Will SoW be boring and superficial?

[Feathered_IV]

Another aspect that would greatly benefit offline play is a kind of Renown System. Something like what is available in Silent Hunter 3, which btw gracefully managed to avoid the corny CFS3 roleplaying element.

At the moment in the Il-2 series, you fly missions and get kills and rise up the ranks. But it is meaningless in any broader sense, other than whether you get to fly at the back of a formation, or whether you fly at the front. Your success or failure has no other significance.

What if as a neophyte pilot in SoW your aircraft is the war-weary crate that no one else wants?

What if as you gain experience and become an asset to the unit you get entrusted with a better aircraft? How would that be?

What about if you rise to the rank of Flight, or even Squadron Leader? Higher rank means higher responsibility. Perhaps the amount of work you would be expected to do in between missions will become even greater. You would need to manage your pilots and personnel. Allocate your flights, request replacements, and give commendations. Instead of just gawping at the briefing screen before a mission, what if you could actually issue orders to your pilots before the mission begins? You could assign your pilots objectives, waypoints, altitude and strategies. How would that suit you?

And what if you became an ace? A real experten? You would have your pick of the ground personnel. Your aircraft would be top of the line. Your renown would ensure that new aircraft and equipment would flow in. Requests for reassignment or replacements would be looked on favourably by Command. Experienced pilots would request transfers to your unit....

Honestly, am I reaching for the effing stars here???

[nearmiss]

Originally Posted by Feathered_IV

The Il-2 series is pretty. I have no doubt that SoW will be very pretty too. The weather will change. The AI will occaisionally sh*t their pants and the FM's will be great.

And we'll all go around, doing the same things as we are doing now. Just in a more detailed environment.

But really, don't you think there should be more to the future of air combat simulations than just cookie cutter dogfights and dropping a stick of bombs? Do you really just want to play the exact same pair of missions all over again for another five to ten years ?

What if other mission perameters were coded in? What other options could we get?

Maybe instead you'd like to pilot a Lysander for SOE. Fly over to France at zero altitude in the dead of night. Alone in the dark, you would struggle to find 'that little field' marked on your map and glide into it, engine off so as not to alert the Jerries.

Perhaps you'd rather fly a Storch, evacuating wounded from the combat area. Or maybe spotting for the artillery? What if you could give directions and targeting information to ground units?

What about unarmed photo recon? Take your Blenheim across to France to take photographs of the invasion barges. Photographs that the campaign generator can judge and pass you on.

Coastal Command perhaps? Why not have a crew that can actually call out the sightings of distant ships and other objects and give an intelligent description of their range, type and heading?

Or nightfighters with AI radar operators that can actually guide you to the kill?

Wouldn't you like to try to fly a danerously overloaded Ju-52 into the icy landing strips of Stalingrad one day? Or a C-47 over the Himalayas?


There has to be more to this genre than, fly to waypoint and shoot stuff down. Or fly to waypoint and drop some bombs. There has to be.

Do you want to have some fun?

You need to get the old MSFT CFS2 and work with the mission builder that is par excellence. You cannot imagine the things that can be done with a combat flight simulation game until you do.

There is also a very vibrant community of users for the CFS2 at http://sim-outhouse.com
Users are still building missions and campaigns, aircraft, scenery, skins for that great old sim.

There are of course a couple things that will never be fixed unless MSFT decides to either release the source or do an upgrade of the CFS2.

The CFS2 AI are just not competent, but there are workarounds. The scenery has limitations. The online game is no more, which is just as well it was so full of cheats. It is now possible to fly in any war theatre in the world as CFS2 includes all the war theatres.

You can still have an enormous good time, because the mission builder tools are absolutely awesome. You can build all kinds of situations for on-the-fly, navigation, etc. into your missions.

The Shockwave BOB II WOV with the new 2.07 patch has the best AI performance of any flight simulation game ever. Shockwave and the community devs have turned the old Rowan's bob into a significant combat flight simulation game. Currently, they are working on a Coop Online addition to the sim. This is great, because if you can fly with a squadron of real people against the awesome AI of BOB II you are going to be into almost real world scenarios. You'll get to fly against the largest mob of bombers and fighters you can imagine and be into some of the most immersive (close to actual) combat you can imagine.

Currently, the BOB II WOV has a campaign engine,which allows the player to jump into the battle at will or fly within the same squadron time and again. There is good flexibility for level of player participation. There are plans in the works for a competent mission builder, but they are too busy with a new addition to the sim now to build it.

The strength of Oleg's Il2 has always been the Online play. The current mission builder has been OK for building Online play missions, because the players on each side of the conflict are real people. AI performance doesn't have to be much, because the AI doesn't do that much in Online play.

If Oleg is finally going to really address the Offline game competently he has some tough competition. He will have to provide a mission builder equivalent to the MSFT CFS2 or Jane's WW2 Fighters, and he will have to spend some real effort to measure up to the Shockwave AI performance engine. I hope he will do it, because it would set the bar for Combat flight simulator games.

