Happy Birfday, have a great tme :)

Cheers
Gary

Do not want to steal this thread, so we can keep discussing it in the appropriate sub forum at http://www.subsim.com/radioroom/forumdisplay.php?f=216

Only thing to say is that RoF is free and comes with three planes, and you can choose whether yoou buy stuff or let it be. RoF also has "special sales" all the time, with often reduced prices for whole bundles of planes.
The free planes are the Spad XIII, Albatros D.Va and the Nieuport 17.
Flying and especially landing the N17 is nothing for the faint-hearted, in RoF.

You have to create an account at the RoF central server once, yes. You can play offline though in campaigns, without being online. If you want to play online against other 'live' players, you certainly have to be online :03:
The thing is when you ever played it you will be disappointed by other graphics, flight and damage models.
You can also buy planes as a gift, for other players and friends. It is easy, already did it.

And yes i do like WOFF, and the single campaign is the best i ever experienced in any war game, bar none. Not because the flight and damage model is so sophisticated (it is in comparison to a lot of other older simes, but not compared to RoF), but because there is so much historical knowledge regarding WW1 packed into it. While RoF is not wrong in its campaigns, it just is not as historically versatile.
WOFF is the product of almost 20 years research of WW1 enthusiasts, and no 10-man-team can beat it in 2 or 3 years.

Last not least: WOFF uses ye olde Microsoft Combat Flight Simulator III engine, and while the WOFF team did a hell of a job, it sometimes shows. No mouse movement looking around, only arrow keys or the joystick's coolie hat. And WOFF is hell to setup until it runs properly, at least for me. A week is nothing, for that. It also is only able to use one processor, so you better have 4 GHz + one, because even with 8 or more processor kernels, WOFF will only use one. And this means it may suddenly stutter, in bigger dogfights.
Flying against real players is impossible with WOFF, but there is a coop mode, together against enemy AI.

Tough choice, but.. RoF is free. And if you can fly a plane in RoF it is not far to the real thing.

Get both! :yep

Steve,

if I were you I would make it a habit to check at least once per week a Windows blog like this one:

https://www.askwoody.com/

Or any similiar, there are quite some Windows-critical blogs and sites.

It will keep you on your guard regarding some bad stuff happening due top Micorsoft's wisdom. Delay updates for as long as possible, which is 4-5 weeks usually, and make mental notes of the problems and dangers listed in blogs like this. This blog may be mostly of interest for professional IT people and company admins and the like, but private users like you and me can get a hint of what mess is going on in the background, and it keeps me discouraged from trying foolish experiments and giving up my reservations about MS - they do not deserve this trust of mine anymore.

When it comes to enforced updates "as a service", the parole can only be: delay, delay, delay. Stay maximum defensively when using Windows. Keep its settings as tight and paranoid as you can afford.

Even when you use all Windows 10 Pro or Enterprise options to tighten the privacy and telemetry settings, you nevertheless have several hundred variables being constantly telephoned home to mama, almost two thousand, I seem to recall. For the most, these are not documented anywhwere, and for that they are harmless and only exist to improve Windows - ROFL! - you only have Microsoft's word. And they showed so often in past years that their word is worth NOTHING, and that they consider your property (and your rights over it) to be theirs.

Stay maximum conservative.

And do not fall for the hype about "patching" Meltdown and Spectre. So far, not a single "in the wild" incident has been reported, but the tweaks and cures released by Intel and also Microsoft have caused plenty of havoc: for a threat that so far only is a proof-of-concept ( in many demionstrations) and is extremely difficult to turn into a real menace. Block according patches as best as you can. At least do not allow to get talked into using them voluntarily - sooner or later Microsoft will enforce them on you anyway. But you must not agree to be beta prey walking early to the butcher. Delay, delay, delay.

And while I am at it:

https://www.computerworld.com/articl...nstalling.html