http://pockettactics.com/2013/05/09/flight-school-ace-patrols-iaps-explained/There’s three broad categories of things Uncle Sid wants to sell you in Ace Patrol.
Campaign Packs
Which is accurate.
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Ace Patrol’s campaign simulates the four years of air combat in the Great War. There’s six missions for every year of the campaign: that’s a grand total of 24 semi-random missions in each game.
Ace Patrol, as you’ve read, is free to download. This free download lets you play the first year in the British campaign, giving you six missions to get your feet wet and see if you like how it feels. Continuing past the first year as the Brits, or to play as the Americans, French, or les Allemands, you can spend $0.99 per campaign or just drop $3.99 to get them all in one fell swoop. It’d be nice if there was a discount for buying the package deal, but alas.
The campaign deal is great, but you probably won’t miss too much buying one country’s campaign for a dollar. The major differences between the country campaigns (so far as I’ve seen) are which aircraft you get to fly.
Aces
That would have been his bird, baby.
If Austin Powers had been a pilot.
The next item in the Ace Patrol shop window is aces. Your four pilots gain new abilities and learn new maneuvers to perform in combat as they score kills and level up. You might opt to teach your pilot the Immelman turn or loop maneuvers, or choose to grant them the ability to dodge enemy AAA fire or extend the range of their machine guns. Buying aces unlocks new special abilities and new aircraft paintjobs.
Similar to the campaigns, aces come for a dollar each or five for the pack. The aircraft liveries are fun, if not particularly historical, but hey: you’ve also got a four-pilot flying squadron with women in it in 1917, so let’s not get nitpicky about historicity here. The abilities that comes with the ace packs are useful but not game-changing. There’s also no shortage of variety in the standard pilot abilities — you can pretty safely disregard the ace packs and still have a very replayable game.
Improvements
Coulda been worse.
At least there’s only three (that’s not a suggestion, 2K).
This last batch are the ones I’m least enamoured with. Ace Patrol features a variable difficulty scale that you can adjust at any time: the benefit of cranking up the difficulty is that you’re granted a score multiplier for every run you ascend, giving you an edge on your friends in the Game Center leaderboards.
When you play on higher difficulties, the odds of your pilots not coming home goes up. Nobody ever dies in Ace Patrol: if your pilots are shot down over enemy territory, they’ll spend the rest of the year in a POW camp. They’ll come back for the next year of the campaign, having been released in a Christmas prisoner exchange. But if your pilots are shot down over friendly territory, they’ll have to spend five missions in the hospital getting patched up.
The improvements essentially take the edge off of the hospital stays. There’s three improvements (a field hospital, a regimental aid post, and an ambulance corps) you can buy, and each one reduces the hospital stay for downed pilots by one mission.
Unlike everything else on sale, that kind of is a game-changer. In a standard game, losing a couple of pilots in the first or second mission of the campaign is disastrous because you can’t replace pilots. You’re stuck with whatever healthy pilots you have, whether the next mission calls for a single pilot or all four.
If you’ve lost three pilots in a campaign of Ace Patrol, I think you’ve pretty much lost the game. That’s like a base invasion in the original X-Com, or going into debt in SimCity 2000. It’s the fail state. I wouldn’t actually care that the game lets you pay your way out of the problem if it weren’t for the leaderboards, which stop being a fair arbiter of skill.
But on the whole, Ace Patrol is decidedly fair in how it implements its IAP. You get an excellent game for free, and practically all of the important stuff for four dollars more. I don’t intend to buy the “improvements”, but I think we can safely conclude that Firaxis hasn’t sprouted horns and transformed into Zynga yet.
