I personally like it realistic as possible, but that's not going to fit everyone. Just shed some realism settings - although I might agree that perhaps more fine-grained options for realism might be appreciated for some people.

I'm guessing, for instance, that you're not very interested in DCS A-10C. There literally aren't enough keys on a keyboard for all of it (MAYBE with all the ctrl/alt options), and you constantly have to use the mouse to operate systems in-flight... you also have to manually turn them all on, wait for them to bootstrap, etc etc. That's what makes it brilliant, and that's what I want out of CoD.

That's fine if you don't like it - you can turn down the settings, but please don't assume that's the way CoD should be for everyone :)

P.S. if you really think you don't need separate mixture/prop pitch/radiator controls, you haven't flown a damaged Blenheim back to base ;)

I think we will draw more IL-2 people as soon as we get some more maps and theaters. This next patch doesn't have any new theaters but it looks like there will be big improvements with ground colour frame rates and sound. If I remember right the person reworking the sound did Rise Of Flights sound and it's awesome. The next theater to come up appears to be Russia, then I hope the Mediterranean, I love North Africa :)

Some pics of good old 2001 IL-2 just to show how good it still holds up. I started in August 2001 on the demo on the Hyperlobby. You could play 4 in a dogfight at a time that's all there was. The plane were the 109G-2 Sturmovik and a P-39 to chose from. That went on up until November when the game came out. Even when the demo was still being flown everyone was joining up with Squads and Jagdgeschwaders. One of the funniest moments was when Herr-Spray Uhoh7 Burn and myself..Hackl were flying in a dogfight mission. Burn was plastered but still able to dogfight . He wasn't speaking English very well, he was a Swede. Uhoh7 was from the States and had taught skying in Austria..strange :)....anyway they could communicate with each other by speaking German. It was Burn and Uhoh7 VS Herr-Spray and Hackl all on the same Roger Wilco channel. Burn was yelling and screaming this German into his mic and getting drunker and drunker. We were all laughing so hard it's a wonder we could fight at all. By the end Burn couldn't even take off anymore. Good times :)

Mixture/prop pitch/radiator controls, these all impact flight in real time and of course I agree should be included in CLoD as they were in IL-2 46. I have always flown full switch btw. I use the gauges.

The things I mention above, these appear to me to be mundane pre-flight checklist items. Or in the case of the anthro restriction that I would guess hardly anyone uses online, or the crooked 109 gunsight where many on this board are trying to find a workaround with their TrackIR/Freetrack, these are simply failures. I would just get rid of them. On the other hand, if Luthier can tell use that modeling separate fuel cocks for each engine of the Blenheim and shutting it on a smoking engine will help to prevent engine fire, then "yes", keep that in the game. That would be good and enhance realism experience. But leave it default "open" at start-up so I don't have to check it each time I fly. Priming the fuel pump? Luthier, tell me how this feature will help in actual flight. Maybe a fuel hose leak is modeled and can be offset/mitigated this way? How about at start-up also making the fuel pump primed by default so we don't have to pump it five times every single time we fly.

You may have it the nail on the head. I don't play DCs-10, but maybe that is part of the problem. They tried to turn IL-2 into DCs-10. The mouse click-able cockpit and the little icons. I want to be able to turn that off completely. I just want a cockpit. No icons or windows or overlays. I use my controls or voice command to execute. No moving my mouse around clicking all over my screen. This is inefficient. I also want them to get rid of all that radio chatter. It is annoying. In old IL-2 it is not annoying. I understand what they are saying and it isn't a blobby mess of sound like it is in CLoD. What the hell went wrong??? Gawd!!!

That he is not content to turn down his difficulty settings, he would rather want the new realism options to be unavailable to all.
Ok, just joking, no offence meant :-P


It's just that while i do get that people have busy lives and limited gameplay time available, i don't get the reluctance to learn new things in something that's supposed to be a hobby.

Going from European Air War to IL2 had me spending quite some time learning all the new things i had to learn. Going from IL2 to CoD is the same. I just think that many people forget about this and if something prevents them from getting instant results on previously acquired habits they lose their will to remain involved.

