Apparently it’s “addicted to escorts” week at the Dope.
In the game War Thunder, I have been flying mostly Random Realistic Air Battles, and have not signed up with a squadron, so it’s almost always “every pilot for himself/herself.”
After being slaughtered numerous times while flying solo American bombers, I have twice recently been saved by the unexpected intervention of P-51 Mustangs swooping in and shooting down my tormentors! So I need to confess that I could indeed get addicted to fighter escorts!
Oh, sure, it’s all great in the heat of the moment; rolling around together, first they’re on top, then you are. But on the outskirts of Berlin they’ll say “I need more fuel than you can provide” and they’ll leave you when you need them the most. I’ve seen it happen a hundred times.
Escort missions are the worst. Except Bioshock Infinite, where the escortee is capable and immortal.
Back in the day, my friend had Metal Gear Solid 2. In Japanese, so we never got the memo on how to lead the worthless escort girl by hand. We learned you can, umm, drag her around by the throat like a common mook. You just had to let off on choking her or you’d snap her neck. Not my finest feminist moment, nor Snake’s.
Starcraft: Wings of Liberty had an escort mission where the escortee was a five-hundred-ton death machine armed with every form of weaponry known to Tychus Findley… and it still sucked. The only way I ever beat that mission was to wall off the escortee so it couldn’t proceed across the map, and not let it out until I’d already wiped out all of the opposition.
Escort missions are my least favorite in any game. They either run off ahead before you’re ready and get killed (often killing you too as they draw a horde onto you) or they are so slow you want to take a nap waiting for them to catch up to you (if they aren’t completely stuck).
Sometimes you get one where the escorted is invincible but that’s not a real escort mission; it’s a kill or fetch/delivery mission with an illusory escort to make it look like something else. Those are tolerable.
Online, free-to-play with incentives you can pay for; mostly “premium time” which accumulates rewards faster, and “premium vehicles” which do likewise (and sometimes are unusual, experimental, or somewhat higher in performance).
To be honest, I’m afraid of taking any bomber as CAS in any tank battles. Without fail, any fighter “escorts” I get try to turn their plane into a missile against a heavy tank while my bomber gets shredded by the enemy.
Well, that and my T-34s do the job just as quickly.
Take World of Planes, add World of Tanks, throw in some Russians, and you’ve got War Thunder. I’ve never played the other ones, but I’ve heard they’re rather similar.