Is realistic the new black?
 

I, like many of my fellow Arcade Top Gun Graduates (Class of '09), have recently been playing a lot of realsitic online games. It's a bit of a revalation as to how good this mode is, very under rated. Watch out for the class of '10!

(The big red stall warning fades away after a bit...)

Do any of the sim guys play Realistic? It'd be nice to get some of the top Arcaders vs the top Simmers, in a half your rules half ours kinda way....

i'm one of the simmers who have actually been playing more than the normal amount of Realistic, mainly because it's all there is, but i do enjoy a bit of realistic from time to time. Always miss looking at my beautiful plane from outside when i'm in sim

only when I feel like breaking the sound barrier without a sonic boom

Is there a plane that'll do 768mph in realistic? I've not seen it.

It's with a tinge of sadness I see this thread. It does indeed appear realistic is the place to be. I like it lots, more challenging handling, better gun damage etc. But there are some things I hate. Dogfight becomes a daisy chain and he who tags on back end wins. Lots of kills that count as crashes. Worst of all the dreaded head on guns blazing suicide attack. I hate this technique in arcade but in realistic it's blood boiling. Team battle works a lot better than dogfight as these problems are reduced by cover and team work. Also smaller dogfights with freinds works well.

And now you're just the smallest step away from being full time simmers :-P

head on the nail

I didn't mean to make you sad :)

The caterpillar of death is bit of a bummer, If someones repeatedly head on against me I'll do slow barrel rolls and then at the top of the roll just before he flys by pull back hard. If it's timed right you can be directly on their six within 5 - 6 seconds of them passing you. If you do it with someone on your six at the time you tend to die tho..

I think the caterpillar comes from having too short a respawn time, there's very few good defensive pilots online it's all attack attack so they join the queue and see how many kills they can get before the inevitable happens.

For all it's flaws I still find the dogfighting in Realistic feels more authentic than the tree top stuff in simutation.

Agreed. I flew a sim game after the realistic late last night and it was all done at 0 altitude. I got so frustrated I climbed to 3000 with a hope the others would follow but no joy. I just ended up on my own watching specs on the ground killing each other. This kind of thing removes a whole axis from play and feels more like a fps. I could get into sim but only if there was an altitude limit.
I am back off to arcade mode. See you on the beach

Sim online works out like that because there's usually no teamwork, no objective except to destroy planes, and with the scoring system, no incentive to disengage from a bad situation. Join the team ladder where it's battle for least deaths again.

During the Battle for Europe many of the air combat matches were high speed and at decent altitude, and well-coordinated.

to encourage people to use real-life tactics, here's a link to one of the definitive air combat guides:

http://www.filestube.com/f263ec98406...neuvering.html

Here's an animated demo I made of "loose deuce" attacks. Team USSR used this fairly effectively in Battle for Europe. Say the big planes are Spitfires, and the little ones are 109k4's. The k4's approach in a slightly staggered bracket. The Spits slow down by turning to engage. The lead k4 attacks the spit that passed its wingman, doesn't have to turn more than 90 degrees or slow down much either.

http://i81.photobucket.com/albums/j2...bracketld1.gif

Now supposing it's not flat, that the Spits make vertical zoom turns after they pass? That makes it even more effective as the spits lose speed by gaining altitude and are easier to hit.

ahh yes i play realisitci and im very good at it
infact no1 has beeten me at cta realistic manston

Good link, I've been looking for something like this for a while. Thanks.

no get a grip winny how can a mode that uses a third person camera angle and uses big red signs to tell you where to shoot be more realistic than sim mode

Because sim mode makes it so hard to see opposition planes you have to get down on the deck to put them against the sky to spot them. The best sim match I played was at the weekend on Sicily coast. The match was played out over the sea so you easily spot the other planes and BNZ them very easily. This had the effect of raising the altitude of the match. As I say I dont see the point in removing one of your axis during a match. Playing out a dogfight at treetop level gives you 4 options, put the power on, bank left, bank right or climb. Climing is suicide if someones on your tale so its always a turning game. Without any kind of tracking this usually works on losing your oponent thats on your tale

What I said was the dogfighting in realistc was more authentic. I've read loads of WWII combat reports and I never read one where the main tactic seemed to be to stay low. If you had an altitude disadvantage in WWII you were in trouble.

As for the big red target indicator.. Switch the hud off and stick it in cockpit view. And third person looks nice, nobody is forced to use it.

Target lock is a better simulation of how your eyes actually work. Human eyes don't pan around smoothly like that.

