u/Foreign-Resident-871

in total i’ve 100%-ed Air Combat, Ace Combat 2, Ace Combat 3 Japanese release, Ace combat 4, Ace Combat 5, Ace Combat Zero, Ace Combat 6, ace Combat X, HAWX, HAWX 2 and IL-2 Sturmovik: Birds of prey

and I’ve beat Ace Combat 7, Joint Assault, Assault Horizon and Top Gun hardlock campaigns multiple times each

Edit by me

for a bit of context four days ago I made a post on this subreddit, asking someone to explain Ace Style to me, aka how to balance it, since I was going to get Supreme Soldier medal on my first playthrough. I was confused because I didn’t understand if the ace style gauge balanced by killing and sparing equal number of yellow targets or is it determined by the points killed/spared yellow targets are worth aka two spared yellow hangars worth 200 points each would cancel out one killed 400 point fighter. Under that post i got three types of comments: a comment giving me a link to the wiki (i’ve read both fandom and wiki.gg pages about three times each before making the post and can say that wiki does not specify if the number of kills matter or the points), comments that copy paste a few paragraphs of the wiki, comments about the cat and some comments who said some “knight spares everyone, soldier does everything for the mission and mercenary kills everyone” which was not very helpful. Then I got banned and decided to stop whining and play the game. I did get the supreme soldier on first attempt and I can say that points are the thing that matter, I played every soldier mission with a calculator counting points of killed/spared yellow targets and in the end I shot down Pixy with Ace Style gauge perfectly in the middle, like THE middle, I counted the pixels.

if I understand the system that counts the Ace Style gauge works like this: it takes summary of points of spared yellow targets and subtracts the points of destroyed ones. If the answer is positive then the gauge moves toward knight, if negative it moves towards mercenary. the number of enemy fighters that turn yellow and which fighters do seems to be predetermined, so keeping track of them too is not hard. The only exception of this rule seems to be:

>14A Mars, where the TGT ships can be spared, turning yellow. destroying yellow ships is supposed to give 3300 points, but for some reason they do not balance out 3300 points of yellow ground targets.

>Mission 15, where sparing/shooting down yellow Espada 1 gives/subtracts very little points, despite the target being worth over two thousand.

also I suspect that 4b Round Hammer does something like 14a, since it has multiple destroyers and cruisers that can be spared, but I am not certain

does the style changes depending on the amount of yellow targets you kill/spare or killed/spared point ratio, like is one destroyed windmill that costs 100 points balances a spared f-4 that is worth 200 or do you need two windmills?

i 100% both and there ARE issues