Dusty Rhodes

Running gun battle between the Germans and the Russians. Germany wins THIS TIME against the T-72. Nice use of the terrain with the Leopard 2's. I bet that took a lot of work to position them just right so they imitate a hull down position using terrain masking. The MLRS strike and Arty strike were good for the atmosphere though they didn't do much. Gimme more gimme more :)

We aren't critiquing or arguing or answering for your opinion. Just post your review and give it a score and people can agree or disagree. Let's keep this thread on target. ED is watching, lets keep it constructive as hell.

You must set a target zone for it but there is a known issue of the GAI flight taking off 40 seconds after the start of the mission, flying a landing pattern and landing. It has been reported to ED already. What you have to happen is that the enemy flight gets into the target zone before the GAI flight puts its gear down to land.

Did you set a target zone for the GAI flight?

Sweet. So let's give him the low down dirty, good, bad, and indifferent. And don't forget to score it. This is you chance to review a cutting edge peice of software, where the producer is watching and reading it. Reviews only, no rebuttals please.

I wish I could help you Shabo. I have your same setup but am running XP Pro SP2 or 3, whatever they are at now. My set up works great.

Good job people. Keep going. Lets keep them like reviews and keep the second guessing others out of this and we will give some very valuable feedback to the community and to most important Eagle Dynamics. Matt, are you watching thread?

I was kinda curious about the Nellis thing too. Are we going to fight in Nevada USA or is that where the training is going to take place? And maybe a Red Flag campaign like the Deployment campaign in Black Shark.

Nice review Gunslinger.

You can't say "given a more favourable AND honest review". It has to be one or the other and you can tell the difference a mile a way. It has to be honest and forthright. If that means favourable, then so be it. But if it means body slamming it because it deserves it, then so be it. To me the review cannot be an honest review or a credible review or credible score if they didn't even delve into the thing. Deadline my foot, that calls to the credibility of the magazine if they don't even give time for the reviewer to delve into the sim or hire a simmer who knows what they are doing and what they are talking about both good and bad.

Zakk, why did you even post? S7 Viper, thanks for the input. Let's hear from others. Think about it and give an honest thought out score and not a knee jerk score.

http://forums.eagle.ru/showthread.php?t=38271 Here is a review for you, in english, good and bad, but not all encompassing. Be interested to hear reviews from some of you. Not rebuttals to mine, write your own review and give it a score.

I believe someone said it was the Shkval recalibrating if I remember correctly.

