Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-1410838-20141028132600/@comment-25467429-20141104180220

I would say that there isn't much likelihood of many Vietnam or earlier era craft, given the timeline in this game. They would have to go way too far in boosting their performance or gimping the performance of everything else to make it competive. If you're talking about a new game, you'd have to start maxing the plane tree somewhere around the F-15C/Su-27/MiG-29 to keep from puting the top tier too far ahead of the bottom tier. The F-117A would suddenly become a special plane, possibly the F-15E/Su-33.

The alternative would be to compress the performance scope even further than it already is. There technically shouldn't be as much ability for the F-14 to compete with the F-22 as there is in the current games. If you start adding stuff like the Sabre or the Corsair, they either become highly ineffectual relative to anything already in the game, of you suddenly have no incentive to play into the game and target the F-22 unless you just really like it, because the F-14 would be nearly indestinguishable.

This is a fun exercise, but in reality they aren't likely to add anything to Infinity much more capable than the X-02 or the R-101 Delphinius, and probably not anything at all on the lower end since that won't attract people to keep playing the game for very long (how long could it take to fully upgrade a plane that can't manage to keep up with the F-22s and 2u-47s of the game anyway). And if they twist the competitive balance too much to justify it, then it destroys the balance and meaning in the game design.