Nugget to Ace || How to be good at Ace Combat 7 Multiplayer (and singleplayer)!

Energy management is probably the most crucial skill to have in Ace Combat. Poor management will lead to undesired stalls, being hit by missiles, crashes (into the ground), and being unable to catch enemy targets. Depending on your setup, there will be two primary controls to manage energy: Accelerate and Decelerate. When you Accelerate, you are increasing your energy (speed). When you decelerate, you are decreasing your energy (speed). Depending on your controls, when you accelerate and decelerate at the same time (or just decelerate if that is the configuration you have), you are almost directly transforming your energy into mobility (turn speed) and should feel the speed your plane turns increase dramatically. Your speed is visible on the left hand side of the HUD. Please note there are multiple units of measurement that the HUD speed and altitude can be in. There are approximately three ways to gain energy:

1. Holding accelerate
   
2. Diving
   
   
3. Some weather conditions that push the plane will give you speed if you are going with the currents.

There are approximately seven ways to lose energy:

1. Holding decelerate
   
2. Adjusting the plane's heading
   
3. Climbing
   
   
4. Crashing
   
5. Some weather conditions that push the plane will decelerate you if you are not going with the currents
   
6. Performing High-G turns
   
7. Performing Post-Stall maneuvers

You should practically never be on middle acceleration. You should almost always be accelerating or decelerating, and you should be doing that first and foremost with thrusting, braking, and turning. If you stay at a constant medium speed, you are bait for missiles, guns, EML, and basically everything else.

One way you could think of it is like breathing. You always want to be inhaling (accelerating) or exhaling (decelerating).

Energy is also like a currency; you spend it when you perform an attack or take evasive action. Therefore, in order to attack or evade the most effectively, you will need the most energy possible. Make sure to build and save energy whenever you are not spending it, and when you run low on energy, it may be best to switch to gaining energy instead of continuing to attack.

Unless you want to stall or perform a post-stall maneuver, you never want to run out of energy. Doing so will also make you missile, EML, gun, and everything else bait.

You should also be mindful of altitude, as altitude is, in many ways, stored energy. If you have the high ground, a dive will give you an energy advantage over someone climbing to meet you, which means you can perform more evasion and more attacks.

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If you have any questions about this guide, are looking for someone (or a group) to play with, or want more personal training, please contact me or leave a comment!

Any constructive feedback on the guide is also welcome!

###INCOMPLETE!###

Knowing how to evade missiles in Ace Combat is only second in importance to Energy Management, and that is simply because good evasion requires energy management. Being unable to avoid missiles leads to death and frustration.

Depending on your setup, deploying flares will be bound to different things. For the PS4 controller, it is button-pressing both sticks. Number of flares remaining can be seen in the bottom right of the HUD. In order for missile evasion to make sense, one must understand how missiles themselves work, first. Missiles do not typically have the same mobility as an aircraft. When they lose speed, they pretty much will not regain it. These are the fundamental keys to evading missiles. It is this performance that makes the majority of missiles only effective when approaching a target from specific directions:

Most missiles will miss when fired perpendicularly to their target. Some will circle back around, but many will run out of fuel first. The exceptions to this are the SASM which will explode near it's target regardless of direction, and when a plane is flying slow enough the missile can compensate for the plane's continuous change in direction. When approaching a plane from behind, the plane has the least amount of movement relative to the missile, making missiles the most effective from behind:

Assuming it is traveling at standard speed, the plane could bank left, right, up, or down, and the missile would start tracking it's shifted movement and have the best odds of still striking it.

When a missile approaches a plane head on, the situation is very similar; however, the distance between each is closing much faster as they are both accelerating towards each other, meaning the missile and plane must both react faster. The other major difference is that if the missile misses the plane, the distance between the two ALSO increases faster. As with before, however, missiles with a longer lifespan (QAAMs) are often still able to double back and catch the player.

It is for these reasons that when evading missiles, the player should aim to be perpendicular to the missile when possible, and when firing missiles, they should aim to be directly behind or head on to their target (The other disadvantage of head on encounters or "jousting" is that the other player may use an EML, their own missiles, or their guns to their advantage).

There are approximately six major modes of evasion in Ace Combat 7:

1. Flare usage
   
2. Environment usage
   
3. High-energy evasion
   
4. Low-energy evasion
   
5. Low-to-high energy evasion
   
6. High-to-low energy evasion

Flare's are not a guaranteed way of evading missiles, however they are quite effective, especially in conjunction with other forms of evasion. It is very possible to use the ground or edges of the terrain as a shield against missiles, as an overshoot from one into an object eliminates it as a threat instantly:

The disadvantages with this are, of course, that it limits your mobility due to risk of crashing and it leaves you no stored altitude energy. High energy evasion effectively relies on the idea of outrunning the missile, to an extent. Typically, as the plane itself is not faster than the missile, this is accompanied with a steady turn, flares, a barrel roll, some other advanced maneuvers, or a quick and well-timed application of the brakes for a high-g maneuver. A "pure" High-Energy evasive pattern typically does not work well, especially against upgraded missiles.

###TO BE FINISHED###