Sim with best career mode?
 

Hi Guys,

Quick question... I am getting back into flight games after about a 15 year break. I used to really enjoy playing the kind of games with a strong career mode, where you play the same pilot, maintain stats, get medals, get promoted, injured, etc. Super realism in the flight model isn't as important to me as this aspect.

I have IL2-1946 and I like that it does some of these things - but so far its seems very cursory (maybe I need to play longer?).

Any suggestions for me?

Thanks!

For me, I love BoB2. Hands-down for me, that is awesome. Others may hate the fact that there is a chance the luftwaffe can win, but this can only really be achieved if one plays as the luftwaffe. You have the chance to play as the commander, but you can just play as a single pilot and if playing as a RAF pilot (from my experience) there is no chance the luftwaffe will win because I have always found that events unfurl historically.
Seriously, it is the most immersive campaign I've ever played, and getting vectored to raids will really send chills down your spine, it feels so realistic ;)

IL-2 does not have the most immersive career experience... I think the old standard of Aces of the Pacific in some ways did a better job than this. But IL-2 campaigns can be fun to play... the DGEN ones aren't bad and have some level of persistence. Hand crafted campaigns don't have some of the options but they can offer a very interesting experience as well.

Also consider downloading and installing DCG with IL2_1946.

It provides a much more customizable dynamic campaign/career than the stock DGEN.

Understatement of the day, EAW IMO had a reallly good mix of campaign/gameplay. I remember starting out low rank in a Me-262 in 1944 and then working myself up to Hauptmann and given the control of wich of my pilots would fly the missions and also wich loadout i.e R4M rockets(depending on availability) they would have. Sure you can choose loadout in IL-2 campaigns but in EAW it was dependent of stock. I was actually concerned that my pilots returned from the missions. I hope and also believe that this will be rectified in SOW.

That is certainly something we all hope to see in SoW. Although personally I didn't find the EAW campaigns too immersive either, mostly because the missions were extremely repetetive (more so than Il2's DCG) and the stupid "mission failure" assessment when you only managed to shoot down 18 of 24 bombers :confused:

I think Red Baron is probably the best of the flight sim career modes; although EAW had some great ideas in it.

I agree that IL-2 has always been a bit cold as an off line game. Some of the hand built missions/campaigns are wonderful, and can do a surprisingly good job of historical "tuition"; but the replayablility of anything scripted is limited.

The inbuilt campaign generator wasn't bad when the game was new, but these days it's an insult for a new purchaser to find out he's paid for a game wherein so much of the content is unavailable to a new user (Spit or Temp or He 162 campaigns for example).

BOB2 had fantastic promise, but was so flawed at launch it never really recovered. I think it was the only sim ever made where joystick button assignments were hard coded, despite the in box literature showing a programmable MS sidewinder!

Much of what keeps IL-2 running comes from the EAW world, such as Hyperlobby and DCG.

It'll be interesting to see if SOW will be sophisticated enough to stand alone or if it'll still need support from the EAW legacy.

I think I liked Secret Weapons of the Luftwaffe. You could play as a low ranked pilot or control the air campaign. I liked distributing flights and pilots to different objectives.

But that's just me.

Splitter

BoB2 has come a VERY long way from launch, I'll tell you that ;) Pretty much all the flaws from first release have been ironed out. ;)

One the very best career modes is in Over Flanders Fields, but it's WW2.

IMHO:

The Mighty Eighth B17 II

(And M1A1 Tank Platoon for the older friends on the forum ;) )

ww1..... :P

Beat me to it.

I know some may say otherwise but I always enjoyed CFS2 campaign as well. Graphics were much to be desired by now but still liked the immersion.

Flyingbullseye

Red Baron. It's almost like you're in the real war: you read about war news in newspaper, you can see some propaganda "newsreel" (actually a slideshow) about the battle situation in your sector, you got the list of best aces in the whole front as well as in your own unit. If you want to change unit, you must make request, and not all requests are accepted. Before flight you got the best briefing ever: flight plan with detailed waypoints and time, type of action, enemy activity (not quite sure about this), map, and believe me, aerial recon photos. You know exactly what you're supposed to do, not like IL-2 where you must figure it out on the way. You can choose ammo types before mission, and IIRC, for each gun. After each mission, you get the mission report. If you're wounded, you'll be absent from combat for some time, or maybe for the rest of the war. If you're shot down over enemy territory, you'd be either captured or escape. If you shoot down friendly aircrafts, you risk yourself facing court martial or even firing squad. And if you die, the game doesn't end right away. You still have the last salute, or maybe even a medal.

Yep, Red Baron 3d for me, that was the best.

Secret Weapons of the Luftwaffe: Lucky Strikes (mod campaign)

It may not have been totally historical - but one wanted to fly the next mission (and there were some plot choices).

Must you confuse Red Baron with Red Baron II/3d! The first was the better!! ;)

Red Baron 3D - easily.


