How to play guide for Sky Knights

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This page will serve as a basic **How to Play Guide for Sky Knights**. Feel free to edit this guide with any tips, tricks and suggestions.

## Basic Gameplay

Sky Knights is an aerial combat game in which the player takes control of 1 of 6 aircraft at a time. these aircraft fall into 1 of 3 categories, each with unique attributes and roles to differentiate them from the other categories. The counterparts to each aircraft are almost identical, allowing for knowledge of how any of the NATO aircraft to be easily translated for use with the PACT counterparts. The three classifications of aircraft are close air support, light fighter bomber and air supremacy fighter. The NATO aircraft for these roles are, in order of the class as listed previously, A-10A, F16A and F-15A and for the PACT faction, they are the Su-25, MiG-19 and the Su-27. Close air support aircraft excel at killing creeps and damaging Forward Operating Bases (FOBs), air supremacy fighters excel at destroying other aircraft and light fighter bombers are a hybrid of the two.

Matches can be played with entirely bots, entirely human players, or a mix of bots and players and are played with 2 directly opposing teams. Players can lock matches to require a password if they want to play a normal match against only bots, or start a lobby password free and wait for people to join before starting. If a match is in progress and the hot joining option is on then anyone can join at any point of the match if a password is not required and the match is not ending. Matches can also be limited by player/AI slots, with 2 versus 2, 3 versus 3 and 4 versus 4 as options for the amount o f slots. There is also a practice mode, which is not automatically filled with bots, allowing for a more uneven match if desired, though practice matches will not reward experience once finished. If a match is played and there are other human players in it than the player will be rewarded with a currency which looks like a golden wing. Winning a match rewards 5, losing rewards 3 and there are daily challenges which have varying rewards. Once the player has accrued 100 golden wings they can open a loot box from within the hangers menu, awarding them with a piece or are for either the nose or tail of one of the playable aircraft, of either common or rare quality.

To win a standard match one team must destroy all of the others Forward Operating Bases (FOBs). This can be done either by aircraft or by having creeps attack them. FOBs have a total of 6000 hp, requiring quite a lot of attacks to destroy. The area around these FOBs is guarded both by the Infantry Fighting Vehicle (IFV) creep and by the Anti-Aircraft Artillery (AAA) creep, for defence against other creeps and enemy aircraft respectively. It is not recommended to fly over enemy AAA as it will inflict heavy damage to you and to instead try to take them out yourself or to have your creeps take them out. You can aid friendly creeps as they approach the enemy by taking out the opposing teams creeps. The more creeps you take out, the less damage yours will take and the fewer stops they will have to make to engage them and the higher your morale meter will go. Having higher morale will have your creeps spawn faster and the enemies slower and having low morale will have the enemies spawn faster and yours slower. Care should be taken to avoid letting enemy creeps over run you, as that will certainly lead to a loss. If you decide to attack a FOB yourself, there are several ways you can do this. Strafing them with your main gun will do damage, though this will put you at more of a vulnerable position and will take some time to expend all of your ammo. The better approach would be to use bombs and Anti-Tank missiles, which despite the name will lock-on to a FOB.

Each team has 2 unidirectional runways, which they can land at to resupply ammo, missiles and bombs, refuel, repair and to upgrade or change aircraft. The runways being unidirectional means that they can only be entered from 1 direction and to land, you must be travelling slow enough and close enough to the start of the runway. If you are unsure if you are travelling the right direction to land on a runway, you can look for the landing lights which can also be used to help line you up with the centre of the runway. If you land close enough to the centre of the runway and nearly parallel to it you will be rewarded with 25 credits for a "perfect landing".

Once you have enough credits you can upgrade your plane with one of the various upgrades. The shop can be accessed once you die, once you land, or at the start of the match, though you start with a total of 0 credits once you start so you will not be able to purchase anything then. Credits are obtained by destroying enemy aircraft, enemy creeps and over time as well as on a perfect landing. Destroying the IFV and recon vehicle creeps with reward 30 credits, the AAA creep 100 and assisting in destroying any creep will give 20 credits. Destroying an aircraft will reward a range of credits, depending on your killstreak and the killstreak of who ever you killed, while assisting in a kill will also reward an amount varying on the same factors.

## Controls

Sky Knights supports both keyboard and controllers, with most keys for keyboard being re-bindable, with only Fire Gun and Fire Secondary Weapon not being re-bindable, while controller inputs are fixed in place.

For keyboard, the default inputs are as follow:

* Fire Gun: Left Mouse Button
* Fire Secondary Weapon: Right Mouse Button
* Throttle Up: W
* Throttle Down: S
* Turn Left: A
* Turn Right: D
* Cycle Secondary Weapons: Q
* Manoeuvre: Space
* Afterburner: LeftShift
* Countermeasures: E

For Xbox controller the inputs are as follow:

* Fire Gun: A
* Fire Secondary Weapon: X
* Throttle Up: Right Trigger
* Throttle Down: Left Trigger
* Turn Left: Left on the left thumb stick
* Turn Right: Right on the left thumb stick
* Cycle Secondary Weapons: L3 (pressing the left thumbstick in)
* Manoeuvre: B
* Afterburner: Right Trigger (Hold)
* Countermeasures: Y

## Tips and Tricks

Heatseeking missiles do not require a lock-on to be fired, but can still acquire a lock-on on their own. This can be used to safely attack if an enemy flies into an unsuitable area for you to fly over such as over AAA or above their airfield.

Both SARH and heatseeking missiles require a lock on, but that can be acquired with a physical barrier between the player and the missile. This means that if one way to evade them is to simply hide behind a mountain and hope they hit it instead of you.

SARH missiles can be evaded without the use of the chaff upgrade or without the lock being broken. One way to do so is to manoeuvre when the missile is very close to you and turn to either side. The timing to do this is very precise, but it can save you.

If an overwhelming amount of enemies are on your tail or you otherwise cannot put up a fight with someone, try "baiting them" for a friendly aircraft. This can be done by having them expose their tail to your ally as best you can and by flying towards them. Even if the enemy breaks off to engage the ally, you can still turn around to help, this time with more favourable odds.

The requirements for a perfect landing are quite lenient in some regards, being only to be close to in line with the runway and close to its centre. This means that you can fly over the runway as fast as you can go, do a few hard turns to bleed off speed, start your descent over the runway and still get the perfect landing bonus. Since the bonus is rewarded as the aircraft touches down and not when it stops it is also possible to get the bonus and crash due to not being able to slow down fast enough in the same landing.

## See also

* Release date
* System requirements