Everyone can still become adept at CoD by spending the same amount of hours per week that they did back in the day with IL2. The difference is that when 50 hours meant you knew quite a bit in IL2, it's barely scratching the surface in CoD (you either know a couple of planes well or you can just fly a lot of them but not fight well in them after logging 50 hours) and it's not good enough for someone who expects to join a server and have his first online kill in the sim within the first week while switching flyables on every sortie.

If i list the amount of legitimate features mistaken for bugs that people have mentioned since the day of release we'd need a new thread ;-)

That doesn't mean those of us who enjoy those features should suffer reduced gameplay, especially when those features

a) have already been worked on
b) are representative of the real aircraft and
c) can be toggled off.

Nobody's forcing anyone to fly with CEM on, disable it for single player, host/join a server with similar settings for multiplayer, etc and go have fun.

Calling the new features a novelty is like calling accurate ballistics a novelty because i was used to flying red baron 3D before moving on to IL2.


In other words:



Furthermore, if anything, the aircraft systems modeling is actually very automated in terms of the actions demanded by the player. What it does is have a more accurate model of engine parameters and how they interact with each other, but there's no actual checklists to speak of.
90% of the time is turn on fuel, open radiators, give it a bit of throttle and press "I" to start the engine.

If that's too much then CoD is probably not the sim for you MadBlaster. That's not a stigma or anything like that and i'm not being a smarty-pants, it's perfectly fine to have your own opinion and stick with the old sim.

People have different tastes and that's why a lot of us like exactly the kind of things you describe as "novelties" and would want even more of them with consequences for mishandling them, that's why i haven't booted up IL2 a single time ever since i installed CoD: the aircraft always operate at full capacity with minimum effort and after sampling the increased pilot workload and the challenges it brings to the table (which also force more realistic tactics and mission profiles simply because people have to account for the loss of situational awareness in high workload situations), IL2 is just not doing it for me anymore.

That doesn't mean IL2 is not good, it just means that CoD is much better (at least for what i personally expect from a next-gen sim) under the hood, despite the initial avalanche of bugs. CoD just needs debugging to do what it set out to do, IL2 would need a major engine rewrite to achieve the same, it's not even a fair contest.

Once again, if it was in the real aircraft and can be modeled in a sim i say go for it. Better to let the players disable a feature themselves if they don't like it, than not including it at all and having players who would like it being unable to use it.

If there's CEM in the sim you can turn it off. If there's no CEM in the sim i can't magically turn it on. It's as simple as that ;-)

The agenda again. I rest my case.;)

The irony, my first virtual flight online this morning on WoP Spit/109, in HE-111-6, a destroyer blew my right engine on a torpedo run. So I cut the power on it, opened the rad and retrimmed. When it died, I feathered it. Made it home safe and sound on the left engine. But of course, if it was CLoD, I would of had that fuel cock and a fuel pump!!! That would have made all the difference between "toy" CEM and realistic CLoD...NOT!!!

You might've missed MadBlaster's latest post there, Blackdog.

I think I get what he's trying to say. He's all for full-real, as long as whatever comes with it has an actual impact in the game, while flying, and isn't just "going through the motions".

I can definitely see an option for that. I might even use it from time to time if I just don't want to bother heating up the engines (suppose you still fly with CEM, you just don't have to wait 2m for the engines to heat up like on the Blenheim). Sometimes we can't be flying for too long, and those things don't add much more than the feeling of actually being there.

I still don't think they should be removed from the game. I do believe that realism for realism's sake is a good thing - even if it means individual fuel cocks, priming the fuel for a while and all that. I want to feel like I'm there - I wish I could smell it, and feel it on my hands. The whole experience... heck, I sometimes even wish someone would do a Pacific carrier battle taking a whole real-life weekend, 24/7 - forget sleep! You're going up at 5am morning patrol/scouting! 6 hours of scouting for the enemy fleet! I would be the first to register for a whole weekend of that! (Any takers?:P)

However, I totally understand your position, where you just don't want to bother with it if it doesn't affect flight at all, and definitely think it wouldn't be bad for it to be an option. I still want to be able to do those things, for the sake of immersion.

It's ok to like different things.

I could just as easily claim that people who declare the new features to be mere fluff have an agenda to keep the rest of us flying IL2 for as long as possible, so that they can keep their favorite servers populated while engaging in their preferred form of flight simming, instead of having the majority of the community gradually move to a platform they dislike/can't bother to learn/whatever, but i won't.

