WARDOGS helicopters

The transport, then the cheapest armed one, then whatever you can afford to lose. The MH-6 at $6,250 teaches the flight model with nothing else to think about, and pilots who transport full time report clearing six figures a match without firing a shot, because passengers you deliver alive keep paying you when they score. The HAVOC at $28,000 is nearly three transports: losing it to a hill you did not see is the classic first-week mistake.

Height and direction are two different controls. The collective is your height; the cyclic is where you are going. Every early crash is a pilot trying to steer before they can hold still, so the order is: lift the collective until the skids leave the ground, hold a low hover until it stops wobbling, then push the cyclic forward a little. A helicopter moving forward is easier to fly than one hovering; the hard part is at both ends of the trip.

Turn off invert mouse for infantry. It also reverses helicopter pitch on the X axis, there is no separate helicopter setting, and Bulkhead has not acknowledged it. If the aircraft feels backwards, check this before anything else.

There is no practice mode. A flyable firing range appeared during the first beta and went away with it. Your first hour of real practice happens on live servers, which is why the cheapest transport is the right first purchase.

A flight stick works, and the game switches to it by itself when you climb in, then back to mouse and keyboard when you climb out. Pilots have bound pitch and roll to a stick, yaw to pedals and a throttle to the collective axis. None of it is documented: the Steam page lists no controller category and three joystick threads have gone unanswered since April, so this is what players report, not what Bulkhead promises.

Two things go wrong. Bindings have to be remapped every session, and a stick that centres itself fights the game, which is why pilots recommend a centre-return throttle for the collective. Head tracking works alongside a stick with vehicle freelook set to always on. On a gamepad, helicopter controls cannot be rebound at all yet.

Nothing warns you about a missile. There is no lock tone and no direction indicator; you find out when it arrives. Buildable anti-air launchers can be placed almost anywhere and are hard to spot, and the Flakpanzer Gepard is a vehicle rather than a structure, so it moves. Stay low, stay behind terrain, and never cross open ground at altitude: height feels safer and is the opposite.