Yes, pretty much, the key in dogfights is to be aggressive as possible. In dogfights where there are more than 1 participants on each team the tendency is to have a "turning" fight, meaning to say, engaging in the classic-style dueling by keeping on turning until hopefully, you reach your opponent's tail (though often if 2 duelists have about the same turning speed they end up in a jousting engagement, then begin the whole turn-try-to-get-the-tail process). This is what is really fun; this is what happens when you fight a Dragon (though I think it was simply fun because I wasn't so aware of the "turret-mode" strategy).
But again, sadly, the AI simply isn't human. The best they can do is to do those fancy maneuvers and as I said, take pot shots at you while spinning round and round but conclusively, you get to destroy him pretty easily by staying in turret mode. If my opponent were a human, he should ALSO engage in turret mode, forcing ME to flee out of fear of losing the "frozen jousting" engagement.
In other words, even YOU against ONE VERY SKILLED AI pilot will often be not that interesting, because 1)Space dogfights, or rather FreeSpace dogfights are fast-paced and dogfighting is really made for 1 player engaging many AI enemies at once, 2)AI pilots aren't smart and are based more on calculation than on logic, and 3) This isn't multiplayer.
So, if we get to the point wherein some smart coders get to have the ingredients for a really sane, expert AI ace, Player vs. AI will usually be best with 1 player against many AI pilots.
I actually tried the 7-to-1 odds thing, in fact I think it was 6 friendly AI pilots flying Persi (I think they were even below General, maybe Major or something, I don't remember exactly; but for goodness' sakes, they were supposed to be elite pilots!) against 1 BALLS OF STEELE Ulysses (on Insane to avoid firing rate buffs).
The Ulysses should have considerably more maneuverability than the Perseus even though it is the much older design, plus the Balls-of-Steele bonus turning rate (someone proclaimed that several posts ago); in fact, that was my point; in Werner Voss' fight against 7 opponents, he flew a plane that was basically more maneuverable but was simply the more outdated, harder to fly machine.
But NO. Humans are simply better - the 7 Persi BLEW IT TO BITS in probably less than half a minute - clearly, in AI fights, sheer numbers will MASH the fewer but more skilled opponent. Besides, this whole recreate-history thing simply won't have high chances of actually being worthwhile in a game concerning robotic-minded NPC's. Though of course, a skilled FREDder can even the odds very easily.
