Wings before war: the campaign wants a graduate, and the board rates everything 2d51c42
The fleet does not send students to war. The campaign board now stays locked until you graduate flight school — all seven sorties, in order — and it says so in plain amber: GRADUATE FLIGHT SCHOOL TO UNLOCK THE CAMPAIGN. Around it, the board got honest about what everything costs:
- Difficulty, numbered. Every campaign mission and school sortie carries a rating out of 100, banded green to red — the first intercept reads 20/100, the Bear PAK finale reads 95/100. No more guessing what EXPERT meant.
- Enemy pilots, rated 0–100. Early bandits fly like GREEN patrol pilots; by the late campaign you are meeting VETERANS, ACES, and finally LEGENDS — and the rating is not a label, it drives the AI directly. Higher-rated pilots fly faster, shoot sooner, and only they are cleared for the advanced maneuver library: split-S escapes, barrel-roll spoils, loops to force the overshoot. The briefing now prints the assessment before you commit: ENEMY PILOT RATING: 75/100 — ACES.
- New school sortie: T-5 AEROBATICS. Rolls, loops and split-S, graded by the instruments — upright to inverted to upright for the roll, over the top for the loop, inverted then pull through for the split-S, all above 1,800 m or the figure doesn’t count. GUNNERY and DOGFIGHT renumber to T-6 and T-7; the dogfight remains your graduation.