I'll just chalk it up to them liking different aspects of the whole flying thing and let them do their thing in peace ;-)

As far as i and my personal entertainment are concerned though i can't put my voice behind design decisions that i firmly consider to be steps of regression, especially when we have new features dealing with some very real limitations of aircraft operation and this creates a new set of challenges and tactical situations for me to master.

On one hand i have a new and varied environment of evolving gameplay where i can learn more about a subject i like, on the other i have the choice of sticking with something that will accommodate past acquired habits of mine to ensure a greater rate of success. And this is pretty much a subjective choice, depending on what makes each one of us tick.

Well, i'm not really putting my life at risk here like those pilots did back in the day, so as far as i'm personally concerned i say success be damned, i want to learn some new stuff about aircraft of the day and how they operated, flew and fought, not pretend to be a top ace while simu-flying with 1/10th of a real pilot's workload. I'm not dissing it but it's not for me, so i'm very glad i got a sim that focuses on the kind of aspect i like. It can be too much for some people, sure, but that's what the difficulty options are there for.


EDIT: I missed Alvinfolk's post (we must have been typing simultaneously), so let me address it here. Rest assured, whatever is modeled in CoD is not about going through the motions. Some stuff doesn't work properly yet but it's in the list of documented issues to fix and when it does it will have a big impact on gameplay.

Example, the Blenheim's hydraulic selector is modeled but automatic, because it's something that the pilot uses maybe twice in the course of the entire mission. The hydraulic pump can't run gear and flaps at the same time as the turret and it's prone to overheating, so what they did was use a three-way switch: off when cruising, set to drive the gear and flaps during takeoff and landing, set to power the turret when nearing enemy airspace. That's why the turret doesn't work when the engines are off and we are sitting on the ground. This however is something that CoD handles on its own without input from the player, once i'm airborne my turret works fine because the sim sets the hydraulics for me.

The fuel controls though? Entirely different story and there are very good reasons they are modeled. Got a fuel leak? You'll get asymmetric weight distribution and since it doesn't have aileron trim you can be potentially stuck in an unrecoverable roll. What do you do then? You jettison some fuel from the "heavy" wing. This is a control we're currently missing in the sim, so we're actually missing features that have an impact on gameplay and not the other way around.

Or let's assume that the weight difference is not that big and the aircraft is controllable even when all the fuel on one side of the wing has leaked out. How do you keep that engine running? That's what the third fuel selector is for, it enables cross-feed so that you can feed both engines from the tanks on one side of the wing.

There are many examples like these and i'm sure that in a future expansion people will be grateful that they will be able to first burn the fuel from the rear tank that upsets their center of gravity when flying a P-51, instead of having them all drain at a similar rate and fly in a spin prone condition like we have to do in IL2 ;)

@Anvifolk
Yes that is what I'm saying. The missions I fly online are two hours long. So I want to get in the game, not the start-up ritual.

@Blackdog
My criticism is meant as constructive and should be taken that way. I also think it fair to defend the game I choose to play because it is better than CLoD. If CLoD met my expectations, then I would be playing that. It's up to 1C to fix it or not.

To the topic, just remember the HL in the golden IL2 days. Of the 1000 online players maybe 10% were playing on full-real servern. But then you still hat the Hud-Log and usually on even on the full-real servern you had far from realistic surroundings. The most popular servers were the servers with shorts flight time to the mass furball on deck. Now take a look at the CloD, despite the state it is in, there is one populated arcade server and one populated full- real server. Also here you only have minimized flight distances to action, no realisitc surroundings. CloD went one step furhter in the direction to a simulation, event though is pretty much still an action shooter like IL2 with simulation elements, what do all the rest of the 90% online players do, who populated the acrade servers in the HL?

As far as I`ve read, switching off CEM is no option, due to program issues, and if the simple start-up procedure is already too much for the most players, how are the supposed to get along with simulated plane characteristics as the 109 ReVi, wariming up, the pitch control or temperature monitoring, where you don´t get a hud log message "Overheating"? I think there will be servers soon, which have airstart next to each other, so the gameplay will be reduced to what the most players seek - action as fast as possible, without any abstract obstacles like simulation elements.

I personally hoped CloD would be sophisticated simulation, but I am fine with the action shooter it is now, because there simply is no other WWII game, which is as close to a simulation as CloD.