Cliffs of Dover AAR -- Text only

[MengJiao]

  Sorry about the lack of screenshots, but I closed up the computer late at night and I had
too many screenshots to consider at that hour.

  Screens later!

  Anyway, the fun part for me at least was all of the pleasant surprises a quick run in CLOD produced.
First it was the first game I've run on the new machine (a quite modest Alienware Aurora r4) and everything
went super smooth.  The Full Mission Builder was pretty close to the similar editor in IL-2 and I set up an easy
interception with 2 Spitfire IIa 100 Octane going after a Donier 17 (early morning recon over the channel).

I put up plenty of cloud systems to help the jerry bomber and had a air start with everything but engine management and
camera views on standard realism.

The results were surprising:  I shot down the Donier pretty easily on most runs.  I guess that reflects reality, but it
certainly has never been my experience in semi-simulators that I can hit anything at all.  I've blasted away at
every imaginable plane in a lot of sims and -- even with experience in the plane and in the game, I usually don't
hit much of anything.

So I'm puzzled: why can I shoot things down right away in fairly realistic mode in CLOD?
I'm thinking that there's enough detail in the game (waves, clouds, aircraft models, movement of
shadows) that I can correctly judge things by eye.  For example, once when I had overshot the Donier,
I saw the bomber's tracers arcing just below me and I worked out a high side run from that picture of the
situation.
Other possibilities:
1) random run of good luck
2) I've never flown good models of early Spitfires and they are very good for shooting down Doniers.
3) Doniers are relatively flimsy (I've never shot at one before, but their reputation was that they
were the easiest of the German bombers to shoot down)
4) better damage model in CLOD 
5) the Donier was flying into the sun at 7 AM and the game models the fact that he couldn't see
me coming at him at least part of the time (seems unlikely -- actually the sun worked against me
by blinding me with reflections off my prop when I was heading east -- a effect I've never seen
in a sim).