Final AC7 S Ranks

Greetings, aces! We've got an update on the Ace Combat 7: Skies Unknown S Rank information presented on the wiki. Thanks to xBlazededge sharing some in-game data with us, we're now able to present the exact S Rank conditions for every mission in the game.

How S Ranks Work

As a reminder, AC7 is one of the only games in the franchise that uses a combination of time and score to calculate the player's final Clear Rank. If you take more time, you can still get the S Rank if you destroy more targets. It works like this:

• Your score from destroying enemies in the mission is your Destruction Score. You see this at the top-left of the screen during the mission. In the debriefing, this is noted as "Total Destroyed" at the bottom-right.
• Your score for completing the mission quickly is your Time Bonus. You don't see this during the mission. In the debriefing, this is noted as "Time Bonus" at the top-left.
• Adding these together gives you a total score. This total score is never shown to you, but this is what matters for the S Rank.

Previously, Qbicle—my co-admin here on the English wiki—compiled results from all over the internet, performed tests, and gathered data sent from many players (thank you all!) to estimate the time and point thresholds for each mission. It was painstaking work to figure out all of these values. He wrote up a blog post with more information on his method, as well as more details on how the S Rank calculations work with this time and destruction math: User blog:Qbicle/S Rank Methods in Ace Combat 7: Skies Unknown

The Official Data

Compared to Our Data

Comparing the in-game data to Qbicle's work, it turns out the wiki's estimations were really close in a lot of cases, and even got the exact numbers correct for a few missions! For example, the estimations for all three DLC missions were right on the money for both time and score!

In fact, except for the VR missions (which I'll get to), we had all of the time thresholds and Time Bonuses correct. The only thing we didn't have right was the exact total score (Destruction Score + Time Bonus); we were off by about an average of 120 points per mission, though we ended up with some really interesting outliers.

The total score comparison is as follows:

Mission	Our Estimated Total	Actual Required Total	Difference
01	20500	20530	+30
02	33050	33050	0
03	44000	44440	+440
04	50000	50240	+240
05	35000	34740	-260
06	27000	27000	0
07	46350	46350	0
08	40550	40550	0
09	43000	43040	+40
10	27000	27540	+540
11	40000	40000	0
12	50000	49630	-370
13	38000	38040	+40
14	32000	32640	+640
15	57000	57200	+200
16	39040	39040	0
17	44000	44030	+30
18	37000	37050	+50
19	67500	67640	+140
20	36000	36050	+50
SP01	58000	58000	0
SP02	70000	70000	0
SP03	117000	117000	0
VR01	13000	12900	-100

Fun With Data

One pattern I noticed is that we tended to guess even multiples of 500 (##,000 or ##,500) for the Total Score, which was the wrong assumption. Even multiples of 100 are present for the destruction score. For whatever reason, Project Aces made the Time Bonus very granular, in both the maximum Time Bonus and the decrement per second. The very first mission—Charge Assault—has a combined score requirement of 20,530 from a maximum Time Bonus of 10,230, which are very specific numbers.

There were three cases where we actually overestimated and presented the S Rank as slightly more difficult than it actually was: 444, Stonehenge Defensive, and VR Mission 01. 444 makes sense since all of the enemy units are air targets and worth a lot of points, making it difficult to test all possible point scenarios. Stonehenge and the VR missions are not exactly simple testing environments, but they're very different missions (Stonehenge has TONS of enemies, the VR missions have just a few) so I found this one especially interesting.

Then there's the three cases where we were off by more than 400 points: Two-pronged Strategy, Transfer Orders, and Cape Rainy Assault. I'm not entirely sure if there's anything that really ties these missions together, but these missions feel especially longer than some of the other missions so I can't imagine they were tested as much.

One last tidbit that you might find interesting. Long Day and Fleet Destruction are the only two missions in the entire game that are point-based instead of based on a combination of score and time. In the game data, the Time Bonus decrement doesn't start until 9999 seconds (166 minutes, 39 seconds). Even if you managed to restart the checkpoint so much to get to that point, the decrement is 0 points per second, so no matter what those two missions are specifically score-based. It's always fascinating to me when game developers come up with interesting ways to get around certain engine limitations.

