[JamesT73J]

Been playing again recently - it's still the best, much as I love the feel of the DCS / Lomac games. Nothing beats the huge scale of immersion one feels in Falcon.

I'd say in terms of difficulty, F4AF is 'perfect'. You can fly it like LOMAC if you want to, i.e. if you wish to take off with engines started, you can do so - all you need to learn is weapons delivery & sensor management which really is quite intuitive once you understand the commonality among all the MFD pages. The Viper as depicted in F4AF has an excellent human interface.

Likewise, surviveability takes a lot of practice. The training mission 'missile avoidance' is very good; it places a variety of threats in just the right quantity to keep you busy, without being overwhelming, and it's a mission I return to regularly if I get a bit rusty.

Missile and AAA performance in F4 (any version) has always been a little more fallible than the DCS products, for my money - since the days of Flanker 1.5 threat radar has always been difficult to spoof, and ZSU's & SAMS are extremely hard work; generally if they can lock-and-launch, there's a good chance you'll perish. I always felt weapons in those games perform 'ideally', i.e. extremely well. In F4, sound avoidance technique (beaming the launch platform, tallying the smoke trails - EXCELLENTLY modelled, by the way - and trying to increase the bearing rate does work very well, apart from against the latest threats, which is as it should be.

Falcon 4, (like Falcon 3) has some superb situational awareness tools - don't be afraid to use them. These were designed to overcome the limitations of working with a 2D monitor, and they are really well thought-out; enhanced padlock is a great aid (I have track IR but don't especially get along with it, though I do use that for the DCS titles as I never like the view system) and pressing shift-F3 will open up a useful situational-awareness tool. There is a lot going-on in the F4 world and until you get used to it, don't hesitate to use these things to help develop 'a picture' of what the F4 world looks like.

Little touches set F4 apart for me. I love how the AI will be unpredictable. It will run away, it will sometimes engage very aggressively (who hasn't been caught out by MiG-21's intercepting high-speed at very short range from a GAI scramble? Exactly as they are designed to do!) and sometimes it will not even notice you're there - just like real people.