I stand by what I said.

i do agree that some maps are easier than others to spot enemy planes but i dont agree that all sim games are tree top flying for example the other night i played a historical match with spit mkII and hurricanes against 109E3s high above dover, but also i do think it depends who you are flying against.

Newcomers to realistic should be coached by sim and realistic veterans.
Concepts like velocity vector, lift vector and pursuit courses should be thoroughly explained and practiced.

A rookie should train on a BF109-E and the instructor on either a Hurricane or a Spit MkII. Make butterfly entries to a head-on fight, make use of the vertical on an energy fighter, and a decent guns defense practice. "Zoom and boom" and "turn and burn" techniques explained. Then, the rookie can make his choice as far as weapon goes.

Sim matches would be a lot more effective and fun if more teamwork was involved. To me, Situational Awareness (SA) is the most difficult thing to achieve in sim mode. If I can spot a guy ("See – Decide – Attack – Break") unless he is a good defensive guy he's gone. But if I am clueless as to what's going on during a match, then I get shot down every five seconds. Yesterday I played a couple of sim matches where I had good SA and bad SA. On the good ones, I stayed ahead of everyone with 7-12 kills. On the bad ones I did not even scored a single kill.

Good SA comes from your mate calling out altitude, situation, bearing and heading. An example could be "This is Dr Laplace. I'm on a Spit MkXVI, turning hard left @ 1,500ft, 200mph, going south". Then your mates can look for you and help you if you miss the target. Also, calling out bandits (Bandits!, 12 o'clock high!) helps.

I am not an ace like some guys here who somehow manage to get EVERY kill EVERY time. But I am a good teacher. If there's anyone here that would like to go online and practice some of this stuff with me I'd be more than happy to help. We need more sim and realistic players. Also, I am inviting the aces to help me show the rookies the art of dogfighting.

Yes. When i'm playing sim with the regular 360 sim players, our battles can vary a lot in height. I try to stay as high as possible especially when i'm flying my P-51D and if i get too low I usually get picked off by squirrel's La7 within seconds. One way to make players fly higher is to add some cloud cover, people tend to try and hide in them if they are getting chased.

Try winter at Stalingrad in the morning or day with poor weather. awesome and easy to spot planes too.

Oh and flying as a P-51, plane trains and head ons are what you want to see. Spotting then Hooking onto the back of a plane train after a high speed dive can get you a double kill, and in a head on, once you get the hang of sliding past with the rudder instead of just flying into the other plane, you can get many nice kills without the collision.

The best way to solve the treetop dogfighting problem if you wish you head up to altitude is to host or convince the host to set poor/rain/storm weather. Visibility will be tragic at lower levels, so people should get the hint to head above the clouds if they are a sim regular.

Besides, nothing is better for me in a dogfight than shooting a wing off an opponent and watching them disappear into the bad weather (whether I get kill credit or not).

More weather/match variety and teamwork on sim matches is much needed, but to get there we have to have a good group of sim-willing pilots. Here's hoping that realistic is the new black, and that sim will be in season soon.

Cheers.

At the end of the day I will play any mode, just as long as there are players about to shoot. I have noticed a gradual decrease in players over the last couple of weeks.

I was talking to Ratman the other day and he said the game had lost its shine to him. He is one of us arcade lot shifting into realistic for a change though so at least he is still playing. He said realistic had given the game a new lease of life as its a challenge again. I agree with him on that and I reckon some more matches we can start to develop tactics to combat the daisy chaining and head ons

With the completely ridiculous lock-on mode in Realistic you might as well be playing Arcade as far as I'm concerned.

And 'Dogfight' mode in Sim is garbage. People have to crawl on the deck because they have no teammates defending their six. It's a shame that mode is all people want to play when they come from Arcade/Realistic.

edit: In before "Well, I just perform rolling scissors' and split-S manoeuvres and kill all 5 enemies so I don't need teammates protecting my six."

yes i totally agree with everything you said and i also wish that the regular sim players would bea bit more adventurous and play all of the game modes available

Team battle and CTA on sim FTW

Having got used to sim, I find realistic both hard and annoying to play. I can push the plane harder in sim because I have flap control, which gets me into spins all the time in realistic. And that stall warning is very annoying.

But I agree - the constant tree top hovering does get tedious in sim. Kudos to whoever suggested setting the weather to counter it. Although that brings it's own irritation at constantly shifting through the cloud layer, and never knowing where your opponent is, even if he was just in front of you. Playing at sea helps as there's no point hugging the ground then.

