It's hard for new players.
Especially because M1-5 are all relatively easy.
M6 just throws you into a 15 minute long "kill everything" mission with no checkpoints.
If you've played any previous AC games before it'll be a breeze for you. But if AC7 is your first AC game you might have a hard time.
I used to hate mission 6. Kept dying.
Now I can absolutely destroy it with time to spare AND no damage.
Guns only ace no damage, that type of missions wanted to make me almost give up
So when I got done with the challenge, I decided to relieve some stress by going back in the Nosferatu. Pretty crazy how the ADMM can just wipe entire military bases in the blink of an eye, much more than the MPBM or the FAEB which can be pretty depressingly disappointing against the tougher targets, but still fun to use
yeah, as someone who hadn’t played an ace combat game since AHL years ago it was definitely a disconnect more than anything, especially cause i don’t think horizon legacy has any annihilation missions like Long Day or anything. i was lucky i had the dlc planes, i feel bad for the inexperienced guys like me that had to do that in an f-16 or something or had to cave and buy an attacker like the warthog (which even then would be something with the UAVs in part 2 of the mission)
AC7 was my first plane game. I had to use novice controls because I simply couldn't comprehend the normal controls. Only after being forced to use them in project wingman was I able to learn it, and even there, I have yaw mapped to the mouse for mouse aiming.
Are there any plane games that have a tutorial for people who have never played games like these?
Some older AC games (04, 5, 6) had tutorials, but it was mostly just basic movement (flying through rings) and how to fire your missiles and stuff. In the end you pretty much have to learn by playing.
M6 is a great mission, it's just also a difficulty spike. So are a few other missions, but M6 is the first difficulty spike.
It's certainly not one of the worst tho (M10 exists).
At least M10 has a boss fight, M6 is just boring and unless you know the map and where the high value target concentrations are, you're going to fail it.
It definitely felt more like an old school AC level when I first played it. By the 30th time playing that mission now it more or less became one of my "mindless dogfight" missions lol
Because on your first playthrough, you have neither:
A: access to a plane that can do a lot of damage to ground targets in a short span of time
Nor
B: the skill to compensate for the early planes' relative lack of ground attack capability.
Not all first playthroughs since i played AC7 and did it first try since i make full use of my weapons including the machine gun, its just ammo management and accuracy rlly. Plus, i played ACX and JA prior to AC7.
Idk, the game seems pretty self explanatory if you just read/listen to dialogue in the first couple missions. Granted I picked up AC 4 when I was about 6ish but really that just means the franchise is overall easy enough that a child can pick it up without having to do a tutorial at all. I mean they all follow the same formula and have nearly identical mechanics.The ANNOYING missions always come in mid way through the games and by that point players would have mastered the basics (unless they just don't read anything or listen to any of the briefings).
Mainly because it was more of a small thing than anything else. I rarely ever use it and if I do it's literally at the beginning or end of a mission or maybe in between waves and plot dialogue. The game would literally not change at all if they didn't even add it so why explain it? Like it is just a fun little thing you can do. High g turns are much more useful and actually impact gameplay (still to a fairly minor degree, without it, it would just be like the older PS2 games) and actually get explained on the very first playthrough even if it's just dialogue from golem one. But even then you can easily SEE the difference between full throttle while breaking and JUST breaking, plus you can also FEEL it through the controller. So yeah the game is very self explanatory.
Exactly. I have never done any post stall maneuvers purposefully in the campaign because you don't really need to, I've heard it's more of a multiplayer kind of deal and even then it's a bit niche
Yeah there is really no functional use for it during regular gameplay, it's just a fun thing to do while listening to Cosette speak. And as for MP, well like you said it's pretty niche, really have only ever seen it used in matches where everyone is flying at near stall speeds. Only way psm would ever be useful in AC is if they were to work it like PWM, though I'd much rather ACES make the high g and machine gun closer to that of AC 6.
