[QuantumDelta]

Hand-eye coordination is a given, it's a skill index on it's own, but I'm talking beyond that as well.
The more restrictions you place on a pilot in terms of quick reflexive actions the more predictable they're going to end up being.

Unfortunately, I've been a gamer my entire life and most of that time a clan/squad/raid/guild/whatever, leader (well ok, most = ~14 years), 'thinking' about enemy strategy is something I've done all my life, I'm not as good at it on RTSs as I should be, but most other games, especially when the human element is the bigger influencing factor in tactics and strategy on the battle field, I /tend/ to dominate.

For example, in WoW - a game that is highly competitive and very complex (leading to some major balancing issues in PvP, but anyway), when the Arena was in it's first season my battlegroup was europes most competitive, I was the strat/tactics guy for my team and we basically just took other teams to pieces, with a comp that wasn't very powerful, we ended up #1 for season 1, though we couldn't go to the regionals because of the nationalities of some of our team members.
Live tactics being formed to manipulate people into a dead end of abilities/cooldowns or just break up the flow of their nukes or what have you to leave them in a vulnerable or exhausted position, and that's monitoring my own performance whilst noting the complex behaviour of 5 hostiles who have anything between 10 and 40 'main' abilities, and 4 of my own team, managing their ventrilo comms input + macro fire, and administrating them with my own instructions at the same time.

"Simple" Physics estimations and player prediction at the same time really isn't hard, especially in an environment as restricted as a flight sim.

This somewhat applies to FreeSpace 2, quite a lot of the time I can, moreso in the past than now, I could fly in a way that would subtly put a player where I wanted them to be even if they didn't want to make that choice, and then abuse the snot out of them due to it.
It's even easier in most 'realistic' sims, though I can teach most people to do the basics of it in FS and probably not so easily in those games.

If you want to see 'thinking' 1on1 skill go watch a star craft tourny.
Squad based fighting in FS2 has absolutely no equal of all the games I've played, which is a great many.

[TrashMan]

ICP is far, FAR from the finishing product.
- It only has those temporary laser thingies as weapons (the final verison will have lasers that act like real lasers, mass drivers of various kinds, plasma weapons, etc.)
- no shield managment (at least for capital ships, you'd have some options and setting for the shields)
- outdated models (I don't even think that the ships that is labeled as a BB in the ICP will be in the final game at all. If it does, it certanly won't be a BB.  Ships longer than 2km are considered battleships)
- it has fixed caps on some things and no atmospheric entry, no travel between systems, etc.

[Mika]

"Simple" Physics estimations and player prediction at the same time really isn't hard, especially in an environment as restricted as a flight sim.

I think I will go to sleep and reply on tomorrow, but meanwhile if you read this during that time, what flight sims have you played? Just curious.

The more restrictions you place on a pilot in terms of quick reflexive actions the more predictable they're going to end up being.

And here I thought that's exactly what was supposed to happen.

Anybody else notice how strange is it that the space shooters have actually worse aiming sights than modern jets?

[Thaeris]

I'm curious how a full Newtonian sim places more restrictions on the player. If done properly, it shouldn't... or at least shouldn't given that the sim is realistic enough. Such a sim is no different than any other realistic flight sim in that regard.

FS is actually more restrictive. You can't loose control of the ship. You actually can't do a lot of things. Mods like TBP, the BtRL demo, and Diaspora when it comes out will, be closer to being more like the "real thing" in a way. But, that is the extent of FS.

[NGTM-1R]

Well, lets see, changes in momentum(inertia) of your ship are sluggish, and predictable, no matter how good a pilot you are against someone who knows the mid-level skill range - they wont die.

For the most part space 'sims' that are attempting to be 'true to life' have a 'low ceiling' on their skill levels, that can't be broken.
FS2-style DOES have a ceiling, but it is significantly higher, insofar as that it took people +-5 years to actually 'master' it in an extremely competitive environment, and those that did 'truly' master it were absolutely untouchable, unmatchable and indisputable gods of the game, the difference between them and even people only very slightly below them was incredibly dramatic.
In Newtonian games, this doesn't happen SO.