With all the publications coming out with their ratings, rated by people who are hardly hard core maniacs who expect the world from their hard core sims, lets let the real experts rate the sim...................US. Rate it and give a short explanation why. Be good for ED to get some good feedback from it's customer base. So here is why I give the score you will see below. Without radio calls from the combat area, like you hear in Allied Force, the sim still has a small but noticeable sterile feeling to it. The ATC still needs a little work and I enjoy Allied Force in that there is a appreciable landing pattern of incoming Aircraft. I hope ED works on this in the future. For now, what they have is workable but could be improved. Some ingenius person brought in radio calls from GUNSHIP and for me flying those missions sent the immersion level to an all time high when it comes to radio chatter. I plan on instituting them into my missions once I hit the Mission Editor hot and heavy. The ME is fantastic and just what people were asking for and there is talk from ED that it is going to be even further enhanced. The trigger features and flags really make for a dynamic mission if the mission builder knows what he/she is doing. Having the ability to make templates of units makes the work of the mission builder much easier and was a stroke of genius on a small level. It is an old complaint, but one that won't go away for me, this line of product needs, no BEGS, for a Falcon 4 style dynamic campaign. It is made for a DC. It takes the work away from the tremendous amount of work a mission builder has to do to create a dynamic, living atmosphere. Black Shark is a play a dynamic mission, go home and the world stops. Then the mission builder has to pick up from that minute and try to simulate the next hour of the war and how it goes, but that is impossible because the mission builder doesn't know what the outcome of the players mission was from all the units in the mission. Then he has to spend hours and hours making up the next mission when a DC runs it minute by minute and there isn't a centralized battle area, with nothing happening out side your battle space, but there is a whole front with many battles taking place. It makes the world live and makes you fight the war minute by minute with real time changes in the tactical situation. Having a front line with troops in contact and conducting operations minute by minute in what would take a mission builder days to recreate for just one mission in one area. You have heard it before, so I will shut up about it.............AGAIN :) Some saw the choice of the KA-50 as a curious choice. Mostly us Westerners who forget there is another world out there in the east with a vast array of weapons systems. The KA-50 was just simply masterful and perfect pick. With the weather and a realistic flight model, the KA-50 takes a lot of practice to become efficient at flying her, let alone then fighting her. That goes to a whole other level and that is what flight simmers want. Multi levels of difficulty. The clickable cockpit was a joy to learn (and I still don't know what half those damn buttons and switches do). The shkval is a hoot to use and modelling a minute detail like laser burn out is important to us Simmers. We want to be punished for screwing up or not fighting our steed correctly (how hopeless we are :) ) The graphics to me are wonderful and made for a helo sim. The one down fall is the tree's having no collision capability which also affects the combat as the enemy can see you thru them and can fire thru them, taking away a huge tactical advantage to the player. If that were to be fixed it alone would notch up my score for the sim by 2-3 points. Another curious omission and I believe it may be a limitation of the engine is that we lost the Crimea and all the usefulness it would have brought along in mission and campaign building and design. I would like to see it reinstituted and also populate Turkey. Turkey is in the sim but with no cities and airfields, it makes it almost impossible to make a campaign or series of missions that make Turkey a central figure in the fight. Why is that important? Turkey has the KA-50. Me thinks that ED will eventually populate that area but I hope it isn't at the expense of losing another part of the map like we lost the Crimea. ED, we want it all of course :) The selection of AI aircraft and weapons is wonderful and makes for a very interesting battles that can take place. Line of site vision, sensor line of site were all taken into consideration with the AI( I know, I tested the crap out of this), and that is something Simmers have been begging for is an AI that acts and has the limitations of a human. The AI isn't quite there yet (will it ever really be for any sim/game), but it has taken leaps and bounds forward in Black Shark and ED should be proud of that. The Vista problem, though it doesn't effect me, nags at me at the back of my mind. I like to think, though, that Vista came along when it was almost too late for ED change things up and ED did their very best to make it as compatible as possible. I give the benefit of the doubt to ED here and would bet they are working on the problem as I type, knowing their product support. As in any software, there are bugs to be worked out and Black Shark is no exception. But I can honestly say that I have not seen a flight sim come out with this much depth and have so few issue's since Janes F-18. And with ED's business model of patching till they get it right or as right as the software will let them and the promise of new flyable aircraft coming every 9 months or there abouts, future products are going to be in even better shape then Black Shark and that is phenominal. A-10C HOG. gimme gimme gimme gimme. A Model Apache, I wet my shorts just thinking about it! I like the fact that ED didn't foget Joe Simmer. I know it is hard to believe but there are those of us out there who do not want to immerse themselves in a 500 page manual and spend a bazilliion hours trying to figure out how to fire weapons and become befuddled by the avionics and switches and buttons. And believe me, Joe simmer is WAY important to our well being as a hard core community. ED made a gamers mode so that should draw more people into our folds and recruit future hard core simmers. Thank you ED for continuing to expand the customer base. It benefits ED and it benefits us. I was very happy to see that ED included training in Black Shark. But I must say that some of the information in there was so useless it was like they were put in there for filler to make it look better. I rolled my eyes at some of the electrical information passed along. Now there may be a reason for the info but I haven't figure it out. The training is not Longbow 2 training but that doesn't mean it isn't as good. The ability to take over and apply what you just learned is invaluable to those hands on people that like to watch, listen, and then do. That is me and the training was right up my ally, minus the useless information :) Regardless of my comments about needing a DC, ED went miles above their former products of LOMAC and Flaming Cliffs in delivering 3 campaigns that offer a diverse selection of missions requiring not only tactical knowledge but also a knowledge of the aircraft and its benefits and limitations to fly them. The campaigns take into effect your success or failure to assign you your next mission in the mission tree ala Janes F-18. There has been some rumble of late by a very few that the missions in the campaigns aren't much different from each other. I took the time to go thru each mission of each campaign and it sure seemed to me that the mission builder built missions for a KA-50 gunship for what the gunship does, kill armor and protect their own armor. I say the campaigns were well done and I would love to hear the man hours it took to bring those 3 campaigns to life. I would bet it would stun the Black Shark community. This does bring up a niggle I have in that we still don't have a Multiplayable campaign. I believe I read that it is a limitation of the software. Well I hope ED is spending some man hours fixing this problem. Simmers want to be able to fight a war with their buddies, not fight a single battle and go home and then wait for the next mission to come out from the fine mission builders we have out there. This should be a priority. Least I forget a very important single play feature. The campaign builder. ED hit at least a triple with this (it would be a home run if you could MP it). Build your missions using a story line and branch them out depending on success or failure and you put it into the campaign builder and suddenly you have a campaign for other people to single play. As do the campaigns that came with the game there is a bit of dynamics to it and can be as diverse as the man hours you want to spend on it. I hope there is someone out there who is doing up campaigns for us simmers to fly because we can never get enough diversity in our sim play. Well I have rambled enough and I know I didn't hit each and every thing that Black Shark brings but I hope I hit the important parts and my whys and ways of thinking about why I give KA-50 Black Shark the score I gave it. I am very hard on a product and don't grade well when a product isn't what it is advertised. But I think Black Shark is exactly what it was advertised, and maybe in some ways a little more. That is why I give Black Shark with all it's glitz and glitter and small little warts a score of 90 Agree, disagree, lets hear from you with no bickering or whining and don't rebute my view, write your views and score. Rebuttal does no good. Honest reviews do from ED's customer base. Keep it civil and on point and lets help ED make a better product in the future.

