First of all, retract your flaps after you take off and have gained some speed and altitude. The combat setting of flaps is meant to help you in turns during fights, if you keep them at the combat setting during cruise they will only slow you down.
Second, the artificial intellience (AI for short from now on) pilots in IL2 always fly in perfect trim and are immune to overheating, so they are able to run their aircraft at a higher performance than a human player. This is of course annoying, but it's also something that you can account for with some experience.
For starters, you can try taking off in closer intervals than the AI pilots do in order to limit the initial separation between you and your wingmen. If the AI pilots wait until the plane before them is 600 meters away before starting their take off, you could try starting your take off run when the AI plane in front of you is a mere 100-200 meters away. I find that this helps the most in managing to join the formation in a reasonable time frame.
There's also another thing you can try if the flight plan features a circruit over the home airfield to gain altitude. As your flight is circling the field, you try to intercept your wingmen by pointing your nose in such a way that you don't follow them, but lead their projected route. Usually, climbing circuits take the form of 3 waypoints forming a triangle around your airfield.You could try flying to a point between the first and second waypoint, or skipping the first one altogether and flying directly to the second one.
Use the ingame map to help you with that. When i fly online i fly on full difficulty servers, but when flying offline i keep some of the help functions enabled because the AI is flying unrealistically perfect. So, you could enable showing the flight plan and the position of your plane and other planes on the minimap, in order to judge how much you need to lead your wingmen to join the formation.
As the AI pilots follow the flight plan to the letter, by skipping a waypoint you will be ahead of them and in a position to join the formation easily. Once they settle into cruise speed it's not a big deal to keep up with them. The difficult part is keeping up with them during the initial take off and form up sequence.
As for engine management, it's a very large topic. What i'm going to tell you works in the game but it's contrary to what works in real life. This might be a very realistic simulator, but it's also 10 years old and some things are wrong or simplified. In the game, overheat is mainly a function of RPM. You control RPM through propeller pitch, a higher prop pitch % value means higher RPM, more power and more heat. A lower prop pitch % value means lower RPM, less power and less heat. So, in many planes you can run the throttle at more than 100% and not overheat, simply by reducing prop pitch. For example, i fly FW-190s at 100% throttle plus WEP (war emergency power enabled) but i don't overheat because i use 80% prop pitch most of the time in level flight. I use less than 80% in dives and 90-100% in climbs or when i need a lot of power, but if all goes well i don't have to keep it there and i don't overheat for long. These values vary between different aircraft, so experiment in the quick mission builder to find what suits your chosen ride well. Another thing you could do is google some operating limit manuals for the plane you want to fly and use the values for manifold pressure (throttle) and RPM (prop pitch) provided there. This works well and is also more authentic.
Also, an overheat won't outright kill your engine. In reality, engine damage accumulates over time with rough handling. In the game, the engine dies only if you stay on overheat for 5 minutes. So, you can work your engine to overheat and then cool it for a few seconds by cutting the throttle and opening the radiators briefly, this will reset the 5 minute timer and your engine will be as good as new, ready to be pushed into overheat again as needs dictate.
This is not the optimal way to fly and doing that kind of stuff with a real engine would break it in no time. However, when faced with AI that manage their aircraft perfectly and don't overheat i think that the human player is justified in "gaming the game" a little bit.
As for ammunition load outs, this depends on the aircraft you fly. Some aircraft have machine guns, some cannons and some a mix of both. In some aircraft all weapons are fired by the first joystick trigger, in others half of the weapons are fired with the first joystick trigger and the rest with the second joystick trigger. That means you could be flying an aircraft where the trigger activates 8 machine guns at once, or 4 cannons at once, or only 2 machine guns and you need to press the secondary trigger to fire the rest of the guns. Again, pick a plane, set up some friendlies in the quick mission builder (so that they don't shoot back) and use them as target drones to see what happens.
I hope this helps. The learning curve might be a bit steep with some things, but if you take your time and try to enjoy yourself learning from your mistakes instead of expecting to win every time you'll be doing pretty well in no time.
|