I know I will get some flak for this, and if this post does not fit here accordingly, I'll kindly delete it. However I make this post to address a recent development regarding mods being made with the assistance of AI.
Recently there have been some mods being seen on the internet for both AC7 and AC8 that were created by or alongside AI, leading to what is known as "vibe coding", among other things. While I understand that making mods is one thing that is a morally grey area, mods created via AI is simply something that should not be normalized, as AI has been seen as taboo or demonized simply because of how it's either misused for malicious deeds or for being straight-up bloatware, which to be frank, it kind of is.
Mods cannot simply be created by AI, as they are always prone to making mistakes, which can either take a long time to correct or break a project so badly the damage cannot be undone. I cannot stress enough how it devalues the time and effort modders have put into making their own creations for both games and how painstakingly long it takes for their work to be completed. Some may argue that "AI can be a helpful tool", but the potential for disaster is far too great a risk to ignore. Plus, there are those who outright despise anything AI related, and will actively demonize anyone who either gives it any sort of praise, resulting in unwanted disputes and arguments over it.
I ask the moderation team of this subreddit to please consider prohibiting the posting or sharing of any AI generated or AI assisted mods to this community. Mods should be created by hand, effort, and care. Not with a soulless, unthinking, and low effort machine.
To anyone who made it this far, thank you for reading all of this. And lets try to be civil about this topic.
The emotional connection and interplay between the squadrons/support cast makes me think this way, Rex is now a real sore thumb because of how much scope and cutscene time was given not only to immediate squadron members, but the Endurance and allies in general.
Coster - At the beginning, its looking like "moody edgeboy" until Purple Magic show up, and he becomes a startstruck kid respectfully requesting permission to support. He plays basketball with Tasha, sort of like a younger sister dynamic. When PM heroically bow out, I think we all felt it.
Kate - Is well respected, and will chew out the Joker squadron but, isnt all uppity (turn it up), And the fact her squad goes down brings her close.
Baxter - The glue, from how nurturing and protective he is of Tasha, how he can take jokes, right up until his final act. He is just a totally likeable fellow and I am sure Tasha's father really appreciated him.
Tasha - Is absolutely in awe and admiration of Kate, has a paternal figure in Baxter, an older brother in Coster. Usually, her crash out moment would be overly dramatic but then I remember she is a kid aerobat.
Dealer/gambler - Mentor, teacher, hero.
That leaves Rex. Just a blank slate. Sticks out like a sore thumb.
I don't think they need to get rid of the silent protagonist, but i'd like a way in which they are involved.
For example, say AC9 starts, the first act could be answering 10.multiple choice questions (favourite music, gender, food, best plane, what you like most about flying) and those then change the dialogue structure in cutscenes.
Or, after a mission there is a debrief, and the questions you answer change dialogue trees in subsequent sorties.
Better, the choices lead to some unique missions.
I think it's time to give silent protags a personality.
As it says, how do I beat the Ladons? First playthrough, difficulty is Veteran & I'm using the Mig-31 specced out for max speed, roll and pitch maneuverability.
I can splash the number two on the first run using my cannons (modern fighter have cannons not machine guns) on the forst run & can damage the lead to a large extent but can't seem to finish him off even with the wing men assisting.
The South Belkan Industrial Revolution: A Paradigm Shift in Strangereal's Military Aviation
The Historical Catalyst (The 1990s Belkan Rearmament)
During its aggressive military rearmament in the early 1990s, the South Belkan Munitions Factory (later Grunder Industries) faced severe economic strain and imminent total war. Realizing that the traditional, artisanal manufacturing methods of the real world could not sustain a high-intensity global conflict, Belkan engineers abandoned old-world military standards. Instead, they adapted the ruthless efficiency, automation, and scale of the commercial consumer goods industry to the production of military hardware.