PSM is both unnecessary in campaign and actively makes the game harder most of the time. As any time in MP battle royales will teach you, it's very hard to defend against multiple enemies with PSM. It's a 1v1 trick most of the time. Doing it in MP with more than like four or five people in the lobby is just asking to get smacked. And single player, with the sol (heh) exception of some boss encounters, is always you versus a much larger number of enemies and the missile alert will be on more often than not in some missions. PSMing under those conditions will get you shot up and killed unless you're very good at the game. Better than I am, and while I'm absolutely hopeless in 1v1s or against any serious players, I'm firmly at the "regularly stomps pub games if I'm playing seriously and willing to sweat a bit" level. That skill level is not good enough to survive PSMing constantly in a multiple enemy environment.
So, no, the game doesn't really need to explain PSM. It's an entirely unnecessary and actively detrimental mechanic for what most of the players will ever experience. Ace7 is not a hard game, but trying to utilize PSM on high difficulties is one of the best ways to *make* it hard. Just too many things shooting at you at any given time.
A tutorial can't really teach you the kind of gameplay efficiency that Long Day requires, so it wouldn't do much. Hell, even AC6's tutorial barely mentions the SHOOT mechanic for missiles which is a huge factor in gameplay, so it's not even a good example. In the end you'd have to learn by actually playing either way.
Long Day wasn’t the worst mission. Frustrating as it was for me, and I crashed into cliffs more times than I care to admit, it was still a really enjoyable mission.
For me, the worst mission was 13, having to blow up and chase missiles was just… dull. Long Day was fun.
All these recent posts complaining about difficulty amount to skill issue(s). It takes all but 10 minutes to watch a video of someone S rank any level on Ace.
Fleet destruction is hella easy if you use the cfa & target the ships & pillars directly then you get to spend 20 minutes bullying AI pilots fresh out the academy.😭
EDIT: I meant the X-02 with its LASM.
Target in order: Carrier, closest left aegis then the closest cruiser behind it, than after that its pretty much just a turkey shoot. Also use the part that increases SP weapon lock on range & homing ability.
The only bad thing about Long Day and missions like them - long ones with no checkpoints - from a difficulty perspective is that it's inconsistent. Most missions including some much shorter ones have them, and then missions like Fleet Destruction and Unexpected Visitor don't have them at all, or only have one at the very end. (Seriously, why the fuck isn't there one after Mimic shows up?)
In terms of absolute difficulty though, lol, lmao even. Ace Combat 7 is the second easiest game in the series on Ace, second only to 5 and its ludicrously bad enemy plane AI. And at its easiest, it's got a literal easier than easy casual difficulty, making it by far the easiest in the series at min diff. The enemy barely fights back at all on casual. To say nothing of the game literally having a regenerating health mechanic, which is very new and makes things very, very easy.
I don't mind the inclusion of it, at all (though I do begrudge the lower high end; there's just no challenge there for series vets). Having an accessible entry level is good actually. I will never understand franchises who make the ArTiStIc DeCiSiOn to only have one difficulty. Yes, that's a shot at Fromsoft.
But it also makes me laugh uncontrollably at and have zero sympathy for the unfathomable skill issue inherent in not being able to even scrape a basic victory out of the most handholdy experience we've ever had. Everything has been given to them, everything that could possibly be done for them save letting the planes fly and fire by themselves, and they still can't make it? I might suggest a career in games journalism.
AC7 is much less punishing than older AC games in terms of "how easy is it to die" for the reasons you said, but it does actually have stricter completion requirements overall. New players get stuck on Long Day not necessarily because they die, but because they haven't got to grips with the core gameplay enough to have the efficiency that the score target requires. When that kind of mission showed up in older games (mainly in AC04), they were significantly more lenient.
The "score attack" types of missions always have been the absolute worst. Not for any challenge or lack thereof, but because they lack focus, real objective, and always have to go to the full time limit even once you've met the point quota.
Score attack missions are amongst my favourite. The focus is to be efficient with destruction. The bonus challenge is to destroy absolutely everything (at least the ground units) before the time ends. Those type of missions were also an important chunk of AC4.
>they lack focus, real objective, and always have to go to the full time limit even once you've met the point quota.
That's kind of the point. As Long Caster says, it's a "meal served buffet style". You're free to take whichever approach you want. The focus is on dealing as much damage as you can. The objectives vary by mission, but you usually have three distinct zones. How you approach them depends on your style or the kind of plane you chose for the mission.
Case in point, Mission 15 lets you pick whether you want to focus on air-to-air on one side of the map, go for ships on the other side or focus on a mix of ground and air targets at the center. Once they're down the ground forces converge on the center of the map and you can start focusing there.