So what you're basically saying is that you always go for raw speed instead of being able to change vector in such games, and you've never encountered a sufficently skilled pilot with them. Since you can't actually, you know, offer statstical evidence or anything.

You're also saying you don't want games to be friendly to intermediate-level players, since you want these "gods" to exist and lord over all.

They want that game to be a non-skill grinding competitive PvP-MMO vaguely based on the concept of the EvE universe, using a skill set that doesn't cater to the upper echelons of the gamer community, and then 'claim' to be better than EvE because their game requires skill?
**** that.

Hilarity. EVE isn't about pilot skill either, but tactics. The difference you describe is present in EVE, too (go watch Pandemic Legion rape all who challenge them in the Alliance Tourney with an inferior fleet if you don't believe me) but EVE is not a game of twitch territory masters like you seem to prefer.

[Flipside]

From what I'm reading here, the ICP seems to be little more than something to keep the fans quiet whilst development of the actual game takes place, and, in part, a pre-Beta test of close-quarters interaction. So I think that possibly taking ICP as an example of Infinity as a whole is a bad idea.

From what I've read in the last few pages, practically nothing from the ICP is actually going to feature in the actual game, from the ships to the lasers to the backgrounds, I'm not even certain that full Newtonian physics will apply in the final version of the game, but if it does, it's down to implementation. Elite:Frontier was an example of bad implementation of Newtonians, it frequently did boil down to jousting at several hundred kps, whereas I-War implemented it better.

My own thoughts on the matter is that it might be a good idea in the case of Newtonians to limit the upper speed available anyway, there's plenty of excuses for doing so, the first one that springs to mind is potential damage from micro-meteorites and debris at very high speeds. that way you won't get situations where ships pass into and out of firing range in fractions of a second.

Edit: As for X-Universe stuff, I actually quite like X, but then, I do very little flying myself, I get more fun from setting up the trading systems and watching them tick over than from physically interacting with the engine, I'd actually prefer X more if there was less player-based work and more done with the automation-based systems.

[Colonol Dekker]

I like X(3) it's like a muhmorrupguh without the asshats.
 
This is getting pretty heated for something so trivial.

[Mika]

I'm curious how a full Newtonian sim places more restrictions on the player. If done properly, it shouldn't... or at least shouldn't given that the sim is realistic enough. Such a sim is no different than any other realistic flight sim in that regard.

If the question was aimed to me, I meant that in a combat flight simulator you are trying to take away the enemy's capability to maneuver, and thus become predictable. Of course, there are ways to be unpredictable even after speed has been lost...

But QuantumDelta, maybe I could hook up with you and fly some Falcon 4: Allied Force together. Just that I could understand those combat tactics better. Then I have some friends who frequently do IL-2:Sturmovik. I guess they would like to take a lesson also.

[deathfun]

Flying around at 2,000+ m/s and making an attack run on a target is not that easy

I'd say. 2 km is quite the speed, and if your opponent is also going to same speed at you, then you are really going to have troubles.

At that speed, imagine the kinetic energy when two ships were to collide.

[Colonol Dekker]

Anyone who's played i-war 1 can appreciate that.
 
That was the pinnacle of newtonian combat for me.

[Thaeris]

My "wicked-fast attack run" experience comes from Laminar Research's "Space Combat," a program built with X-Plane 7ish graphics and generally incomplete features. But, if you wanted to build a space ship and blast a target... or fly around some imaginary region is space... it was pretty neat.

Here's the original page... now archived:
http://web.archive.org/web/20080727005743/www.x-plane.com/SpaceCombat.html

Not sure the links for the downloads work anymore... (it's freeware, but you'd need the X-Plane 7 or 8 app for it to run. 9 might work... but I've never tried)
Mac: http://dev.x-plane.com/update/SPACEMAC140.sitx
Windows: http://dev.x-plane.com/update/SPACEWIN140.exe
Linux: http://dev.x-plane.com/update/SPACELIN140.tar

The program had potential because of its concept... but was very obviously unfinished. If this is test/discussion-worthy, it might be worth making a thread of it. But probably not until then...