Red Dawn, one of the best aircraft only based vanilla BF2 maps and it's still just an experiment. This map is about mastery of the air. It's a great choice to hone those mad air skillz or try out different aircraft key mappings.
Red Dawn is an experiment to see if an unsupported map size would work. It's huge. And it's also a single player map. The BOTs fly well and coordination is fairly good. The venue is open ocean under a red sky at dawn. The red color makes it fairly easy to see contrails of jets and exhaust of missiles. Placid ocean reflects the early morning light of the sky. The only vehicles are aircraft: FA-18s for US and a fighter and fighter/bomber for the MEC. Nothing else. If you ditch, you swim or suicide.
There are two capable MEC airbases and one uncapable US carrier. MEC starts with four CPs including the AA platform roughly the center. Neither the airbases nor the carrier are protected.
The AA platform spawns Hellions/Cobras and has the ESSEX class Point Defense Missile System along with two AA turrets. All capture points have a very large cap radius with a short conversion time. Flying by a CP will lower and raise it to your side by about 20-30 percent. So it takes two fly-bys or a fly-around to cap a flag.
At round start you always spawn inside of an aircraft, AA turret, ESSEX defense or Hellion/Cobra. The aircraft have a short take off time but it's still possible to crash into another parked aircraft. Sparingly use your afterburner and get off the tarmac quickly. Aircraft spawn instantly.
After playing this map for three hours I discovered that the same operational rules apply to airmaps as infantry maps.
The BOTs will hang together so stick with your squad. Because a human player is generally visible to BOTs you'll have a harder time sneaking around in open air over open ocean. But it can be done. You could sneak past the opposition to harass the carriers and airbases. But you won't last very long even if you shoot down a few enemy aircraft at their launch.
This map has a video glitch which may affect NVIDIA more than ATI cards. At various angles there are a few black bars or plane spaces at some of the CAP points. It's not serious but can be a distraction. You won't see them most of the time, but when you do you'll wonder what it is.
This map is enjoyable and shows that BF2 could be pushed a little farther to accommodate aircraft conflicts. I didn't see any info on COOP play but it seems a great map for just that.
It's usual for the US to win. But flying MEC is more of a challenge. Try it for pilot training. I think you will like it.