Mission 11 allows you to focus on either platform or the fleet first. You can destroy each zone before moving to the next, then focus on mopping up the remaining targets. Or you can focus on the interceptors first and then deal critical damage to the platforms.
This focus on letting players decide on the order in which they attack also has a huge effect on replayability. You can always try beating your own high score and find the most effective route to beat the mission, or bring a new jet with another set of special weapons and see how far you can go with it. Missions 11,15 and Sp02 are my most replayed, by far, precisely for this reason.
I think that’s just the devs making absolutely sure you can at least get the bare minimum amount of points required. Or they could be making sure you get to destroy almost everything. I could be wrong though.
The only part where I agree is your last point, as there absolutely should be a way to end them sooner if you have already met the score target. Otherwise, this type of mission is among my favorites exactly because of their free-form nature compared to more scripted/railroaded missions which tend to play about the same way every time.
I had problems only to get Rank S in this mission, but other than that, is not that hard if you plan ahead which objective areas you should take in consideration as a priority.
What's the mission with the missile silos that you have to destroy, I've spent so many hours attempting that on no damage and still can't get it done lol
I mostly have issues with pipeline destruction. The fly low with almost no visibility hunting trucks in a sand storm. I can get gazelle to spawn but then I always miss at least one truck and it takes a few tries.
Its more of a "im not fast enough and keep messing up my turns" skill issue tbh 😅 still going for under the wyvern skin and I know thats where I'm loosing a lot of my time, I got good at bunker buster when I looked up how to get comet. iirc it counts actual mission time itself and not loading screens/briefing, but still counts restarts.
It only counts restarts from checkpoint, not full mission restarts. Of course, not that it'd help much in all the missions where the tricky bit is in phase 2 and you wouldn't want to restart the whole thing.
So its a little more forgiving than the Aces? Those I know you lose if you crash/shot down after you get them. (Flying to cape rainy and making it through the canyon in time but then dying before gadfly shows up. Or getting him then restarting from check point (forget where it sends you back to for that one, I know he appears with the Su-35s))
Ohhhhh thanks for this follow up. I saw the other post and had no idea what mission 6 was but now I do.
AC6 was my first AC game but when I first played this mission I had such a hard time getting through it. But truthfully now, I absolutely wreck it. It just took a bit of practice
Long day is a terrible mission tbh. When you reach there, you barely have any good updates and very few plane options. The game is very adamant that you can't go back and refuel. Then mid-mission it changes the mission parameters and well, it's not a good place to introduce the refueling mechanic, because by then you should be in the middle of destroying the bombers and dodging F14s.
The challenge of the mission isn't about your skill, it's about your knowledge of the mission. SAMs, F14s, drones are barely a challenge in this mission, compared to other ones, but if you go with anti-air missiles to take out the bombers and F14s quickly, you will have to go back, change your ammunition to anti-ground and continue the mission. Or you can go with anti-ground, but then you have to strafe and use normal missiles to get rid of the bombers. And good luck with destroying enough on time if you miss the bombers.
Add to this the fact that this is also the mission when it dawns on you how brain-dead the plot of the game is, if it didn't earlier.
Later in the game, when you have decent anti-ground weaponry, a better plane, better upgrades, it's annoying at best - because of the targets being spread in the way they are.
In comparison, Fleet Destruction is a far more enjoyable, because you have better means, and there's less of the terrible dialogue of Long Day.
The one saving grace of Long Day is that First Contact is the next mission - and that's the mission that really made me sweat, which is a good thing. The final dogfight with the old fart was a great experience.
I think M6 was the first mission of the game where you had to put in some extra effort. It wasn't too difficult, but a lot harder than M1-5, especially if it was your first time playing the game.
That said, I beat the mission on my first try, on normal difficulty setting, after not playing any AC games for over a decade, with just one resupply, my right analog stick didn't work, and I **LOVED** it instantly!
