But we can still live with it, I guess…

[Majo]

With this game again we run into the problem of trying to target for the wider possible audience. The publisher is trying to make a profitable product targeting to as many possible people willing to pay for fun.

Some of us just value this game and pay for it as a mean to reach the highest possible fidelity of simulation, historically accurate, tactics, navigation, FM, DM, peripherals, and so on... like in the “warbirds old days”.

Some others just want to have fun and pay for it. They will play this game among others, depending of the mood of the day. Just another game...

I am not sure if there is any possible migrations between these groups.

With the years Il2 has been distilling its self becoming more and more the pure essence of online WWII aircraft combat, and an offline/online way to truly reproduce events of WWII aircraft combat.
In my opinion thanks to this and with some “help” form the modding community, il2 has been a success during the last 7 years.

We do not care about simulated girls. We do not care about “renegade” pilots or romantic nonsense arguments (in my opinion). When we read this in the interviews, we just fake a smile trying to understand what the hell this guy Luthier is thinking…;)

But we can still live with it, I guess…at least as long this thing does not get out of hand. Because you have to remember that the people that will make this thing move for the next years won´t be the “just another game” people.

I honestly think that the tougher competence for il2 is il2 its self.

Salutes.

[addman]

I don't mind being entertained while I try to keep an airplane in the air, flying full real. I don't feel Oleg/Ilya has compromised on what's the core of the game and as long as there is a solid foundation you can always keep on adding more stuff. Install and play IL-2 Sturmovik 1.0 for a while then install IL-2 1946 4.10 and play that for a while, you'll see what I mean. We've been very spoiled with all the free contents in all the pacthes for IL-2, even though I've been on the "train" since the bluebyte forums I've also been spoiled through the years. Right now I'm just being grateful this thing is actually hitting stores in less than 2 months (!!!) :grin:

[winny]

Some others just want to have fun and pay for it. They will play this game among others, depending of the mood of the day. Just another game...

I am not sure if there is any possible migrations between these groups.


We do not care about simulated girls. We do not care about “renegade” pilots or romantic nonsense arguments (in my opinion). When we read this in the interviews, we just fake a smile trying to understand what the hell this guy Luthier is thinking…;)



I came to IL-2 via Birds of Prey on console, so the migration does happen, I'm proof of that.

And shouldn't you be saying 'I' instead of 'we' ? One of the things I'm looking forward to is being placed into a historical setting in the Battle of Britain, as I find IL-2's whole breifing system very dated.. Read this, go and fly, read this, go and fly. No wider picture.

[1.JaVA_Sharp]

Just about the only thing where they got this right was the Glowing Glory campaign. That narrative left me speechless.

[Blackdog_kt]

Jesus, this is not about the Spit girl again, is it? :-P

It's a plot device in a scripted campaign that happens ONCE, probably as a way to show off some triggers of the new mission builder, not something that will happen every time.

So you can chill out and don't worry about your entire campaign being unrealistic or hollywood sequences.

It's just like flying a scripted, user made campaign in IL2 and you see a Heinkel that doesn't shoot at your Hurricane.
Well, maybe the guy who made the missions wants to provide some surprises but apparently a single occurrence of imagination at work is a punishable offence unless there are documents to back up it happened :grin:

The realism for me is in how the planes fly, shoot and get destroyed. As long as 14 missions out of 15 are normal missions i don't mind 1 in 15 where something unusual and interesting happens. Oh, and don't keep thinking that a normal mission involves always meeting the enemy, fighting to the death and returning home with multiple kills like it is in iL2, because such a high frequency of combat is as unrealistic as flying with a girl on your lap.

Every mission ending in a dogfight is Hollywood too, it's just the acceptable type of it because explosions sell games, but i don't see many realism experts complaining about not enough missions where we don't make contact with the enemy :rolleyes:

[Majo]

Blackdog_kt
Jesus, this is not about the Spit girl again, is it?

No of course is not, like someone said you have to look a little further.

This is about who is going to maintain this game alive long enough to emulate the il2, forgotten battle, aces, pacific,... path?

Who? The girl? The renegades?...:confused:

I do not think so. But like I said before is just my guess.

Salutes Majo.

[recoilfx]

Man, this reminds me of a church of old geezers who screams at anything remotely unorthodox. As the years go by, there are less and less parishioners - and they wonder why their church is dieing.

As long as the core principle is still in place for CoD (and Oleg has again and again proved that this will be the most detailed ww2 flight sim ever), I absolutely have no problem with spending dev time on semi-fictional missions/campaigns. We got a 1946 expansion didn't we?

If anything, I think Oleg should've spent more time easing people in with better user interface, better training missions, missions with great voice overs and trigger events that will let an average user understand the 1940 BoB mentality.

Flight sims is awesome in that it really takes our patience to learn, and in the end, we feel a sense of accomplishment. We need to keep user's interest and feeling of accomplishment as they climb the learning curve.

We old timers can create 'dry' historical missions/campaigns ourselves - we are more than capable of that, so why complain now that we have better tools at our disposal?

[Majo]

I like that:

"The core principles".

I think that is what we need, to ensure the "The core principles" are in place.
That will keep il2 moving strong.

Thank you recoilfx, sir I could not have it expressed better.

Salutes.

[Blackdog_kt]

No of course is not, like someone said you have to look a little further.

This is about who is going to maintain this game alive long enough to emulate the il2, forgotten battle, aces, pacific,... path?

Who? The girl? The renegades?...:confused:

I do not think so. But like I said before is just my guess.

Salutes Majo.

Well, then let me extend my apologies for misunderstanding you ;)

To be honest, i'm not worried. The game seems to have enough content for launch, certainly equal to the original IL2 version of 2001 but done with a lot more fidelity and complexity. Between learning all the new methods of controlling an aircraft, learning to apply them in combat and having a huge community of mission makers with a mission builder in their hands, we will be busy enough and probably not have the chance of getting bored before the missing stuff gets implemented.