About the VR Missions...

Lack of Testing

You'll notice, in the table above, I only listed VR Mission 01. That's because we never actually got around to testing VR Missions 02 and 03. Very few AC7 owners also own PlayStation VR, and a lot of those who own PS VR do not record their gameplay or interact with us on the wiki.

However, I do own PS VR. So, you may ask, why didn't I test VR Missions 02 and 03? The answer is both disappointing and simple: I never really had the opportunity or desire to. I don't have my PS VR hooked up at all times, and, speaking from experience, VR Mission 03 is the third-hardest mission in the entire game to S Rank (Faceless Soldier and Ten Million Relief Plan are the two above it, though I'm not sure in what order...). The time requirement in VR03 is so quick, you have to be blazing fast and it almost seems impossible. I played that mission more than enough times and I don't want to again.

Cut Content

It turns out there was a reason for my obsession problems. According to the incredible research User:Keystone Gray has been doing on AC7's cut content, three more VR missions were planned—for a total of six—instead of just the three we got with the game's release. Some of the plot details for the cut VR missions were repurposed for the DLC missions (such as the Rán Fleet), but the Ghost Squadron was always VR-exclusive and it was supposed to have a much larger role than just the final boss fight in VR03.

The game's S Rank data supports this. The following is the S Rank data for VR Missions 02 and 03:

Mission	Max Time Bonus	Max Time for Time Bonus	Bonus Decrement	Required Total Score for S Rank	Total Score - Max Time Bonus = (Destruction Score)
VR02	14000	6 minutes, 30 seconds	30 points/sec.	24190	10190
VR03	15000	6 minutes, 30 seconds	35 points/sec.	24860	9860

VR02 is a combined air-to-air and air-to-ground mission. You defend your base from enemy fighters, then you defend the base's substation from a ground force, and finally you defend the base from more enemy fighters and another ground force. More details will arrive with Keystone Gray's released notes on the matter, but some cut dialogue lines indicate that the final wave of enemies was not originally intended to have aircraft. In fact, if you remove the Mission Update 2 aircraft from the list of enemies in VR Mission 02, you would still earn enough points to get the required Destruction Score for the S Rank. It seems that the last wave of aircraft was added in close to the game's release, but the S Rank was never updated to account for it.

VR03 has a similar story. It's strictly an air-to-air mission: You track down a C-130, then you get ambushed by a large squadron of Harriers, then you get ambushed by Su-35s carrying long-range missiles, and finally you have a boss fight with four Ghost Squadron aircraft. That may not sound like a lot, but the Su-35s with the long-range missiles are split into three units with three aircraft each, spread far across the map. Ghost Squadron isn't cheap, either; they're flying Su-57s and are difficult to corner into a position where you can shoot them down. There's no way you were supposed to do all that in 6 minutes 30 seconds, the same Max Time Bonus as VR Mission 02. VR03 is closer to 10 minutes. Keystone had an idea here, too: What if Ghost Squadron was not supposed to be in this mission? Turns out, just like VR02, if you remove Ghost Squadron from the list of enemies in VR Mission 03, you would still earn enough points to get the required Destruction Score for the S Rank. With the cancellation of VR Missions 04, 05, and 06, where Ghost Squadron was supposed to feature a lot more heavily, they must have been hastily added to the end of VR Mission 03 and, again, the S Rank wasn't updated.

Final Word

All of this data puts the last nail in the coffin for researching AC7's S Ranks. Qbicle can finally rest and watch the sun rise on a grateful community.

On behalf of the Ace Combat community, I'd like to thank Qbicle for all of his work in estimating the S Ranks for the last two and a half years; I'd like to thank everyone who ever contributed their mission results to help us get those estimations; and I'd like to thank xBlazededge once again for providing us with the in-game data. We can now close the AC7 chapter of gathering accurate S Rank data.

If you're still working on the S Ranks, we hope the definitive information available on each mission's page will help you out in that quest. Best of luck!