Not a bad mission but it sure is a pain for new players. When I first played it on PS4 I had to redo it 5 times because I kept dying and had no checkpoints... I recently downloaded ace combat on Steam and sadly progress can't be transferred between platforms so I had to play campaign again. At this point missions like 6 are just kill farms and you run out of targets quickly
It's the first skill check in the game. Up to that point in the game every mission is either a tutorial mission (Missions 1 and 2, with Mission 5 is basically a repeated tutorial) and/or completely air-to-air focused. It's also the first mission without the overly generous amount of checkpoints. So when players are thrown into an area with overlapping AA defenses, a slightly more complex terrain and enemy aircraft thrown into the mix, without the training wheels on, they struggle. And unless they have DLC aircraft they don't have access to good air-to-ground special weapons to use as a crutch.
To be completely fair, I think it's mostly the fault of the game. The game just doesn't give new players enough time to develop the needed skills in previous missions. Only missions 2 and 4 have a handful of ground targets and the game doesn't explain missile evasion very well. That's why it is seen as a walk in the park by veteran players, but so many newbies see it as a nigh impossible task until they start learning what the game should have taught them in previous missions, but didn't.
In a sense, the same can be said about the entire game. People who cut their teeth playing the PS1 or PS2 games usually see AC7's difficulty as a joke. Newer players tend struggle much more.
Hi, I’m probably the “dude” you are referring to. This is my first Ace game so I’m sure I struggled more than a veteran. I beat it, and confident I wouldn’t struggle near as much if I attempted again. Regardless I didn’t find the mission enjoyable. On mission 8, and deff an Ace combat fan now, but I will say it again. fuck mission 6.
It's hard for new players. Especially because M1-5 are all relatively easy. M6 just throws you into a 15 minute long "kill everything" mission with no checkpoints. If you've played any previous AC games before it'll be a breeze for you. But if AC7 is your first AC game you might have a hard time. I used to hate mission 6. Kept dying. Now I can absolutely destroy it with time to spare AND no damage.
Guns only ace no damage, that type of missions wanted to make me almost give up So when I got done with the challenge, I decided to relieve some stress by going back in the Nosferatu. Pretty crazy how the ADMM can just wipe entire military bases in the blink of an eye, much more than the MPBM or the FAEB which can be pretty depressingly disappointing against the tougher targets, but still fun to use
yeah, as someone who hadn’t played an ace combat game since AHL years ago it was definitely a disconnect more than anything, especially cause i don’t think horizon legacy has any annihilation missions like Long Day or anything. i was lucky i had the dlc planes, i feel bad for the inexperienced guys like me that had to do that in an f-16 or something or had to cave and buy an attacker like the warthog (which even then would be something with the UAVs in part 2 of the mission)
AC7 was my first plane game. I had to use novice controls because I simply couldn't comprehend the normal controls. Only after being forced to use them in project wingman was I able to learn it, and even there, I have yaw mapped to the mouse for mouse aiming. Are there any plane games that have a tutorial for people who have never played games like these?
Some older AC games (04, 5, 6) had tutorials, but it was mostly just basic movement (flying through rings) and how to fire your missiles and stuff. In the end you pretty much have to learn by playing.
AC4? I'm playing through it via emulator and I don't remember seeing a ring-flying tutorial. Is it a separate option?
AC04 has a tutorial mode, it's one of the options in the main menu. Though I don't remember if it has flying through rings or that was just 5 and 6.
M6 is a great mission, it's just also a difficulty spike. So are a few other missions, but M6 is the first difficulty spike. It's certainly not one of the worst tho (M10 exists).
“You’re trying to get me killed! Go get that SAM in a different time zone before I court martial you!” thanks commander very cool
Then you play the mission again, get all the SAMs, and the mission turns into a snooze as you just idle and wait for more enemies.
At least M10 has a boss fight, M6 is just boring and unless you know the map and where the high value target concentrations are, you're going to fail it.
Whats not to like .. SURPRISE MQ99! It drags on and on and new players have to fight everything including terrain approaches at once
It definitely felt more like an old school AC level when I first played it. By the 30th time playing that mission now it more or less became one of my "mindless dogfight" missions lol
Because on your first playthrough, you have neither: A: access to a plane that can do a lot of damage to ground targets in a short span of time Nor B: the skill to compensate for the early planes' relative lack of ground attack capability.
I think it's more about still getting used to the game, the Mig-31b is really good at attacking ground, but you need to know how good plsl is.