The guys who will carry the new title forward are already here. If a couple of unorthodox happenings in the campaign have the potential to draw a few more people in without derailing what the game's scope is at large, i'm all for it. Some of these new people might not be cut out for flight sims, others might be able to continue onwards and gradually progress to full flight simmer status. I mean sure, i've been flying full switch for years, but i didn't start out that way...we all started somewhere ;)

[Bullethead]

The guys who will carry the new title forward are already here. If a couple of unorthodox happenings in the campaign have the potential to draw a few more people in without derailing what the game's scope is at large, i'm all for it. Some of these new people might not be cut out for flight sims, others might be able to continue onwards and gradually progress to full flight simmer status. I mean sure, i've been flying full switch for years, but i didn't start out that way...we all started somewhere ;)

I'm an IL-2 virgin but have been doing flightsims since most of you all were in diapers. I did the very first version of Flight Simulator on an Apple II back in 1980, which took 20 minutes to load from a casette tape. I flew every flightsim there was in the golden age of computer gaming, when flightsims were what it was all about. I was flying online in DOS Air Warrior before most folks knew there was such a thing as multi-player games outside of hotseat and split-screen. And I went through Air Warrior, Warbirds, and Aces High.

I never did IL-2 because I got into online flying so early. In those ancient days, flightsim AIs totally sucked and once I'd found the MMO persistant world format of AW, WB, and AH, I never had any desire to play 1-off "deathmatch" games with only a few players. Besides, about the time I got into the MMOFS scene, offline flightsims went into scripted campaigns that were universally corny and had exactly zero replay value.

Unfortunately, these days I live way out in the sticks where I can only get broadband via satellite. Because I require broadband for my job, I can no longer fly online due to satellite's built-in lag of several seconds. As such, I'm once again insterested in offline play.

And to me, that means a fully dynamic campaign. I don't want to be able to change history, I just want the flavor of flying in a huge battle for as long as I live. You know, the way RB2 and OFF do things. Of course, the AI has to be pretty good, too, but that's no longer the problem it was back in the day.

So, until a few days ago, I was VERY interested in COD. I was almost obsessing over it, rereading all my books on the BoB. But then I found out that the dynamic campaign had been scrapped. As such, I will NOT be buying this game unless and until it has a dynamic campaign.

I'm not hard to please on the eye-candy front and flight mechanics front. After all, I date back to when airplanes were just tiny dots no matter how close you were to them, and terrain was a grid pattern with a jagged line along one edge representing mountains, and all controlled via the keyboard at about 5fps. So while I greatly appreciate all such realism efforts by the IL-2 team, I view it as a total waste because offline play is practically nonexistent.

Oh well. Maybe one day Maddox or the community will make a dynamic campaign for COD. That, and only that, will make COD worth my money. And by that time, COD will be in the bargain bin so I'll get a better product for less money than I would by buying it now.

So my $0.02 is that it doesn't matter all that much what eye-candy and FM/DM realism get into a game. What I want is offline play value, and I just don't see that here. And you know what? Even if I had DSL out where I live, I'd still only want COD for offline play because its online play is so limited compared to the MMOFS format I'm used to.

IOW, if the IL-2 community wants converts from other flightsims, it needs to offer them something they don't get elsewhere. It needs either a fully dynamic campaign for offline play, or it needs to go MMO. Without either, it offers nothing to folks who like those things more than they do arguably better graphics and realism. And that, IMHO, is a real tragedy.

[IceFire]

Are scripted handcrafted campaigns not enough to satisfy that single player need?

I find quite a bit of immersion can be built into these and hopefully CoD has more value there than before. Dynamic campaigns often feel somewhat stark to me... maybe I've not seen it done right?

I used to have plenty of fun with the Aces of the Pacific and Aces Over Europe and those had mostly two sentence briefings (except the historical missions).

I think with a large community of mission builders in the short term single player folks won't be bored and Oleg said there were hooks so I wonder how long it will be before one of the third party dynamic campaigns is adapted for IL2.

[nearmiss]

You are going to love it.

Oleg is in charge, you'll not get a loser.

Forget all the speculations, you'll see the BOB COD will come through.

I remember all the times when Oleg released IL2 addons. Always better...

The dynamic campaigns were all created for IL2 by third parties. Oleg acknowledged that as well last week.

The dynamic weather will come along as well. I'm not going to sweat it, the BOB COD will be awesome... and you can look forward to all kinds improvements in patches and addons.

I suspect the Med with Malta, N.Africa,Taranto,etc. will be second theatre, because the aircraft we have will work. We'll get double duty out of the Italian aircraft as well.

We can't overlook the Gloster and Fairey Swordfish

http://www.pilotfriend.com/photo_albums/images12/37.jpg

http://www.fleetairarmarchive.net/aircraft/Swordfish_W5856_restored_isleofwight_Colour.jpg

[Bullethead]

Are scripted handcrafted campaigns not enough to satisfy that single player need?

Absolutely not.

At BEST (which is very, very rare), they're fun 1 time through, but they have zero replay value because you know EXACTLY what to expect. Where's the feeling of having to check six constantly and wonder what you'll be getting into this time when you know full well that the only enemies out there are those you saw the last time you played this mission.

At worst (most of the time), scripted campaigns are so corny that they're unplayable even once. Instead of just letting you be a regular pilot of that time and place, you repeatedly have to do some utterly bogus thing like kill a particular enemy ace flying some ridiculously amped-up uberplane, or rescue "spit girl" (I'd rather rescue "swallow girl"), or what have you, with the fate of the world hanging on your actions, and you have to keep playing the same damn mission over and over until you finally beat it.

Either way, the ONLY replay value of a scripted campaign is trying to beat your previous score by memorizing a pattern of actions based on complete familiarity with the situation. This might appeal to the Nintendo crowd but not to anybody beyond puberty.

Look, I'm a game designer myself, and I tell you, a "hand-crafted scripted campaign" is a complete joke. The "hand-crafted" part is just a marketing ploy to cover up the fact that the devs put next to zero effort into it. It's just a series of linked scenarios with little if any carry-over from one to the next. Anybody with a mission editor can do the same thing. The only thing the devs add is bogus things like your best friend from childhood always going down in flames during this one mission while saving you from some enemies who always magically spawn right behind you no matter how well you check six. Gee, what fun.

So, to me, in the absence of MMO action, a flightsim simply must have a truly dynamic campaign or I won't buy it. If I can't join any squadron on either side, and fly whatever missions come my way (and they're different each time I play that squadron), then forget it. It doesn't matter how pretty the game looks or how realistic it is if there's nothing meaningful to do with the aircraft. I'm not spending $50 to fly a few corny missions and be done with it.

[nearmiss]

Bullethead

I've never enjoyed a computer generated campaign.

I have enjoyed plenty of human created IL2 campaigns. The new FMB tools in the COD should improve all campaigns.

Discussing this is too time consuming for me. It is a topic that has been covered several thousand times over the years from Il2 users.