The ground hugging is mainly a tactic born of the invisibility of planes in sim, but the patch has fixed that. If someone can use altitude to their advantage, that tactic could now become more prevalent.

That's nice of you Dr. Laplace Are you on XBL or PSN?

PSN: f1rebrand

As of "hugging the ground", check out this FW 190 flying at point zero :o:o:o:o

http://nuav.rforum.biz/discuss-all-a...w-190-t194.htm

Awesome stuff. There's a part in this Dogfight tv show that recalls a chase feet off the ground with a FW-190. It's one of the things that BoP lacks, just like the Gran Turismo series, a decent sense of speed.

I hope they can improve that aspect of the engine in the sequel.

Cool, good thread with lots of good points.

I'm not Migervin or Tagem, sadly. And I guess that if I was I wouldn't need Realistic mode. As a very average simulator pilot realstic's the closest I can get to 'real' WWII air combat. I'm handicapping myself by not using a control pad (can't check six properly in sim with my stick) but to me playing with a gamepad is even more intrusive than the BIG RED STALL

All this only applies to online btw, I really like playing sim offline.

I'd love to learn some proper techniques and tactics but I don't really get time to learn from my mistakes as they usually happen at about 50ft and by the time I've thought 'fucked up there' I'm already a very compact burning heap of scrap metal (or wood for you hurri fans)

Thanks, my friend... I am on XBL: Dr Laplace.

absolutly 100% bo'selecta post. you have got to love that P47, after the spit that is my favourite fighter plane of ww2

Fixed it for you, my good Docter of BS ;)

hmmm
 

I enjoy realistic enough, fast kills, the lack of a lead reticule shows the difference between those who can shoot and those who can't the aircraft are a damn sight more better balanced than arcade. but i'll never join sim just for the pure defiance of it.
And for those of you who haven't realised the no kill crash thing can be fixed by you simply bailing out of your aircraft

lol, If only that were true. More likely you will get people angry for bailing out (and crashing) before they could "explode" you.

Bailing out is just like killing someone by making them crash. Sometimes you get the kill sometimes not.

3rd person view.
 

You can use the 3rd person view on simulator with "Wings of Prey" That makes things easier for me as I tend to get motion sickness using the "Superman " view:-x
Using cockpit view on sim is great but definitely puts you at a disadvantage against players using HUD.

WRONG! we obviously we play with different kinds of people because my friends are happy to get the KILL (not crash). When you bail out whom ever has caused the damage that has made you bailout gets the kill... maybe thats not true on xbox but it's how it works on the ps3. Must be something to do with the ps3 exclusive patch, but as long as the person who caused said damage is still in the same aircraft (they have not already been killed themselves) they get the kill.

I wish it was like that with the Xbox !!!!!!:mad:

Yeah, bailing out on the PS3 seems to subvert the crash-bug. Only it's a pain in the arse to get to the bail out option in the aviator layout. Especially when your elevators have been shot up in a dive and the ground is approaching quickly.

WRONG! I said people will more likely get angry with people bailing out (as in random people who don't understand). I DIDN'T say my friends get angry with me when I bail out lol. People I fly with mostly don't give a fig wether a kill is registered or not. What I said is true of the ORIGINAL game on PS3 and Xbox, have no idea about the PS3 patch if what you say is true then maybe i'd bail out if I had evaded my atacker. I wouldn't bail out though if I was still under fire lol that would be madness.

Anyway this is beside the point because most of these crashed kills one gets is in the situation where you bang up a planes {usually a spitfire flying at 20ft} wing and it goes into a snap roll and crashes milliseconds later. You'd do well to even press the start button before you hit ground let alone have time to navigate the menu and select bail out.

Another thing has come to my mind, Its fine bailing out in realistic or arcade but in sim because you have no hud you have no clue the the plane you are firing at has already been made to bail out by someone else. Very anoying when you finish off the plane only to find you have been wasting your ammo.
Hmmm but that could be more a side affect of having limited ammo and people jumping from a perfectly flyable plane to "rearm". I don't do this.

anyone who gets all worked up about not getting credit for kills is wasting their time. Even if you got credit for all kills, the scoring system is still so screwed up that online pickup games are nothing at all like real air combat. There is no incentive to not die. So if you worry about getting 20 kills every round, minus 20 points for the 20 deaths you suffered to get those 20 kills, all to win the round with 80 points, you are training to be a terrible pilot.