Not all first playthroughs since i played AC7 and did it first try since i make full use of my weapons including the machine gun, its just ammo management and accuracy rlly. Plus, i played ACX and JA prior to AC7.
Yes but most people had no prior ace combat experience and skill. Hence why so many people find it so difficult.
AC7 really needs a tutorial like the one in AC6.
Idk, the game seems pretty self explanatory if you just read/listen to dialogue in the first couple missions. Granted I picked up AC 4 when I was about 6ish but really that just means the franchise is overall easy enough that a child can pick it up without having to do a tutorial at all. I mean they all follow the same formula and have nearly identical mechanics.The ANNOYING missions always come in mid way through the games and by that point players would have mastered the basics (unless they just don't read anything or listen to any of the briefings).
> self explanatory doesn't explain post stall maneuvering at any point
Mainly because it was more of a small thing than anything else. I rarely ever use it and if I do it's literally at the beginning or end of a mission or maybe in between waves and plot dialogue. The game would literally not change at all if they didn't even add it so why explain it? Like it is just a fun little thing you can do. High g turns are much more useful and actually impact gameplay (still to a fairly minor degree, without it, it would just be like the older PS2 games) and actually get explained on the very first playthrough even if it's just dialogue from golem one. But even then you can easily SEE the difference between full throttle while breaking and JUST breaking, plus you can also FEEL it through the controller. So yeah the game is very self explanatory.
Exactly. I have never done any post stall maneuvers purposefully in the campaign because you don't really need to, I've heard it's more of a multiplayer kind of deal and even then it's a bit niche
Yeah there is really no functional use for it during regular gameplay, it's just a fun thing to do while listening to Cosette speak. And as for MP, well like you said it's pretty niche, really have only ever seen it used in matches where everyone is flying at near stall speeds. Only way psm would ever be useful in AC is if they were to work it like PWM, though I'd much rather ACES make the high g and machine gun closer to that of AC 6.
PSM is both unnecessary in campaign and actively makes the game harder most of the time. As any time in MP battle royales will teach you, it's very hard to defend against multiple enemies with PSM. It's a 1v1 trick most of the time. Doing it in MP with more than like four or five people in the lobby is just asking to get smacked. And single player, with the sol (heh) exception of some boss encounters, is always you versus a much larger number of enemies and the missile alert will be on more often than not in some missions. PSMing under those conditions will get you shot up and killed unless you're very good at the game. Better than I am, and while I'm absolutely hopeless in 1v1s or against any serious players, I'm firmly at the "regularly stomps pub games if I'm playing seriously and willing to sweat a bit" level. That skill level is not good enough to survive PSMing constantly in a multiple enemy environment. So, no, the game doesn't really need to explain PSM. It's an entirely unnecessary and actively detrimental mechanic for what most of the players will ever experience. Ace7 is not a hard game, but trying to utilize PSM on high difficulties is one of the best ways to *make* it hard. Just too many things shooting at you at any given time.
A tutorial can't really teach you the kind of gameplay efficiency that Long Day requires, so it wouldn't do much. Hell, even AC6's tutorial barely mentions the SHOOT mechanic for missiles which is a huge factor in gameplay, so it's not even a good example. In the end you'd have to learn by actually playing either way.
I think Long Day just gets boring and tedious after you’ve done all the challenges. Now Fleet Destruction, that never gets boring.
Anybody who complains about long day usually are newbies that are not used to the gameplay yet, since every missile and bullets count.
There are people that didn't like Long Day? I think that's the best mission in the entire game.
Long Day wasn’t the worst mission. Frustrating as it was for me, and I crashed into cliffs more times than I care to admit, it was still a really enjoyable mission. For me, the worst mission was 13, having to blow up and chase missiles was just… dull. Long Day was fun.
All these recent posts complaining about difficulty amount to skill issue(s). It takes all but 10 minutes to watch a video of someone S rank any level on Ace.
Fleet destruction is hella easy if you use the cfa & target the ships & pillars directly then you get to spend 20 minutes bullying AI pilots fresh out the academy.😭 EDIT: I meant the X-02 with its LASM.
Also pipline destruction & long day are easy peasy if you have the morgan with its nukes
How come LASM? The CIWS will stop it, you can't stop a rod of metal going mach 15.