I'm not alone there are plenty of IL2 users that will not agree with you.

[BadAim]

For the most part, the "IL2 Aficionados" are here for the simulation of WWII flight. After 10+ years, I'm convinced that's what Oleg and his team are here for. If "we" look for casual gamers to subsidize "our" hobby, so what? "They" will be just as happy with their 20hrs of game play as we will be with "our" hundreds. Why all the fuss? By the freakin game for your own reasons, or don't. Either way, it's a pastime. If it's more than that, it will never bring you any joy. (unless your on the development team)

[Bullethead]

For the most part, the "IL2 Aficionados" are here for the simulation of WWII flight. After 10+ years, I'm convinced that's what Oleg and his team are here for. If "we" look for casual gamers to subsidize "our" hobby, so what? "They" will be just as happy with their 20hrs of game play as we will be with "our" hundreds. Why all the fuss? By the freakin game for your own reasons, or don't. Either way, it's a pastime. If it's more than that, it will never bring you any joy. (unless your on the development team)

Look, I'm not dissing IL-2, Oleg, or anybody who plays these games. While I have never owned an IL-2 title myself, I've flown them a few times over the years at friends' houses and have always been very impressed by the overall quality, both visually and mechanically. It's only been the rather limited forms of gameplay of the franchise that have kept me from buying the games. Obviously, the existing IL2 community is quite happy with it, but they're a niche within a niche. While all serious simmers want realism, most of them are willing to settle for a bit less to get the gameplay they want. So until the IL2 franchise puts out that type of gameplay, it won't attract much in the way of new customers, no matter how realistic and graphically stunning it is.

I only got into this conversation because, from lurking here and at Ubi in anticipation of COD, I've noticed a lot of folks (such as the one I quoted in my 1st post here) hoping COD will bring in more customers, thus allowing Oleg to do more IL-2 stuff in the future. Or at the very least, that it would generate enough sales that Ubi would quit dictating release dates that cut planned features from Oleg's games. Being both a potential new IL2 customer and an indy game developer myself, I felt qualified to comment on these subjects. Sorry if I ruffled any feathers.

[BadAim]

My reply was not meant to be directed at you alone, nor if I'm to be honest this thread alone. I'm not sure why I even read these damn threads. If anyone who is remotely interested in WWII flight doesn't buy COD because it doesn't have a dynamic campaign or dynamic weather, they are just being foolhardy. It's $50 for crying out loud! Most Games get you 10-20hrs of gameplay for your $50. You will probably spend that much time just getting the hang of one aircraft (at least I will, I'm not that good;)).

I guess I just don't understand what people expect from COD. It's going to be twice the Sim as IL2, and IL2 is twice the sim as any other (in the WWII genre anyway). If that ain't worth $50 because it doesn't have a dynamic campaign, you've probably wandered onto the wrong forum.

BTW, COD is not unfinished guys, The dynamic campaign and the dynamic weather are. COD will still be a ground breaking sim, I'd rather enjoy it now than wait for these features that my computer probably can't handle anyway.

This is all just my opinion, we'll all vote with our wallets.

BTW: My feathers aren't ruffled, I'm just cranky. :)

[Kikuchiyo]

Look, I'm not dissing IL-2, Oleg, or anybody who plays these games. While I have never owned an IL-2 title myself, I've flown them a few times over the years at friends' houses and have always been very impressed by the overall quality, both visually and mechanically. It's only been the rather limited forms of gameplay of the franchise that have kept me from buying the games. Obviously, the existing IL2 community is quite happy with it, but they're a niche within a niche. While all serious simmers want realism, most of them are willing to settle for a bit less to get the gameplay they want. So until the IL2 franchise puts out that type of gameplay, it won't attract much in the way of new customers, no matter how realistic and graphically stunning it is.

I only got into this conversation because, from lurking here and at Ubi in anticipation of COD, I've noticed a lot of folks (such as the one I quoted in my 1st post here) hoping COD will bring in more customers, thus allowing Oleg to do more IL-2 stuff in the future. Or at the very least, that it would generate enough sales that Ubi would quit dictating release dates that cut planned features from Oleg's games. Being both a potential new IL2 customer and an indy game developer myself, I felt qualified to comment on these subjects. Sorry if I ruffled any feathers.

I don't believe anyone is truly upset about your providing of a contrary view point. Personally I see where you are coming from and what you mean. I must,however; point out that our tastes obviously differ. I can live with two campaigns that are scripted and then the countless scripted campaigns that this community will invariably come up with. Oleg's campaigns I doubt will have scripted "friends deaths," and I don't seem to recall any such scenario in any of the other Combat Flight Sims I've ever played. Seen it a lot in arcade flight games.

I personally prefer the realism of a flight sim (I too have been playing them for quite some time). Over the more "user friendly" types of sims. I like jumping on line and doing a co-op dynamic campaign, or a good old fashioned
dogfight. Just because our two tastes differ doesn't mean that either of us is inherently wrong or right. No game ever will appeal to all consumers, and will always miss out on a demographic of one kind or another. Yes Combat Flight sims are a niche market of the Flight Sim niche market, but that shoe fits the other foot too. MMOFS are in fact a niche of a niche as you say.

In time we will have dynamic campaigns, and hopefully then you will give it a shot. I am sorry you can't really enjoy online play due to the latency inherent in satellite.

[Sven]

I've also like Nearmiss never enjoyed a computer generated campaign, a good scripted campaign gives me much more enjoyment, immersion and historical accuracy a computer generated campaign cannot deliver.

All I want is to focus the time spared by not creating a dynamic campaign to be put into the dynamic weather, that is something we'll all benefit from, in any aspect of the sim. If time was not limited I'd of course say we would be best off with both, a dynamic campaign and a dynamic weather system, but there so much more to work on after BoB has been released.

[Old_Canuck]

Reading these "Spit girl" posts is not unlike flying the same scripted campaign over and over again. It's amusing at first but it gets stale after awhile.

So now the artist(s) who had created the uncontested most re-flyable sim of all time have added a little flourish to their latest creation. Instead of standing back to contemplate and admire their creativity (which will in no way devalue their work overall) we who love the sim start a verbal fist-fight in the art gallery "I DON'T LIKE SPIT GIRL" / "I LIKE SPIT GIRL" while the uncomprehending public wonders -- "what in the hell is up with them?"