A while ago I decided screw the most kills, screw the leaderboards, and started concentrating on two things:

1) get the least deaths
2) get a positive kill/death differential

Since not every kill is credited, it's even more of a challenge to keep deaths under kills and have fewest deaths both in the same round. So I tended to get fewer points, but for some reason I moved up the dogfight board anyway.

.... like i said PS3 exclusive patch makes me right, ask any one who flys against me in REALISTIC as this is what the thread refers too they will agree, also in REALISTIC when you bail out of a plane it dissappears as a target, so all you have just said about simulator may be true but but not in the context of what i'm talking about.
You do not understand because you haven't got the patch that makes such things possible, I'm sure your opinion enlightens xbox users but don't talk about the ps3 and it's users when it is blatant you have no experience of how the patch works.
I'd rather give someone a kill by bailing out (if the opportunity presents) then crashing . It may not work that way with you or on the xbox but it is possible on the ps3...... rather than battle a dying aircraft i bail out, i'm not going to get another killl when my wing is so full of holes it's impossible to turn any direction but left or when my engine is little more than inertia spinning my prop.
I understand what you're saying kozz, i strive for that same also but i find my kills to death and deaths very much depend on whom i'm flying against; when dkwookie davedog74 gilly and mkinny are around my k/d is closer 1 but when their not around sometime i can get 7 to 1. I play this game for fun not leaderboards i'll build my own in realistic too if there is enough people who want to sign on

I try to do this in most online games. MW2 is a good example, I get no pleasure from 17 kills 15 deaths. I'd rather come out with 9 -4 or something.

Same applies to IL-2. In sim especially. I managed a 5-3 in a 20 min match yesterday and was quite proud of myself. (it's a lot better than the usual 3-10)

The bailing out thing is all good and well but personally I try and keep the plane in the sky, if someone else 'explodes' me when I'm a sitting duck then they deserve the kill. A kills not a kill until they've been killed. I've also noticed that what feels like terminal damage can be overcome if you've enough altitude to recover. I like dropping my gear if the engines gone so whoever is shooting at me gets the full WWII experience!

For me this game is primarily about the flying, whatever the condition of the plane. I'd rather go out in a big ball of fire thanks.

Muchas Gracias, my friend.:grin:

Really? Where did it say PS3 patch people only in this thread? Your original comment is therefor only half correct as you said nothing about PS3 patch only. And for the other half (360 users) its worse than staying in the plane and giving the guy shooting more time to "KILL" you. I agree I didn't know that on Patched PS3 bailing out ALWAYS gives the shooter the kill. But then you too seemed to be oblivious to the fact that bailing out is bad form for xbox users or even worse were discounting xbox users like they didn't exist.

I wouldn't have cared to reply to your first reply to me but I didn't apreciate being SHOUTED that I was WRONG! When you are just as wrong as I was.

Can we just stop this now, I should have known this would descend into a tit for tat exchange. I didn't realise you'd take it so personally; I apologise it wasn't my intention to offend, i was merely sating how to negate the no kill crash bug. Granted on the ps3... but i know nothing about xboxs and was never saying that i was making statements true of il2 on xbox; granted i didn't make it clear at all in my first post, however heres the quote from my second post "maybe thats not true on xbox but it's how it works on the ps3. Must be something to do with the ps3 exclusive patch".

I'm sorry to all xbox users you shouldn't listen to anything i say because it has exactly no bearing on you in any way. I am really enjoying ps3 realistic il2. I'm hope you enjoy the xbox il2 also.

Nice reply man, Respect. I'm sorry too, I guess the death of the 360 patch still gets me angryer whenever the P word is said lol

Separation of Xbox and PS3 users is the last thing this forum needs, I will continue to read threads about the game on PS3, aswell as your posts as they are well writen (when not shouting lol) and have interesting views on the game.

Afterall the patch may have changed somethings but the basic game is the same and in most cases an xbox user and a PS3 user can discuss the game without even having to mention what platform they are on.

Now to put the post on topic. I do play mostly sim, but realistic is still enjoyable for me when I'm with friends. One thing I did find very fun on realistic and a nice change after playing sim, was that you are much more able to single someone out. Sorry Bucketman but you had to pay for all those times youve team killed me :D

never meant to shoot you pope i always forget whether freinds are blue or red

Bucket??? Is that really you??? YAY!!! :grin: You've finally stopped lurking.


Oh and you are an awful liar lol.

yep its me pope . on subject we do switch sometimes between sim and realistic . especially with subaru on .it can be fun and he doesnt take it too seriously.