly a rank novice to simulation games.
sorry, but even chilled out this one still only rates a "blow me"