[The Kraken]

Obviously, the existing IL2 community is quite happy with it, but they're a niche within a niche. While all serious simmers want realism, most of them are willing to settle for a bit less to get the gameplay they want. So until the IL2 franchise puts out that type of gameplay, it won't attract much in the way of new customers, no matter how realistic and graphically stunning it is.

But if you consider currently successful game franchises, or what is remembered as "classics", aren't they usually those with a clear focus on storylines and scripted events? When I mention "Wing Commander", is the first game you think of "Armada" or rather the main series? ;) Case in point, maybe this approach for CoD is exactly what is needed to bring in new players, who would feel lost or bored with a realistic dynamic campaign.

Take the BoB2 WoV campaign, which is certainly an accomplishment: it's so complex to just get going that it would overwhelm any beginner. I mean, I too play flight sims since the early 80s and felt pretty lost at times.

I'm also flying offline only, but my experience with various dynamic campaign systems is that they are either a buggy mess (Rowan's BoB & MiG Alley, Falcon4), boring (EAW, Il2 FB) or unrealistic (Longbow II, CFS3, EE:CH, TAW). Sometimes all combined. Not that I didn't have fun with some of them, but it usually doesn't take long to find out what works and what doesn't, especially if there's a strategic layer involved.

I haven't played OFF but all I've heard about the campaign sure sounds great. But it's been a huge effort in itself and if resources aren't enough for that, then I'd rather not even see the team waste time with some halfhearted approach. Having another DCG-like random mission generator put into CoD is apparently what many people would be happy with, but personally I'm much more excited about other features important for offline play, mostly what's been revealed about the AI so far. Because only if that part works right do many other features people are asking for make any sense. What's the sense of any squadron management if half of the flight dies in each mission?

So for me the focus is right. 3rd party devs can and will come up with a campaign system, which they couldn't for any other feature that might have been dropped instead.

Sorry if I ruffled any feathers.

You didn't - thanks for keeping things civil, sure doesn't happen too often anymore in this forum.

[Chivas]

I find it amazing that people can't drop the price of a couple pizzas and beers for even a one time fly thru of a scripted campaign. "Triggers" should make even a scripted campaign very interesting. You should get at least a few weeks of entertainment with the knowledge there will be more dynamic campaigns in the works by third parties and developer. This minimum investment could insure the long life of the only WW2 combat flight series on the market for the foreseeable future.

[Blackdog_kt]

I'm an IL-2 virgin but have been doing flightsims since most of you all were in diapers. I did the very first version of Flight Simulator on an Apple II back in 1980, which took 20 minutes to load from a casette tape. I flew every flightsim there was in the golden age of computer gaming, when flightsims were what it was all about. I was flying online in DOS Air Warrior before most folks knew there was such a thing as multi-player games outside of hotseat and split-screen. And I went through Air Warrior, Warbirds, and Aces High.

I never did IL-2 because I got into online flying so early. In those ancient days, flightsim AIs totally sucked and once I'd found the MMO persistant world format of AW, WB, and AH, I never had any desire to play 1-off "deathmatch" games with only a few players. Besides, about the time I got into the MMOFS scene, offline flightsims went into scripted campaigns that were universally corny and had exactly zero replay value.

Unfortunately, these days I live way out in the sticks where I can only get broadband via satellite. Because I require broadband for my job, I can no longer fly online due to satellite's built-in lag of several seconds. As such, I'm once again insterested in offline play.

And to me, that means a fully dynamic campaign. I don't want to be able to change history, I just want the flavor of flying in a huge battle for as long as I live. You know, the way RB2 and OFF do things. Of course, the AI has to be pretty good, too, but that's no longer the problem it was back in the day.

So, until a few days ago, I was VERY interested in COD. I was almost obsessing over it, rereading all my books on the BoB. But then I found out that the dynamic campaign had been scrapped. As such, I will NOT be buying this game unless and until it has a dynamic campaign.

I'm not hard to please on the eye-candy front and flight mechanics front. After all, I date back to when airplanes were just tiny dots no matter how close you were to them, and terrain was a grid pattern with a jagged line along one edge representing mountains, and all controlled via the keyboard at about 5fps. So while I greatly appreciate all such realism efforts by the IL-2 team, I view it as a total waste because offline play is practically nonexistent.

Oh well. Maybe one day Maddox or the community will make a dynamic campaign for COD. That, and only that, will make COD worth my money. And by that time, COD will be in the bargain bin so I'll get a better product for less money than I would by buying it now.

So my $0.02 is that it doesn't matter all that much what eye-candy and FM/DM realism get into a game. What I want is offline play value, and I just don't see that here. And you know what? Even if I had DSL out where I live, I'd still only want COD for offline play because its online play is so limited compared to the MMOFS format I'm used to.

IOW, if the IL-2 community wants converts from other flightsims, it needs to offer them something they don't get elsewhere. It needs either a fully dynamic campaign for offline play, or it needs to go MMO. Without either, it offers nothing to folks who like those things more than they do arguably better graphics and realism. And that, IMHO, is a real tragedy.

Well, you're entitled to your opinion by all means, it's just that not everybody will share it ;)

The way it reads to me is "i was a strictly multiplayer flier, but now that i lack the required connectivity i'm upset about the trimmed down single-player". It's all fine and dandy if you are, but (and i say this with no intention whatsoever to insult you) this is just a repeat of what we see so often on these boards: "i want the features that are important to me personally, overall balancing of the product be damned".
Ok, i'm exaggerating a bit here to illustrate the point (in fact you seem like a much more civil and level headed fellow than many old-timers of the forum :-P), i think you get my drift.

Don't get me wrong, i am not one to take whatever is served to me under the excuse of "buy it or the genre will die". However, i don't base my decisions on a single feature alone. For example, i didn't buy Rise of Flight because i disagreed with the way it did some things. Notice the plural here, it was a decision based on 4-5 different instances of what i considered shortcomings, not one. For CoD, i will buy it because the amount of things i agree with are more than the amount of things i don't and guess what, i too am a fan of having a proper dynamic campaign in the sim, especially if it's done in a way that we can use both of online and offline play.

Again, you're perfectly entitled to think this way and buy at a later time or not at all, i'm not going to try and convince you.
It's just that this focus on a single feature seems a bit shortsighted to me (especially when you discount FM/DM in favor of playability in a simulator game about aircraft, if we all wanted it like this we'd still be flying lucasart's secret weapons of the luftwaffe), more so in fact under the current situation: they can release the game now and get cash to work on the dymamic campaign to be patched into the game at least a year from now (according to their words), or delay the entire game for a similar time frame. I think they did the right thing by providing us with options, since you can enforce this delay on yourself by not buying early while the rest of us can enjoy whatever is there. Just because the game is incomplete for some people, it doesn't mean the rest of us should be unable to play around with what's already there while waiting for the improvements;)




Absolutely not.