Rise of Flight may be getting a campaign mode modeled on RB3D due to overwhelming requests.

Hey, all those people are doing it wrong ;) Consider starting a real IL-2 career. That is join on some online squadron, get the best missions and campaigns, get training, get the world class "AI" (other human pilots), get promoted, get medals, become a commander, and seduce all chicks you can find :lol: I am doing that :cool:


Edit: Optional challenges: Break all rules :lol:

+1

How about Steel Panthers - World at War :cool: I know it is not an *action* simulator, but that doesn't make it bad :)

Maybe when SOW progresses to 1943-45 I'll be able to do the same in a 109 with just as many chills.

Haven't had the chance to really try Battle of Britain: Wings of Victory, but I keep hearing good things about it.

B-17 II The Mighty Eighth II was fun in the beginning, but got boring very quickly. And lack of proper plane numbers (I frequently RTB'd alone, or with just one plane) was an immersion killer for me. Not to mention that out of 18 planes you could had in formation, only 6 were 'alive'. And that in the only career I managed to force myself to finish I ended with over 30 kills...

IL2 was never good offline for me. AI was predictable and flew too perfect. Bomber formations were more or less fun to attack if one used the proper tactics, trigger happy gunners who shot at other bombers flying nearby killed it for me. Other things were good, more or less. But I could never 'get into the mood' as I did with some other games. On line was where it used to shine like no other...

This leaves me no choice but to put EAW at the first place. EAW might have had repeating missions, but the overall end result accompanied with a nice atmosphere was more or less believable. Not to mention the 100+ plane battles which were epic, to say the least.

Red Baron was very good. From what I remember of it. :)

I don't know what you are speaking about but I flew 109 in Murmansk yesterday and it has maybe never felt so good before!

It was awesome. But after I saw Their Finest Hour from Youtube I am not sure do I want to see Red Baron anywhere else than in my memories :lol:

No may about it mate, here are some pics they look very interesting.

http://riseofflight.com/Forum/viewto...p?f=45&t=12964

planned for update 1.017 along with the gotha :D

RedBaron3d.....Every action you took seemed to affect the rest of the campaign, kill an ace early, he was gone the rest of the war. Plus it was hard to beat watching the ground battles in No Mans Land when each side would come out and brawl.

K2

Red Baron II/3d was so immersive. The scrambles that sometimes happened if you flew over an enemy airbase, along with the ambulance that came out to get your pilot if you where injured near an airbase. Plus of course the huge number of flights and individual pilots and squadron management. IMHO Il2 has always had so much unrealized potential in the immersion department, I think if we can get Lowengrins DCG incorporated into Il2 we would be one step closer.

Rise of Flight is releasing an all-new campaign generator next month. The promo information looked extremely promising. It will be a pleasure to say goodbye to the makeshift one the game shipped with. The new DCG takes a lot of inspiration from the old RB3D apparently.

Edit: a link to some campaign info released earlier in the year http://www.simhq.com/_air13/air_455a.html

http://www.simhq.com/_air13/images/air_455a_008t.jpg

http://www.simhq.com/_air13/images/air_455a_007t.jpg

http://www.simhq.com/_air13/images/air_455a_010t.jpg

I loved that one. I agree about the mission failure assesment.

As for the repetitive nature of the missions however, i think it's pretty accurate. There were certain planes for certain jobs and some gruppe/squads were also specializing in a certain field, so i guess it was that way for real pilots too. Plus, going against bombers mission after mission really gave you the immersive feeling of being just you and your wingmen against a continuous enemy onslaught, much like the real pilots would have felt after a while but without the combat fatigue and risk to life for us :-P

As someone else noted, it was also nice to see that loadouts and even drop tanks were subject to stock limitations.

I also have very fond memories of Secret weapons of the luftwaffe and Red Baron (my first two prop sims on my first ever PC), as well as Red Baron II/3D. Part of what happened in RB/RB2 is not very pertinent to a WW2 scenario (the whole knights in the sky affair with duel invitations, personal paint schemes and so on, it might have existed briefly but was largely gone by late 1940), but it's true that the small details like ambulances, the newspaper headlines or the church bells ringing as makeshift air-raid sirens when battles were raging over a village (RB2 also had doppler shift for sound, even back then) were awesome. Not to mention the animated mission debrief in RB2.

I think that combining features from RB/RB2 and EAW and giving them a bit of a facelift would produce an amazing result.Especially the massed bomber formations of EAW, i once had an intercept mission where i also called up reinforcements to deal with the heavy escort and ended up with close to 200 planes on screen at the same time.

That looks great, I hope SoW has something like that

Agree, I would actually be dissapointed if SoW campaign would be anything less than that. I mean, 6 years in development, if the SoW is anything like the old Dgen I would be very very very dissapointed, but I won't be becasue I know Oleg and team will delight us all :)