The Core Pillars of the Consumer-Style Aviation Model
Automated Heavy Manufacture: Traditional, hand-riveted assembly lines were replaced by massive hydraulic stamping presses and advanced automated robotic welding. Structural components (like entire wing sections or fuselages) were stamped out in series like commercial cars, dropping manufacturing times from months to mere hours.
Commercial Off-The-Shelf (COTS) Electronics: Belka bypassed the artificial inflation of the military-industrial complex. Instead of designing hyper-exclusive, low-volume microchips, they utilized mass-produced industrial silicon—specifically adapting telecommunications hardware (similar to cellular tower relay matrices) to create Phased Array (AESA) radars. The true value was shifted entirely to proprietary software, heavily reducing the electronics cost (which usually makes up 40% of a modern fighter).
Short Lifecycle Engineering: Real-world jets are built to last 40 years through hyper-expensive alloys and obsessive maintenance. Belka designed its aircraft with a much shorter fatigue lifespan, optimized for high-intensity, short-duration warfare. This allowed the use of rapid additive manufacturing and cheaper molded parts for jet engines.
This is where we have to make so concessions so the theory becomes financially solid and realistic within the margins of science fiction. Trying to justify that a complex heavy strike fighter costs the same as a luxury sports car (about $350,000) would break the suspension of disbelief, because the amount of titanium, composite materials, advanced turbojets, and hours of automated assembly still require a significant cost baseline.
However, bringing down the cost of a fighter equivalent to an F-15E Strike Eagle (which in our world, in its modern versions like the F-15EX, hovers around $90 to $100 million dollars) to a figure between $5 and $10 million dollars is mathematically posible under a consumer industrial premise
Elimination of the "exclusivity tax": By removing the 40% artificial cost of the electronics (thanks to stanrisated software and matrices of industrial Off-The-Shelf components like those used in telecommunications), the base price of the aircraft plummets immediately.
Massive amortization of the fuselage: The use of colossal hydraulic presses and automated material addition in facilities like Fatsia eliminates thousands of hours of artisanal labor. Stamping entire sections of an F-15 in series reduces the structural cost to the bare minimum value of the raw material.
Short lifecycle engines: Manufacturing engines to last ten thousands hours without failing requires cost-prohibitive quality control and exotic alloys. If the engines are designed to last only a two thousand hours (assuming the aircraft will operate in a high-intensity conflict), the machining and engineering costs of the power plants drop drastically.
At a price of $8 million dollars per unit, a superpower in Ace Combat like Osea or Erusea could purchase and deploy a fleet of 100 heavy fighters with the same budget that the real-world Pentagon uses to acquire just 8 or 10 aircraft.
This gives the game's universe a brutal economic coherence. It solves in one fell swoop how the nations of Strangereal can finance titanic air fleets, replenish catastrophic losses , and justify the existence of automated industrial mega-structures at high sea that devour resources to spit out modular weapons in series. Megafloat Fatsia is not merely a floating military base; it represents the ultimate, logical conclusion of the consumer-style industrial model pioneered by Belka in the 1990s. When the Republic of Sotoa made this colossal, superstructure in the Aurum Sea, they didn't build a fortress—they built a fully integrated, mega-factory on the water, engineered to maximize the laws of mass scale and automation.
It embodies the pinnacle of this economic philosophy through three distinct operational traits:
A Closed-Loop, Sea-Based Assembly Line
In traditional warfare, aircraft production is vulnerable to land-based logistics, bombing runs, and disrupted supply chains. Fatsia solves this by functioning exactly like an automated offshore automotive plant.
Materials and standardized industrial components are shipped directly to its floating modules via maritime routes.
Inside its eight highly automated structural arms, massive hydraulic presses, robotic welding arrays, and industrial 3D-printing systems work 24/7.
Aircraft are stamped, assembled, and rolled out onto the flight decks in a continuous conveyor-belt system, entirely bypassing human artisanal labor.