At BEST (which is very, very rare), they're fun 1 time through, but they have zero replay value because you know EXACTLY what to expect. Where's the feeling of having to check six constantly and wonder what you'll be getting into this time when you know full well that the only enemies out there are those you saw the last time you played this mission.

At worst (most of the time), scripted campaigns are so corny that they're unplayable even once. Instead of just letting you be a regular pilot of that time and place, you repeatedly have to do some utterly bogus thing like kill a particular enemy ace flying some ridiculously amped-up uberplane, or rescue "spit girl" (I'd rather rescue "swallow girl"), or what have you, with the fate of the world hanging on your actions, and you have to keep playing the same damn mission over and over until you finally beat it.

Either way, the ONLY replay value of a scripted campaign is trying to beat your previous score by memorizing a pattern of actions based on complete familiarity with the situation. This might appeal to the Nintendo crowd but not to anybody beyond puberty.

Look, I'm a game designer myself, and I tell you, a "hand-crafted scripted campaign" is a complete joke. The "hand-crafted" part is just a marketing ploy to cover up the fact that the devs put next to zero effort into it. It's just a series of linked scenarios with little if any carry-over from one to the next. Anybody with a mission editor can do the same thing. The only thing the devs add is bogus things like your best friend from childhood always going down in flames during this one mission while saving you from some enemies who always magically spawn right behind you no matter how well you check six. Gee, what fun.

So, to me, in the absence of MMO action, a flightsim simply must have a truly dynamic campaign or I won't buy it. If I can't join any squadron on either side, and fly whatever missions come my way (and they're different each time I play that squadron), then forget it. It doesn't matter how pretty the game looks or how realistic it is if there's nothing meaningful to do with the aircraft. I'm not spending $50 to fly a few corny missions and be done with it.

I think it's not a case of putting no effort in it. They said themselves that with the amount of people they have (the whole team is about 25 people, with many of them having more than one field of responsibility), a dynamic campaign like the one you ask will take another year to complete.

This is coming from one of the developers that was actually responsible for designing the campaign engine. He said that they didn't want to do a simple dynamic campaign like the one we have in IL2, but one that will do the rest of CoD justice. He also said that it was a very hard decision for him to postpone it, because he had already prepared a few hundred pages of documents on the subject and that's just for the design phase, how it should work, what features to have, etc.

I already said i'm a fan of having a dynamic campaign that's good for single and multi-player use. Imagine people flying fighters over the channel in 30 minute hops to the combat area. On its own it's not much. However, if i'm flying a catalina in bad weather along the convoy approaches and hunting for U-boats, those players who are after a quick dogfight are actually shielding me from having enemy fighters wander into my operational area and we get a bit of spontaneous synergy going.
Now, if the campaign engine is good enough, me sinking a U-boat or just driving it away and saving the convoy, would have a positive impact on the amount of fuel, ammunition and spare parts these dogfighters have at stock on their airbase, and so on...

It's this kind of a campaign i'd like to see, one that the strategic layer can be automanaged by my PC (or the server, if i'm flying online), but may also be optionally managed by the players (for fans of BoB:WoV), missions have consequences in the proper scale (not winning the war thanks to the efforts of one pilot, neither having our actions have no effect at all, something in the middle), etc. However, this is a massive undertaking for such a small dev team, it's like an entire separate module to the base simulator, so it's going to cost some time and money.

It looks like the three of us (me you and the developer) all want the same thing, but real life constraints are forcing a simple choice: release a simplified campaign generator now, or release a proper dynamic campaign similar to the one we want next year. :cool:

[BadAim]

I find it amazing that people can't drop the price of a couple pizzas and beers for even a one time fly thru of a scripted campaign. "Triggers" should make even a scripted campaign very interesting. You should get at least a few weeks of entertainment with the knowledge there will be more dynamic campaigns in the works by third parties and developer. This minimum investment could insure the long life of the only WW2 combat flight series on the market for the foreseeable future.

BINGO!

Sorry about the shouting, I'm a little excitable with all this tension over waiting for COD.

[jpinard]

Just about the only thing where they got this right was the Glowing Glory campaign. That narrative left me speechless.

What was this in?

[Erkki]

All honour to WB, AHII and WW2OL, but I have also very much enjoyed Il-2's dynamic online campaigns... Last one I took part to had over 100 players airborne simultaneously, with up to 20 guys in the same voice comms, diff sub channels of course. ;)

[Bullethead]

The way it reads to me is "i was a strictly multiplayer flier, but now that i lack the required connectivity i'm upset about the trimmed down single-player". It's all fine and dandy if you are, but (and i say this with no intention whatsoever to insult you) this is just a repeat of what we see so often on these boards: "i want the features that are important to me personally, overall balancing of the product be damned".
Ok, i'm exaggerating a bit here to illustrate the point (in fact you seem like a much more civil and level headed fellow than many old-timers of the forum :-P), i think you get my drift.

When I started in forums in the late 80s, EVERYTHING said was what today would be called a bannable "personal attack". But that was back in the day before some idjit thought kids should have computers. So now, allegedly, a mere Facebook page can cause a bloody revolution these days. Give your kid a gun before a car and a car before a computer, based on the amount of harm he can do with each of them. So I do get your drift :o

Anyway, yup, until say 3 years ago, I'd only done online flightsims since the early 90s. Dial-up sucked for everything else but at least it could do a server-client MMO game as well as broadband.

Don't get me wrong, i am not one to take whatever is served to me under the excuse of "buy it or the genre will die". However, i don't base my decisions on a single feature alone.

Sure, but some features are more important than others. Gameplay is a feature, and IMHO it's the most important feature. Without it, everything else, no matter how well-executed, is pretty useless. For instance, let's say you always wanted to own a Harley-Davidson, totally customized to your personal taste. You constantly dream of riding it all over the country, "looking for adventure and whatever comes our way". But when you go to the dealership, you find out that while you can get a bike exactly to your specifications, you're told all you can do with it is ride around the same block in the same town, over and over. But you still have to pay the full price for it. Maybe, someday, you'll be able to fullfill your dreams, but there's no guarantee, and all the while depreciation is setting in.

