Newbie with some questions

[wayreth]

Hello everyone. I'm a newcomer to IL2 with a couple of questions for all the veterans out there

1. How to set up water effects to the max?
I've read the manual and foruns and found out that I must set "water" value to 3 on the config.ini file. I've done that, but no joy. I've also set the shaders to 1 but the results are the same. I've changed between DirectX and OpenGL but the water remains "flat". Could you please point me in the right direction? I'd appreciate if you could perhaps post the correct settings for the .ini file. Alternatively, perhaps there's a good mod for water effects?
I´m running Windows 7 on a HD 5770.

2. Is there a newbie guide? Or a newbie thread?
The tutorial videos are nice, but they aren't really helpful for the dynamic campaigns.

I apologize if my questions have already been answered on other threads.

Cheers.