look, it's more than 3 years that i play XvT online, i'm member of a clan, i'm signed up at battlestats.com and i've played almost all the WOWs (week of war, a monthly tourney of one week) of the last years (whenever i've time at least) sometimes with decent results.... i know what i'm talking about:)
i must agree that the majority of pilots doesn't know or doesn't apply cooperative schemes, they simply fly like if they are alone, but A LOT of players (all the top pilots and almost all of the decents) use this strategies since they give you a big advantage against opponents
i'm talking of something like "rules", with the objective of maximize the time facing enemies frontally and minimize the time you spend in maneuvres.
When there is more than one enemy (so everytime you are not playing a duel) if you are maneuvring 1-you are not firing at any target (so you make less kills) and 2-you are an easy target
If your wing follow the same strategies it will be almost always (some errors occurs sometimes) like you are coordinating your operations, although you are not using rogerwilco or similar programs that let you talk in game (and that are not allowed in wows since they increase lag)
even if your wingmen doesn't follow this schemes you can(in certain way) still fly using those strategies, adapting them, and still improoving your performances
it is true that in WOWs all the teams must have the same ships, but this doesn't cut the ability to use these strategies even with different ships
in these years i've tried a lot of different combinations for fun with my clanmates, here are some examples:
i've played with a tf against an xwing, loosing only by one (opponent was an excellent xwing pilot but in duels maneuvrability counts, and a lot),
i've played with a tf against an yw, being slaughtered by its superior firepower, hull and shields,
i've played with a gunboat against an aw (and the aw player was at my same level) giving him and hard spank, in maneuvres too (this was unexpected.. the point is that the aw may turn faster but gunboat turns closer...and if you collide the gunboat has a great hull/shields edge:p)
i've played in 2v2 team matchs,me and my wingmen with TB the others with TI and we won, in 3players deathmatch i slaughtered with my xwing the two others with TA (and they both were good),
i've played dozens of deathmatchs with different number of players and free ship selection and the winner usually (skills counts...obviously..) was the player with the heavyest ship (gunboat, ywing..)
i've played even a lot of 4v4 team matchs, with free ship selection and the kickass ship for each team ALWAYS was the heavyest fighter
in my clan, since we are all italian (we are 200 or probably more) we organize annual meetings with an average of, uh, 25-30 guys participating, 3 days lan partys where to play at outcast, sw sims, and many other games without lag.
For example this year we have organized a funny tourney (won by my team:p) 4v4 each team with gunboat, yw, xw and ta
In all matches the first player of any team was,with very few exceptions, the gunboat player. The exceptions were sometimes the ywings... And with NO exception the last one for all the teams in all the matches was the TA player..the lighter craft...
this is because of the balance of sw games, where quite all the fighters (the shielded at least) are multirole fighters with just a different combination of parameters, and because of these strategies that can heavily reduce the gain of superior maneuvrability, whenever you are not playing duels.
Note that i'm talking about multiplayer, not singleplayer....
