@baldylocks: First take out the smaller ships with two planes/ship = no damage to you. Go past the zeppelin on a distance not to be hit. Come up from behind and fire a bit, do a 180 turn, do 180 turn again as soon as you can so you're still behind him, repeat until he's going down, beware not to get too close to him or you'll get hit. 4 stars.
Fun game! One big bug though, the stars doesn't always get stored properly. it's kind of annoying to play a perfect 4 star and then see it didn't register so you have to replay the level (in the later levels that's really annoying)
1948 without damage is easy. Just gas the fast planes, they will blindly follow you in the gas and die. Then turn around with your two planes and pass the slow wing on each side so he can't hit you. He will start following one of your planes, the other plane can easily get around him and kill it from behind where it can't shoot back at you.
Hint: If you don't have time to react, make sure to run into things to decrease your speed. The gaps will decrease in size accordingly. Makes it very easy to time the window jumps too.
I don't understand the bird timing, they seem to fly away at total random times. Sometimes they fly away the moment you start the level thus making it impossible to catch them and then you restart the level and they stay for a few seconds longer.
To beat hard: Use a fast computer, turn down the graphics quality, then max your main gun damage, main gun speed, repair drones and then fighters. And make sure to kill the mines, they do the most damage of anything.
Fun, but hard level is too dependent on luck, the position of your fighters are key, if they're in a good place they draw fire from you while you can snipe the enemies, in a bad place (which they usually are) the enemies hit you while trying to hit the fighter and since they are off screen it's almost impossible to hit them back and you see your health draining fast.
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