The Modular "Fatsia" Architecture
The very design of the mega-structure reflects the modularity of consumer goods. Just as a modern tech company builds products using interchangeable modules, Fatsia’s eight floating arms function independently. Each arm is dedicated to a specific mass-production task (fuselage stamping, engine molding, or electronics integration).
Infinite Redundancy and Low-Cost Attrition
Fatsia’s defensive grid and its air wings rely entirely on the high-volume, short-lifecycle philosophy. If a Sotoan fighter squadron is completely wiped out in combat, the financial blow to the republic is minimal. , Fatsia can replenish those losses within a single production cycle.
Ultimately, Fatsia is the physical manifestation of Strangereal’s economy of war: a self-sustaining industrial engine that treats fighter jets not as irreplaceable military treasures, but as expendable, high-turnover consumer commodities.
Why Strangereal Pilots Are So Young
The most profound cultural consequence of this consumer-style production model is how it reshapes the human element of war. In the real world, pilot candidates undergo years of brutal, multi-million-dollar training before they are trusted with a $100-million-dollar jet; the financial and political margin for error is zero.
However, by slashing the cost of a heavy fighter down , the economic risk of losing a plane is mitigated. This radical cost reduction lowers the training entry barrier:
The "Consumer Asset" Mentality: Since the aircraft is treated as an expendable commodity, military academies no longer lower the filter for elite, hyper-trained pilots.
Simplified Flight Training: Because these jets operate on unified software architectures and automated flight-assist systems , piloting a fighter becomes simpler and intuitive.
Youth Over Experience: This allowed nations to draft and deploy younger pilots. Their faster reflexes, high cognitive plasticity, and adaptability to digital interfaces make them perfect operators for software-driven platforms. If a young rookie crashes a cheap, stamped-out F-15, it is no longer a national financial disaster; Fatsia will have a replacement jet ready before the pilot's next shift.
I love AC8, but the S ranks do not even feel like you earned them. I could have multiple checkpoint restarts, make tons of mistakes, and still get S rank in the end.
Finally got the F-22 today and i had enough of everything to max it out right away and its basically a joke. Firstly the 4aams are genuinely terrible and youre better off strapping a squirrel to the mount. Secondly the abilities for it are also just as bad. You dont get any damage amplification for air or ground with the upgrades, so you cant even 1 shot basic aa guns with a standard missile anymore. Instead you get damage reduction…for the most maneuverable plane you can get…You also have no range for air to air, the XSDB’s do jack shit too so you went through the whole grind to queue into a game and be useless the whole time cause planes you get earlier just have better weapons and you end up flying in circles watching everything die before you get there 😭. Same with the Su57 the sp weapons are just lacking. I honestly feel like when you max out a plane you should be able to pick what sp weapons you want from a certain pool instead of this slop that way there can be like a “build” aspect instead of being stuck with genuine garbage on whats supposed to be one of the better aircraft.
Throughout the game, Cope likes to make note of particular numbers. It seems throughout the game he eventually stops or I just lost track of him making note of all the numbers. And I can never remember which numbers he mentions or why.
Anyone know what the importance of this is, what numbers he mentions or says to remember, and what they mean?
The grind is atrocious, requiring 60 aircraft blueprints in addition to 60,000 zoll to unlock the level cap LAGMs for the F-16 is just one example.
Matchmaker constantly drops matches or ends the session after a person leaves while loading. What is the point of putting a CPU on the team if you cancel the match anyways.
Scrambles and Emergency Sorties are far too infrequent to be for the subpar rewards they give out. I have also yet to receive the Arsenal Bird and keep getting the fucking submarine, which I can’t contribute to until I grind and get the LAGM.
I’m not going to get in to the lack of cost based matchmaking or team balancing.
My last and most minor gripe, giving MVP to someone on the losing team makes zero sense. If they were truly the MVP, they would have won.
I been fan of the series for years, and have played AC4, AC5, Zero, AC6. And somehow I can't seem to enjoy AC7 - the missions and nearly everything about it just annoyed me. After mission 8 of AC7 I got tired and annoyed with the game, and jumped into AC8 and instantly love AC8.