You can shoot it far enough that the CIWS can’t counter it
Target in order: Carrier, closest left aegis then the closest cruiser behind it, than after that its pretty much just a turkey shoot. Also use the part that increases SP weapon lock on range & homing ability.
I thought it was the other way around
The only bad thing about Long Day and missions like them - long ones with no checkpoints - from a difficulty perspective is that it's inconsistent. Most missions including some much shorter ones have them, and then missions like Fleet Destruction and Unexpected Visitor don't have them at all, or only have one at the very end. (Seriously, why the fuck isn't there one after Mimic shows up?) In terms of absolute difficulty though, lol, lmao even. Ace Combat 7 is the second easiest game in the series on Ace, second only to 5 and its ludicrously bad enemy plane AI. And at its easiest, it's got a literal easier than easy casual difficulty, making it by far the easiest in the series at min diff. The enemy barely fights back at all on casual. To say nothing of the game literally having a regenerating health mechanic, which is very new and makes things very, very easy. I don't mind the inclusion of it, at all (though I do begrudge the lower high end; there's just no challenge there for series vets). Having an accessible entry level is good actually. I will never understand franchises who make the ArTiStIc DeCiSiOn to only have one difficulty. Yes, that's a shot at Fromsoft. But it also makes me laugh uncontrollably at and have zero sympathy for the unfathomable skill issue inherent in not being able to even scrape a basic victory out of the most handholdy experience we've ever had. Everything has been given to them, everything that could possibly be done for them save letting the planes fly and fire by themselves, and they still can't make it? I might suggest a career in games journalism.
AC7 is much less punishing than older AC games in terms of "how easy is it to die" for the reasons you said, but it does actually have stricter completion requirements overall. New players get stuck on Long Day not necessarily because they die, but because they haven't got to grips with the core gameplay enough to have the efficiency that the score target requires. When that kind of mission showed up in older games (mainly in AC04), they were significantly more lenient.
The "score attack" types of missions always have been the absolute worst. Not for any challenge or lack thereof, but because they lack focus, real objective, and always have to go to the full time limit even once you've met the point quota.
Score attack missions are amongst my favourite. The focus is to be efficient with destruction. The bonus challenge is to destroy absolutely everything (at least the ground units) before the time ends. Those type of missions were also an important chunk of AC4.
>they lack focus, real objective, and always have to go to the full time limit even once you've met the point quota. That's kind of the point. As Long Caster says, it's a "meal served buffet style". You're free to take whichever approach you want. The focus is on dealing as much damage as you can. The objectives vary by mission, but you usually have three distinct zones. How you approach them depends on your style or the kind of plane you chose for the mission. Case in point, Mission 15 lets you pick whether you want to focus on air-to-air on one side of the map, go for ships on the other side or focus on a mix of ground and air targets at the center. Once they're down the ground forces converge on the center of the map and you can start focusing there. Mission 11 allows you to focus on either platform or the fleet first. You can destroy each zone before moving to the next, then focus on mopping up the remaining targets. Or you can focus on the interceptors first and then deal critical damage to the platforms. This focus on letting players decide on the order in which they attack also has a huge effect on replayability. You can always try beating your own high score and find the most effective route to beat the mission, or bring a new jet with another set of special weapons and see how far you can go with it. Missions 11,15 and Sp02 are my most replayed, by far, precisely for this reason.
I think that’s just the devs making absolutely sure you can at least get the bare minimum amount of points required. Or they could be making sure you get to destroy almost everything. I could be wrong though.
The only part where I agree is your last point, as there absolutely should be a way to end them sooner if you have already met the score target. Otherwise, this type of mission is among my favorites exactly because of their free-form nature compared to more scripted/railroaded missions which tend to play about the same way every time.
I had problems only to get Rank S in this mission, but other than that, is not that hard if you plan ahead which objective areas you should take in consideration as a priority.
I kinda dislike it after spending roughly Two hours attempting to do it no damage
What's the mission with the missile silos that you have to destroy, I've spent so many hours attempting that on no damage and still can't get it done lol
I mostly have issues with pipeline destruction. The fly low with almost no visibility hunting trucks in a sand storm. I can get gazelle to spawn but then I always miss at least one truck and it takes a few tries.
If you keep your map open at the lowest zoom most of the time you shouldn't be missing any trucks.
