Air Combat games with good war campaigns

[Trashos]

So, I am looking to get into (single player) air combat games.

1) The most important thing is that it has a good/immersive war campaign, since that's the mode I 'll end up playing.
What I have in mind is something like Silent Hunter's (the sub sim) campaign, where specific war events are scripted on specific dates, but you are generally free to roam wherever you want.

2) It has to be a decent simulation. Not necessarily "100% realistic, here is how you fly a real plane!", but not a total joke either.

Any era might be interesting, as long as the campaign is well designed. Any suggestions?

 

[Endemic]

Falcon 4.0 with BMS. You can customize the level of realism if you don't feel like learning how a dozen different radar modes work on the F-16.

 

[J_C]

So, I am looking to get into (single player) air combat games.

1) The most important thing is that it has a good/immersive war campaign, since that's the mode I 'll end up playing.
What I have in mind is something like Silent Hunter's (the sub sim) campaign, where specific war events are scripted on specific dates, but you are generally free to roam wherever you want.

2) It has to be a decent simulation. Not necessarily "100% realistic, here is how you fly a real plane!", but not a total joke either.

Any era might be interesting, as long as the campaign is well designed. Any suggestions?

I don't know any specific ones, but DCS has a bunch of campaigns, there might be some good ones among them.

 

[Trashos]

Endemic, I checked out Falcon BMS briefly, and it looks very interesting. The campaign mode sounds very good. Do you have any experience with the campaign? Is it immersive/interesting?

J_C, OK, I looked briefly into DCS, and it's a bit confusing. It looks like the base game is free and I pay for the campaigns, right? Anyway, it might be interesting, if I happen to find a good single-player campaign.

 

[Endemic]

Endemic, I checked out Falcon BMS briefly, and it looks very interesting. The campaign mode sounds very good. Do you have any experience with the campaign? Is it immersive/interesting?

The stock game has 3 different campaign scenarios in the Korean peninsula. It's fully dynamic regardless of your presence. You could just sit at base for several in-game days watching the war from intel screens if you wanted to. The attention to detail is impressive. Even items like the warehouse buildings at a logistics depot are accounted for (the only thing not to scale is the internal density of cities\towns\infrastructure, which is understandable for a 1998 game). Missions for your squadron are also generated dynamically, but this can be changed. For example you can have the system generate more ground attack missions around a specific zone of interest (essentially you become the mission planner\strategist as well as pilot). If you want to stay in the air longer, you can request a tanker to refuel you.

Some screenshots:

Spoiler

 

[J_C]

J_C, OK, I looked briefly into DCS, and it's a bit confusing. It looks like the base game is free and I pay for the campaigns, right? Anyway, it might be interesting, if I happen to find a good single-player campaign.

The base game is free, yes. You can buy the Flaming Cliffs 3 add on, which gets you half a dozen planes and several campaigns, that is basically a separate game. And as you said, you can also buy individual campaigns.