I too am having a great deal of trouble with this exercise.
I have watched the linked videos and found Vindicator Jones' videos (Combat Tips 101) especially helpful and have watch and re-watched both part one and part two several times, however I am having a great deal of trouble maintaining the "dominant" position myself. In particular, while I find I am able to get into the prescribed position to initiate the attack and I am able to land several good blasts (which is usually enough to boil away the other ships shield) I almost always loose the advantage before I'm able to sink a missile in (and that sounded a lot more sordid than I intended).
Typically I loose the advantage by allowing the ship in front to execute a 180 flip and bare back on me, guns blazing. We pass while I still have shields left but then spend the rest of the dogfight with my trying to pull back around to get on his tail again and him constantly flying by hitting me with wave after wave of fire on every pass. While I can always get a few hits in myself on each of these passes his shields regenerate after just a couple of passes and I am unable to burn through them again while he is able to rip through mine, and we basically perform this crisscross dance till I am eventually blown to pieces. This scenario plays out time and time again and I seem completely incapable of doing anything else.
So my question is, how do I prevent the ship ahead from doing the 180 flip and if it does what is the best way to deal with it.
Thanks,
Slarti.
This post has made me completely regret saying "dominant position" in my videos.. lol... THANKS GUYS!!
ANYWHO, back to your problem.. The AI has been made a bit more agressive since I released those videos, and they now take full advantage of their thrusters. This means they will often reverse turn on you, making it almost impossible to get behind them.. ALMOST..
I am going to be doing an updated video series of the original combat videos and make them more relevant for todays AI. The trick is keeping your thrusters in the blue zone and maximizing your use of thrusters, including reverse thrust. The AI does it, and it does it VERY well. In fact they do it so well that most newer pilots think that the AI is cheating, especially when an Anaconda can seem to do a 180 degree turn on a dime, but it's not, it is just using its thrusters far more effectively than most human pilots.
There is no single technique or trick you can use to defeat this, and now boils down a lot more to experience and skill level. But the basics hold true. Keep your main engines in the blue zone, use thrusters, and very importantly, learn how to reverse thrust, its how you can get behind targets very easily, just like the AI does to you.