So what would you do? Buy the thing now and just admire the paint and chrome, without getting to ride it as you want, or wait a few years and buy it used for less than 1/2 the price and be able to hit the highway immediately?

I think it's not a case of putting no effort in it. They said themselves that with the amount of people they have (the whole team is about 25 people, with many of them having more than one field of responsibility), a dynamic campaign like the one you ask will take another year to complete.

My own game company has way fewer employees and we do dynamic campaigns. I write the campaigns all by myself, AAMOF, on top of my many other responsibilities. It's not that hard to do, just tedious. Want to see my work?
www.stormeaglestudios.com

So I'm really not impressed by this argument. Reading between the lines, as a member of the industry myself, I see the lack of a dynamic campaign in COD as just the latest chapter in the long, tragic saga of Evil Publishers chasing short-term profits and to Hell with the interests of the Good Developers, the genre, and the customers. Ubi told Maddox that the game WILL ship by such-and-such a date, so Maddox had better have the FM, DM and artwork done by then, leaving no manhours left to do a campaign, and all gameplay worthy of the name limited to "small batch" online.

This is why my company is an "indy", as in it self-publishes.

It looks like the three of us (me you and the developer) all want the same thing, but real life constraints are forcing a simple choice: release a simplified campaign generator now, or release a proper dynamic campaign similar to the one we want next year. :cool:

And folks wonder why there are hardly any PC games on store shelves these days. The Evil Publishers and the Evil Retailers are to blame.

[Blackdog_kt]

While i share your complaints about how distribution companies handle game releases nowadays, i think we have to be a bit honest with how the community at large operates as well.

I would probably have no problem waiting an extra 6 months to get a fully polished product and by the sound of it, it seems you share this opinion.
However, there's a large part of the community who's been chomping at the bit, going "is it ready yet?" and "how much longer?" all along the way.

I too dislike incomplete games but i know there is no such thing as a 100% complete and realistic simulator. The thing is, what happened with CoD was a choice of "scaled down release now" instead of "full fledged content half a year later".

I have no problem either way, because i can weigh pros and cons and if the "completeness index" is to my liking i can purchase, if not i can wait until more things are added (which is exactly what you describe, it's a perfectly valid outlook on things).

The stirring up usually comes from members of the community who on one hand want the game to ship early, but on the other hand don't realize that this will put a dent in things with regards to how complete it will be. I'm not referring to you here, it's obvious you realize this counter-balancing going on behind the scenes and i would expect no less from a member of the industry.

What i'm trying to say is that just like the features that make it into the release version are a compromise between time, cost, feasibility and hardware requirements, how to deal with the community and balance the desires, wishes and sometimes downright demands between different groups of fans with diverging agendas and priorities is also a tough balancing act :)

[brando]

To be honest I'm having difficulty in establishing how a "dynamic campaign" would work, given the subject of the release; i.e. the Battle of Britain.

How could it go?
1) Volunteer for fighters, go through training, hang about at an army barracks in Middlesborough for 6 months, and then get a posting into Bomber Command?
2) All the above except you get posted to a fighter squadron. On your second flight you get bounced by Adolf Galland and crash in flames. Spitfire girl stands on the cliffs at Dover and weeps...or
2b) You get posted to a Defiant squadron....

3) You last through a few missions and get promoted to Flight leader. After your twentieth flight you get bounced.......&c
3b) or you fly into a barrage balloon cable ....
3c) or your fuel ignites and you have to spend six months in hospital having your face reconstructed. Spitfire girl takes one look at you and marries your best friend. Penalty is 50 heartbreak points and a posting to a training unit....or

4) You are one of the lucky ones who lasts through the whole campaign. You are awarded a DFC for which you attend Buckingham Palace and meet the King and Queen. Receive a hundred Honour points and a MkV Spit. You marry Spitfire girl and get shot down on your first mission over Amiens.....You spend the rest of the war in various Stalags. Spitfire girl gets bored and falls for a Mustang pilot....or

5)Your skill at jerking a joystick gets you posted to an elite squadron of supercharged Spits Your next mission takes you into a railway tunnel where you must skip a 500lb bomb into the path of Goering's train and escape vertically up a ventilation shaft. In the course of doing this you create the first clipped-wing Spit and gain 500 Inventor points....... on your return you get totally pissed on warm beer and find yourself unable to deliver when Spitfire girl offers her all....

6) Your final promotion. You are now Keith Park. You get to wear the white overalls and a tin hat and your flying is restricted to visiting 11 Group's bases in your personal Hurricane to encourage the Few. The rest of your time is spent in the Control room at Uxbridge. You get to meet Churchill and spend several hours arguing with Trafford Leigh-Mallory. Winning the campaign results in your being transferred to a Training command.

Or, you just get in your plane and do what the brass tell you to do. The most "dynamic" thing you can do is fly straight (but never for more than 30 seconds in a combat zone!), stay in formation, and either shoot down bombers (Hurricane pilot) or fighters (Spitfire pilot). Sometimes you may succeed, other times you may spend twenty minutes at 18,000 feet and never see a thing. You will count yourself lucky if your wings stay on as you dive back towards Blighty with a 109 on your tail. And pat yourself on the back when you find your way back to a field in bad weather conditions, even though you never found the single raider that you were scrambled to locate.

I hope you can excuse my sarcasm which is only meant in fun - and accept that there really isn't much room for manoeuvre campaign-wise. Fly and fight and hope to get yourself and your wingmen home. Keep on doing it until the Axis decide to quit their daylight bombing. Survive or die. That's what is being simulated here.

[Majo]

I still think that the greatest dynamic campaign is to fly and fight online.

You might still try to fly with a specific purpose when you fly online in an open server, but you never know what you are going to find out there. Even in fixed competition scenarios you never know.

The expert, the unbeatable team, lucky shots, the re-incarnation of the super-nerd, the cheater, life (virtual) in all her brightness…

Too bad some people do not like it or simply just cannot make it or take it.

My guess, again, is that online gaming is now, and certainly will be, a great resource to make money in the long term for a game. It is a steady way to economically support the future development of the sim. Of course, I am not talking about the numbers of the mega-stars of the internet game-play like Call of Duty (not CoD any more…) but still a good way to face a long term project. This might not be the case, but it could be that the limited resources of the team (Oleg’s team) have been focused in online gaming as a priority.

One of “The core basics” of il2 is the online playability. A significant portion of the community likes that and I really hope they want us to be happy.

