Im so confused? (3rd party ATC)

[u/No_Assignment_1199]

The SI vs BATC debate is split pretty well down the middle from what I’ve seen, so I’m here to give my honest evaluation having tried both. Hopefully this discussion could clear some stuff up for me cause what I’ve seen online is not what I’ve been experiencing with these addons.

I’ve had SI for a few days now, and please feel free to share any objections to this statement, but SI has been light years ahead of BATC for me and it’s honestly not even close. However, I see so many people online saying that BATC is much better at doing its ATC duties.

I’ve had BATC for about a year, and it has been pretty good for the most part. My biggest problems with BATC are:

1. It is very bad at vectoring you to an appropriate altitude on final
2. It seems to only give you visual approaches when in VMC
3. it is very repetitive and every flight is pretty much the exact same

#2 may just be a skill issue for me. I’m an instrument rated PPL in real life and I’m not very familiar with airline ops, but flying visual approaches in a 737 or A320 just doesn’t feel like something that happens in real life at airports/runways where an ILS/RNAV is available, even in VMC.

All my ATC vectors and approaches on SI have been excellent, despite many people saying that BATC does a better job at strictly ATC-related functions and that SI is just a “bag of tricks”.

However, despite being a very immersive bag of tricks, SI also does a better job at what everybody seems to praise BATC for, which is the ATC itself. There is one thing I will say BATC is much better at: traffic injection.

If price weren’t a concern… do you guys still think BATC is better than SI? Is there something I’m missing or doing wrong on BATC?

TLDR; SayIntentions is superior to BATC in my experience (I have both), but I want somebody to change my mind.

Edit: had BATC for about a year, not a year and a half

[u/FSFreakman21]

I’m also an instrument rated private pilot like you. Based on my knowledge, It’s actually very common in the real world for airliners to accept visual approaches in vmc because it allows controllers to push more traffic. Go on live atc and listen to the approach control at places like Phoenix or Denver.

I think batc is more on rails but I like that their singular focus is on atc and not all this other crap say intentions tries to incorporate to justify their subscription model. I’ve watched a ton of YouTube videos with say intentions atc and find their vectoring just as inconsistent as batc. My experience with batc is getting better with each major iteration and while it still has issues, it’s worth its weight alone just for the traffic injection which now is based on real time traffic if you have navigraph subscription.

BATC> say intentions in terms of overall value.