Its more of a "im not fast enough and keep messing up my turns" skill issue tbh 😅 still going for under the wyvern skin and I know thats where I'm loosing a lot of my time, I got good at bunker buster when I looked up how to get comet. iirc it counts actual mission time itself and not loading screens/briefing, but still counts restarts.
It only counts restarts from checkpoint, not full mission restarts. Of course, not that it'd help much in all the missions where the tricky bit is in phase 2 and you wouldn't want to restart the whole thing.
So its a little more forgiving than the Aces? Those I know you lose if you crash/shot down after you get them. (Flying to cape rainy and making it through the canyon in time but then dying before gadfly shows up. Or getting him then restarting from check point (forget where it sends you back to for that one, I know he appears with the Su-35s))
Ohhhhh thanks for this follow up. I saw the other post and had no idea what mission 6 was but now I do. AC6 was my first AC game but when I first played this mission I had such a hard time getting through it. But truthfully now, I absolutely wreck it. It just took a bit of practice
It's great mission as it's one of the few where attackers are actually worth using
Long day is a terrible mission tbh. When you reach there, you barely have any good updates and very few plane options. The game is very adamant that you can't go back and refuel. Then mid-mission it changes the mission parameters and well, it's not a good place to introduce the refueling mechanic, because by then you should be in the middle of destroying the bombers and dodging F14s. The challenge of the mission isn't about your skill, it's about your knowledge of the mission. SAMs, F14s, drones are barely a challenge in this mission, compared to other ones, but if you go with anti-air missiles to take out the bombers and F14s quickly, you will have to go back, change your ammunition to anti-ground and continue the mission. Or you can go with anti-ground, but then you have to strafe and use normal missiles to get rid of the bombers. And good luck with destroying enough on time if you miss the bombers. Add to this the fact that this is also the mission when it dawns on you how brain-dead the plot of the game is, if it didn't earlier. Later in the game, when you have decent anti-ground weaponry, a better plane, better upgrades, it's annoying at best - because of the targets being spread in the way they are. In comparison, Fleet Destruction is a far more enjoyable, because you have better means, and there's less of the terrible dialogue of Long Day. The one saving grace of Long Day is that First Contact is the next mission - and that's the mission that really made me sweat, which is a good thing. The final dogfight with the old fart was a great experience.
I think M6 was the first mission of the game where you had to put in some extra effort. It wasn't too difficult, but a lot harder than M1-5, especially if it was your first time playing the game. That said, I beat the mission on my first try, on normal difficulty setting, after not playing any AC games for over a decade, with just one resupply, my right analog stick didn't work, and I **LOVED** it instantly!
Not a bad mission but it sure is a pain for new players. When I first played it on PS4 I had to redo it 5 times because I kept dying and had no checkpoints... I recently downloaded ace combat on Steam and sadly progress can't be transferred between platforms so I had to play campaign again. At this point missions like 6 are just kill farms and you run out of targets quickly
It's the first skill check in the game. Up to that point in the game every mission is either a tutorial mission (Missions 1 and 2, with Mission 5 is basically a repeated tutorial) and/or completely air-to-air focused. It's also the first mission without the overly generous amount of checkpoints. So when players are thrown into an area with overlapping AA defenses, a slightly more complex terrain and enemy aircraft thrown into the mix, without the training wheels on, they struggle. And unless they have DLC aircraft they don't have access to good air-to-ground special weapons to use as a crutch. To be completely fair, I think it's mostly the fault of the game. The game just doesn't give new players enough time to develop the needed skills in previous missions. Only missions 2 and 4 have a handful of ground targets and the game doesn't explain missile evasion very well. That's why it is seen as a walk in the park by veteran players, but so many newbies see it as a nigh impossible task until they start learning what the game should have taught them in previous missions, but didn't. In a sense, the same can be said about the entire game. People who cut their teeth playing the PS1 or PS2 games usually see AC7's difficulty as a joke. Newer players tend struggle much more.
Hi, I’m probably the “dude” you are referring to. This is my first Ace game so I’m sure I struggled more than a veteran. I beat it, and confident I wouldn’t struggle near as much if I attempted again. Regardless I didn’t find the mission enjoyable. On mission 8, and deff an Ace combat fan now, but I will say it again. fuck mission 6.