Anyway, more early than later, I am quite sure that a dynamic campaign will be available. As sure as I am that someday the Focke Wulf will roar & rule over the Channel.

Salutes.

[Richard]

To be honest I'm having difficulty in establishing how a "dynamic campaign" would work, given the subject of the release; i.e. the Battle of Britain.

How could it go?
1) Volunteer for fighters, go through training, hang about at an army barracks in Middlesborough for 6 months, and then get a posting into Bomber Command?
2) All the above except you get posted to a fighter squadron. On your second flight you get bounced by Adolf Galland and crash in flames. Spitfire girl stands on the cliffs at Dover and weeps...or
2b) You get posted to a Defiant squadron....

3) You last through a few missions and get promoted to Flight leader. After your twentieth flight you get bounced.......&c
3b) or you fly into a barrage balloon cable ....
3c) or your fuel ignites and you have to spend six months in hospital having your face reconstructed. Spitfire girl takes one look at you and marries your best friend. Penalty is 50 heartbreak points and a posting to a training unit....or

4) You are one of the lucky ones who lasts through the whole campaign. You are awarded a DFC for which you attend Buckingham Palace and meet the King and Queen. Receive a hundred Honour points and a MkV Spit. You marry Spitfire girl and get shot down on your first mission over Amiens.....You spend the rest of the war in various Stalags. Spitfire girl gets bored and falls for a Mustang pilot....or

5)Your skill at jerking a joystick gets you posted to an elite squadron of supercharged Spits Your next mission takes you into a railway tunnel where you must skip a 500lb bomb into the path of Goering's train and escape vertically up a ventilation shaft. In the course of doing this you create the first clipped-wing Spit and gain 500 Inventor points....... on your return you get totally pissed on warm beer and find yourself unable to deliver when Spitfire girl offers her all....

6) Your final promotion. You are now Keith Park. You get to wear the white overalls and a tin hat and your flying is restricted to visiting 11 Group's bases in your personal Hurricane to encourage the Few. The rest of your time is spent in the Control room at Uxbridge. You get to meet Churchill and spend several hours arguing with Trafford Leigh-Mallory. Winning the campaign results in your being transferred to a Training command.

Or, you just get in your plane and do what the brass tell you to do. The most "dynamic" thing you can do is fly straight (but never for more than 30 seconds in a combat zone!), stay in formation, and either shoot down bombers (Hurricane pilot) or fighters (Spitfire pilot). Sometimes you may succeed, other times you may spend twenty minutes at 18,000 feet and never see a thing. You will count yourself lucky if your wings stay on as you dive back towards Blighty with a 109 on your tail. And pat yourself on the back when you find your way back to a field in bad weather conditions, even though you never found the single raider that you were scrambled to locate.

I hope you can excuse my sarcasm which is only meant in fun - and accept that there really isn't much room for manoeuvre campaign-wise. Fly and fight and hope to get yourself and your wingmen home. Keep on doing it until the Axis decide to quit their daylight bombing. Survive or die. That's what is being simulated here.

Best post ever!!

I think that a static campaign will work well since the game is centered around the battle of britain..

On the other hand, if they make a sequel of a more "generic" conflict, like the MTO or PTO, you're not bound to simulate exact historical happenings and such...

When you announce that the game is to be centered around the BoB, people expect the Adlertag to happen at the exact date.. With a dynamic campaign, some of the historic events might've not happened at all (if the campaign is fully dynamic) ..

My 0.02 cents

[The Kraken]

Well there have been dynamic campaigns released for BoB flight sims, most noteworthy probably the one in Rowan's BoB / Wings of Victory. Not the biggest fan of it myself but it does manage to be dynamic without being ridiculously unrealistic. So yes it's possible, although I understand the reasons why there's no such campaign in CoD.

[Sauf]

"spend several hours arguing with Trafford Leigh-Mallory"

Was Trafford Leigh-Mallory the original Spitfire whiner?

"5)Your skill at jerking a joystick gets you posted to an elite squadron of supercharged Spits Your next mission takes you into a railway tunnel where you must skip a 500lb bomb into the path of Goering's train and escape vertically up a ventilation shaft. In the course of doing this you create the first clipped-wing Spit and gain 500 Inventor points....... on your return you get totally pissed on warm beer and find yourself unable to deliver when Spitfire girl offers her all...."

lol, very humorous :) This forum could use a bit more lightheartedness atm

[Blackdog_kt]

I think that as long as the engine has the rights "hooks" built into it from the get go, you can go as far as you like thanks to the built-in modding support.

Oleg Maddox said that it's already possible to create some sort of dynamic campaign with the stock game, but according to Luthier they wanted to do more complicated stuff. I guess we'll have some the appropriate data output and log files, so that for example a programmer can script some kind of plug-in (let's not forget we'll be getting an SDK some time after release) that tracks mission results from one sortie to the next and acts accordingly within certain parameters.

As far as what the future holds, brace yourself because i'm going to go wild and get too much ahead of things.

I guess it could be a "be an ordinary pilot following orders" deal, all the way to "manage every single sortie" if the rights community mods are available.

However, imagine now having some of this functionality online, with people being able to plan a mission within the server lobby, invite people into it and suddenly the game automatically assigns you a common radio frequency, call signs to use with the ground controllers and gives everyone in your flight the waypoints and flightplan on the in-game map: it's like a fusion/combination of DF server, coop and single player.

Add the ability to schedule AI flights that you can then hop into and take control of and you got the means to recreate real raids on real size maps, with whatever tactical considerations that means affecting the mission towards a more realistic, once again, outcome.
If i can schedule a group of AI B-17s to take off and start heading for a target in the Ruhr or do the same for a bunch of Ju-88Cs patrolling over the bay of Biscay and then take control of them 3-4 hours later, i will be able to fly the interesting parts of the mission while facing as much of the real considerations these guys faced.
And the main thing here is fuel loads and the fear of not making it back to base in case of damage, because what we currently have in IL2 is aircraft with a few thousand miles of range flying sorties of maybe 200-300km round trips at most and usually within gliding distance of a friendly base, all the while loaded with merely 30% fuel with whatever non-historical advantages that brings in combat ;)

I also think dynamic campaigns work very well if they include scripted missions of selected historical events. This was done with GWX (grey wolves expansion) which is a mod for the silent hunter 3 U-boat sim.
Ship traffic was very much dynamic, but selected operations that were well known actions had been scripted to occur in the campaign regardless of other factors: if you were around Narvik during the invasion of Norway you could see the German battleships and the royal navy duking it out along with the transports moving troops, if you were silly enough to brave crossing the channel during June '44 you could easily stumble upon the D-Day invasion fleet (in fact a guy posted screenshots of just that a few years ago on subsim.com from his hydrophone station and there were contacts everywhere), things like that.

