I’ve been playing air sim for half a year now with mouse & keyboard (I share my control setup here: How to execute the FORWARD SLIP to land propeller planes at 500 km/h! Fast landings, easy aborts - #4 by _Mr_Fahrenheit ) and no head tracking.
I’m not the best player, but I can get regular kills and do well if the weather/visibility isn’t terrible. I do wish to note - it took me over 24 hours of mindful flying and practice to reach the point where I could beat people in dogfights with no previous combat flight sim (but a decent bit of civillian flight sim) experience.
You absolutely do not need VR for Air sim EC.
Now, for the OP
In my experience comparing ASB to ARB, the issue is less with absolute map size. This is in perspective of propeller aircraft, gunfighter jets and dogfight missile jets (up to F8U-2).
The issue is with OBJECTIVE DESIGN.
Demonstration:
Vietnam in ARB Map size: 128x128 km, 1 grid square is 16x16 km (rounded down).
Smolensk in ASB Map size: 128x128 km, 1 grid square is 16x16 km (rounded down):
Do you see the difference inherent in the objective design? (a few moments ago there was an air superiority objective where I was that spawned a ground battle. Over 50 kilometers away as we were engaging the objective, there was a bomber and people intercepting said bomber. Sometimes, you end up with A.I targets on the far end of the map as the objective RNG rolls them, or “arrows” likely spread wide apart.)
Smolensk is the same size as vietnam, except rather than concentrate every objective in a roughly 40 kilometer wide frontline (wasting 2/3 of the entire map), the objectives are spread widely across the entire battlefield with multiple airfields to spawn from.
This means we are actually using the full 128x128 battlefield rather than just a 40 kilometer wide column/row.
My solutions as thus:
- Create at least THREE, ideally MORE objectives that are placed roughly equidistant from one parallel edge to the other. These Three or MORE objectives must NOT be able to be ignored, their completion MUST impact either the chance to win or the flow of battle. They MUST be equally important.
- Spawn players FORCIBLY across 3 or MORE runways placed equidistant along the map’s edge, creating small squadrons of 5x5x5 players who will naturally fly towards their closest objective to score and find enemies, thus reducing player density without changing playercount or map size or time to fly.