Regarding the whole mixture and engine management discussion... Personally I don't care much for all those features since I fly almost exclusively offline and since the AI cheats in that matter I often fly with complex engine management off. However, I think that adding any new features to the sim is basically a bad idea. The main focus should be fixing what is broken at this point. I recently played the old Forgotten Battles (1.02 version I think) and it seemed like the most polished version of Il-2 I can think off. The AI does not do any dumb barrel rolls as soon as you get within firing range, the P-47 does not go supersonic (fall apart at around 850 km/h), the AI does not outrun faster planes and basically the whole experience seemed deprived of any bugs that you can encounter with 1946 version.
I get the impression that the game began to get broken with Pacific Fighters - it was an incomplete addon IMO (lack of planes and ships, boring missions etc) and started a trend for the series when adding new stuff seemed to be more important than polishing what was already there. The last patch took quite long to develop and though it has some awesome features, the bug list it introduced is quite large.
So, please Dear Developers, focus on bug fixes rather than adding new planes and options. The AI needs some serious work, especially with new bombing procedures and such. Let's face it Il-2 is an old game and CoD is coming out in 2 months time (hopefully) - the best thing to do is to bring Sturmovik to bug-free state. Sure, the game still has huge potential, but maybe exploring this potential should be left to modders and official developers would be better off with just fixing this game once and for all.
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