Personally, i would fly as just a pilot and wouldn't probably manage the strategic aspect if such an option was ever available, however i'm not against it because it has a certain functionality and set of needed tools that could carry over very well to the new multiplayer mini-campaign mode.

Maybe 2-3 years down the line i'll be able to join a server, click on the map and see a breakdown of the campaign objectives or even data at the strategic level (amount of aircraft per type, ammunition , pilots/team "lives", fuel and their respective rate of replenishment for example) to decide what to do. Then i could click on an enemy installation and select "last known intel", it would display the date of last known data along with "installation capacity %" and "estimated production output" for factories, or "estimated aircraft stationed" for airbases, things like that.

Then i'd select a mosquito, click on the "flight planner" tool and draw up a flightplan for my next mission. My AI navigator would provide course data to help my fly it, i'd go over the target and snap some pictures. If i made it back to base i'd be treated to some black and white screenshots and an update to the campaign map's intel on the specific target. Other people could then use this to do similar stuff and plan air raids against the target, escort for the bombers and so on.

Such a thing would be awesome for a very simple reason: it would give people of varying tastes an incentive and a way to all fly together in the same environment. The wacky folks like me would be flying anti-submarine/anti-shipping patrols and recon flights, the fighter guys would always have something going to intercept, friendly bombers to escort and targets across the channel to raid and flying as a bomber guy would give some very tangible rewards.

And the best part of it is that as long as the engine is moddable by design, it's not the developers who will have to do it all by themselves but hobbyists from the community will be able to help.

Most probably i'd let the folks who enjoy the strategic aspect do most of that, what i would do however is browse a list of sticky messages they had posted on the team lobby with the kind of missions they want: "recon needed at target X", "top cover escort requested for bombers, contact me for details" and so on, then i'd plan my mission, invite my buddies to my flight and go out to do it.

I think it would be great because it would allow everyone to become as much involved as they wanted with the deeper aspects of air warfare planning, or not at all involved and keep flying missions that other people provide (like it is today on mission based DF servers) or even ad-hoc sorties of their own if they just wanted to have some quick fun.

Is it going to happen tomorrow? Definitely not. But i can see it making its first steps within the next 2-3 years ;)

[Novotny]

And pat yourself on the back when you find your way back to a field in bad weather conditions, even though you never found the single raider that you were scrambled to locate.


That's very Wellum, though he was quite sure he saw the undercarriage drop when he fired upon it.

BTW, terrific post.

[Bullethead]

To be honest I'm having difficulty in establishing how a "dynamic campaign" would work, given the subject of the release; i.e. the Battle of Britain.

Well, if you've never seen such a thing in operation, I recommend you try OFF.

But simply put, you set up the historical OOBs, including reinforcements and withdrawals happening more or less when they really did. Then you have each squadron do things similar to what each did in real life. Not exactly the same, or you're into canned missions again with no replay value, but definitely giving the flavor of actual events. Every squadron all over the game map is doing this, and whenever opposing units meet each other, there's combat. If the player is in the neighborhood, he can be part of the fights there but otherwise the results are computed, not rendered. The player can join any squadron on the map at any point in time covered by the game. His squadron gets its assigned missions like all the others but he plays out his own. If he wanders off his assigned track, he'll run into whatever else is going on in other areas. The game keeps track of the player's own career and those of his squadronmates. This goes on until either the player dies or the game reaches its end date.

That's just the simple version. You can add all sorts of things to this, but this is the essential core. It's been done many times over the past several decades so there's no great secret, no need to reinvent the wheel. It's just tedious to set up and test.

It might not sound like much, but this sort of thing is a proven immersion-provider and is actually the most popular type of flightsim gameplay in history. Besides giving the player the feeling of being an actual participant in the battle, not knowing what tomorrow will bring, he can get this experience even if he only has time for 1 sortie per day, at a time when none of his online friends are available, due to real life constraints. And because all squadrons are doing semi-random things, the player can pick a favorite squadron and play the same time period over and over, and never see the same thing twice.

[ElAurens]

I've always wondered how in virtually the same breath, someone can talk about the historical accuracy of a sim, and then lament that there is no dynamic campaign.

They are mutually exclusive as far as I can see.

That said I have no real horse in this race. I am almost 100% an online pilot.

Very few, and I mean one or two, offline "campaigns" have ever held my interest. Their downfall is always the AI. The computer controlled elements, either enemy or friend, are just so uber at fighting, and yet totally stupid at taking orders that the campaigns quickly melt down to tedious "goat herding" of your element, who won't obey anyway, or being sniped from low earth orbit by a tail gunner with a pop gun.

Boring.

I'll take human opposition any day.

[WTE_Galway]

"spend several hours arguing with Trafford Leigh-Mallory"

Was Trafford Leigh-Mallory the original Spitfire whiner?

"5)Your skill at jerking a joystick gets you posted to an elite squadron of supercharged Spits Your next mission takes you into a railway tunnel where you must skip a 500lb bomb into the path of Goering's train and escape vertically up a ventilation shaft. In the course of doing this you create the first clipped-wing Spit and gain 500 Inventor points....... on your return you get totally pissed on warm beer and find yourself unable to deliver when Spitfire girl offers her all...."

lol, very humorous :) This forum could use a bit more lightheartedness atm


Unfortunately its been confirmed we cannot actually fly through the railway tunnels with this release so the Goering mission will have to wait till a later patch.

[ElAurens]

Then there is always the issue of the possibility of Goering himself fitting in a railway tunnel...


:grin:

[White Owl]

Wow. Looks like Blackdog has been putting some thought into this for a while. Great post.

[Blackdog_kt]

Then there is always the issue of the possibility of Goering himself fitting in a railway tunnel...


:grin:

Awesome :grin:

His penchant for the dolce vita is so prevalent that he's modeled like this in many games. One of my friends plays the hearts of iron 3 strategy game where you can apparently assign historical figures certain postings in combat units, so he placed Goering to lead a CAS wing (i think that's how the game calls the stuka units). He was telling me yesterday "whenever i rotate the fat b*stard out of the front lines but don't specify exactly where he should go, he always ends up in Paris" :-P