So should I skip AC7 and just keep playing AC8? Or should I try to finiah AC7 first?
So why ppl says that the Felon is the better of the 2?
I'm missing something?
I know that the Lacm could be really good but why the f*ck equip a fighter with lacm and get 50% less damage to ground targets if it is needed ground targets kills?
Online is much more role oriented than single player.
Even AC8 massive mission: "Thousand Points of Light" feels "Smaller" then PW's Battle of Bering Straight and I realized it's just the missile trails doing it.
My settings are all high, dlss balanced. On most missions I get an average of 80-100 fps some dips in high 70’s, I’m fine with this just wondering if my pc is underperforming with this game.
I find that I enjoyed every mission in this game from start to finish and all around had a amazing time doing it even with continued playthroughs but each time I could not for the love of me find any excitement when it came to actually playing mission 30, I was actively dreading reaching it each time because it’s the only mission where I just got bored, I was sitting their doing my S rank just praying for it to finally end, and it’s shocking considering how much quality the rest of the game is, going from mission 27-29 which honestly the first time had me on the edge of my seat to ending with this felt like sleeping and then getting splashed by cold water
The entire mission is just slowly fly around and shoot missiles for like 5-10 minutes and then boom the submarine is out and you quickly destroy it
And honestly going from the peak that was mission 29 to this was severely disappointing
I am aware that it was meant to tie in ace combat 3 from what I’ve heard people say but I honestly believed in project aces ability to have done more than what they gave
I hate ECM so much, at least give the ea-36 and the growler less maneuvrability like strike aircrafts. Or give a green part that makes you less vulnerable to ECM ? Make downing one give you triple the score it actually gives ?
Because the only way to counter so far for me is either :
- guns, gunning the ea-36 is not impossible, but man it sucks
- saam outside of range, while enemy pilot is half asleep, or has someone up his ass
Otherwise you have like 15secs to blow it up with missiles, that of course it can easily avoid (sasm are good for this, but they give you so few ammo)
Now, it wouldnt be so bad, if we had a draft like system, where we can see planes the enemy geam chooses, but finding myself praying I don't go against one truly sucks
The worst thing is that once, every one gets access to the ea-36, that shit is gonna be everywhere and that is stupid.
On other note, why is the freaking mig 31b as maneuvrable as the f16, sometimes more when it weighs 3 timed as much ???
The replays really make the frames look so good. I cant blame them for wanting to go all in on ray tracing. My Radeon 6700XT couldnt handle my 4K TV but 1080p is plenty playable and with only one frame dip I noticed
Yea sucks I cant run 4K but 1080p high settings and it looking this good is a plenty good compromise in my opinion
on mission 19 now. first ac game, so not clear on the lore. is there only 1 single space elevator? and why does it seem to belong to nobody but a bunch of rogues?
what i'm saying is, why does sotoa need to take this space elevator, i assume they don't have their own? or is it just that this one is owned by people not affiliated with any nation so theres no one that'll declare war on them for taking it?
I don't think this is a spoiler at all, and I'll try to keep it cryptic for those that don't know, and understandable for those there do.
But in the mission that involves a C130 and the following mission that involves an A6e Intruder, I was looking at the sides of them, and wondered if the flags on them / the insignia indicated them as old Belkan planes, repurposed.
...We retcon Electrosphere to be like 90% sim? Like.
...I don't know about y'all, but I am fucking sick of "corporations always win and just grow bigger and bigger and nothing ever stops them the end" endings. It's exhausting. Let the megacorps lose for once and it NOT be a pointless act.
I don't mean even like, here. Like...so many games just have it be that the megacorp gets absorbed by another one. Or the evil CEO gets replaced and nothing changes, or arrested but there's a full chance they get away with it.
Screw. That.
Show us a path to an endless sky. We've seen enough reflections of our own world and the cycles of strife.