I know zactly what you are on about :) Someone has to fly helo one for any triggers and such to work as all I did was add helo's to the missions based on the tactical information of the briefing and looking at the units and their positioning. For the mission to work right, someone MUST fly the number one chopper. I tried to make it easy to identify by numbering the players with the name for the number one chopper simply "Player" and then "Player 2" and so on.

And the last three. There got it to work that time. Seemed the ZIP file was too small so I them individually. Enjoy. MP4 2nd Battle.miz MP4 3rd Battle.miz MP4 4th Battle.miz

Try this one last time. If it doesn't work I will post up a link to it. MP3 7th Battle.miz MP3 Initial Battle1.miz MP3 Initial Battle A.miz MP4 2nd Battle A.miz MP4 2nd Battle B.miz

I took the time to look over the first campaign in the list in Black Shark and took 8 of them and ported them over to MP missions. The names start with MP3 or MP4, that means they are 3 or 4 player missions. I am going to try and attach them here as attaching wasn't working earlier today. I hope you guys enjoy them. I will be going thru the rest of that campaign and the next campaign over the next few weeks and porting more missions over and I will save them. Let me know if there are any problems with them and I will try to fix them. All I did was add flights as Clients with targetting zones. No triggers or anything special. That will be for the #1 player. Any ways, here goes my try to attack them:

Could you imagine that being you trying to hamfist that thing back to base?

I wish there was a feature when setting up aircraft in the mission editor, if you set them to escort, you can choose the flight they are to escort and the AI immediately has a routine to go escort and do the escort job for the flight they are escorting and use the same WP's already set up for the flight being escorted. I also wish that if an airfield is attacked it show physical damage and cannot be flown from except by rotor wing if damage allows.

Yeah good point on the trimming. Forgot about that.

Can't attach a mission. Is there a reason why?

GG I think he means his nose down in a parallel position so he can see in front of him and not nose down like you are referring to. Sounds to me like his Auto Hover is being effected by wind and nature.

I just reported it over in the bugs thread. Let the testing team look at it and see what they think. It is linked to having Willie Pete only, loaded as AG weapons and targetting points.

First off, the SU-25 works great in laying smoke on a target. The A-10 is a different story. I am going to attach a mission and you can see for your self what happens. It gets boogered up when set up the same way as the SU25T mission and it has to do with the Target Point and Willie Petes loaded as your AG weapons loadout. Whichever WP you set the target point to, the A-10 flies to that WP and then begins a slow turning decent until it crashes. Add a Maverick or some other weapon to it and it will fly the waypoints, fire off one Maverick into the wild blue yonder right at the WP and then kill one of the targets with the other Maverick, but it WILL NOT engage with Willie Pete Rockets and in one instance after firing off the two Mavericks and having nothing but Willie Petes left for AG weapons, it turned to the right and crashed into the ground. Tried attaching the mission but it won't attach for some reason. Ask and I will e-mail it to you.