Don't get me wrong The IL2 series is still viable for players. I went back to the old MSFT CFS2 right before the Pacfic Fighters was released. I don't enjoy furr balls. I love building missions that recreate almost real world situations, how they would and did evolve during the war. I do the BOBII WOV for the best AI performance and boy does it improve your combat flight skills. It also supports 6DOF in TrackIR.

I hang around the IL2 boards and occassionally load up the IL2-1946 and do some flying and fighting. I still enjoy all the great replay features in IL2 and being able to go back over my flights to see what I did wrong,etc. I've bought all the IL2 series and still get a kick out of it, but not like I did for the first 3-4 years after it was released.

[bhunter2112]

I have read of Il2 being described as soulless. Maybe true. I remember flying a MCFS2 campaign many years ago where you have to protect transports leaving an island base. The transports were carrying wounded and were taking off. Then the zero's flew in.... a very immersive mission. A little text can really change your feelings about a mission.

I am hoping for a dynamic campaign with a variety of missions but I do believe that the core of the sim is dogfighting !

I am a major IL21946 fanboy but the scripted campaigns were horrible and the dynamic campaign text is mostly non immersive. I do not mind daily front patrols, I am interested in historical accuracy but put a little info in the mission description ! I make my own in the FMB to make up for this.

[nearmiss]

Originally Posted by bhunter2112

I have read of Il2 being described as soulless. Maybe true. I remember flying a MCFS2 campaign many years ago where you have to protect transports leaving an island base. The transports were carrying wounded and were taking off. Then the zero's flew in.... a very immersive mission. A little text can really change your feelings about a mission.

I am hoping for a dynamic campaign with a variety of missions but I do believe that the core of the sim is dogfighting !

I am a major IL21946 fanboy but the scripted campaigns were horrible and the dynamic campaign text is mostly non immersive. I do not mind daily front patrols, I am interested in historical accuracy but put a little info in the mission description ! I make my own in the FMB to make up for this.

There are so many things you cannot do with the IL2 FMB. One good example... Pokriskinin flew the P-39 against the Germans and was very successful, because he applied tactics. He would send in the P-40s to attack German Bombers, but he would stair step his P-39s at higher altitudes. Then when the German fighters came in each flight of P-39s would drop into the fight at different times with high energy levels against the German fighters. You cannot duplicate this in IL2, because all the AI aircraft will jump into the battle. Only the player and sometimes his wingman can be held out of the fight. The P-39s were very effective when proper tactics were applied, but in IL2 when all the fighters jump into the furrball the German fighters will always win.

When you build a mission to attack ground targets the AI will persist to attack until they are bingo or out of weapons. During the war fighters would rarely attack ground units more than once, because the odds of getting hit were very high if they persisted to attack. I've had missons where my entire flight and all other friendly flights were eventually destroyed by Flak. I couldn't do anything to prevent the suicide. LOL

There are nowhere near enough programming tools in the IL2 FMB to build anything close to for real combat. The FMB is fine for building a setting for Online missions, because you human players can be told to disengage and they will. You can apply any tactical play as well, because humans can receive and act on good instructions.

Of course, if you just jump into hyperlobby you'll just furrball unless you get involved with a squadron that has other goals.

[leitmotiv]

Excellent post F_IV. I noticed one of the new combat add-ons for FSX has: horrors! no fighters or bombers, but does have a Me 323, and a number of German gliders, and it is all war missions of various types. The FSX add-on with fighters is for WWI and also has a "height climber" zeppelin. Navigating a 1917 "height climber" mission at high altitude from Germany to London would require incredible skill. Just coping with the winds and the blackout would be enough (will the add-on black out city lights?).

I look forward to somebody having missions with night bombers flying from the UK to targets deep in Germany. Just dealing with weather and malfunctions (not to mention finding the target in 1939-42 without the better-trained navigators and technical aids which came in 1943) would be job enough. Right, a PBY patrol would be great. North Atlantic patrol in a Coastal Command Liberator or Fw 200 or Ju 290. Radar night fighters vs bombers would be a real challenge. How about flying the Hump in C-46, C-47, or gas tanker Liberator (the father of one of my friends flew one of these "Booms," as they called them)? If you run into a JAAF fighter, you had better have a plan! Ju 52 over Crete---what a mincing machine, C-47 over Normandy, how about flying a Horsa to land right by Pegasus Bridge? I would really like this. Land a German glider on top of Eben Emael. Flying patrols out of the Aleutians---the worst flying weather in the world. Fly an Oboe equipped Mosquito precisely to drop target markers over a city. Fly an X Gerat-fitted Heinkel 111H to put incendiaries or bombs on targets covered by overcast. These would move the system away from gaming to being a real flight simulator. You would get a real education in how the systems of WWII aircraft worked.

There has to be more flying and less routine cookie cutter arcade brawling.

[robtek]

@leitmotiv
youve brought it on the point for me.
thats what i would really love.
to be a good pilot with all the handicaps those obsolete technik has,
that would be the real challenge in this game.
and that includes of course real CEM.

[Ratsack]

I'd particularly like to see the night fighters modeled with AI that works. Even more, I'd like the multiplayer code set up so two players can crew the same plane. This would be great for bombers like the Ju 87, and for planes like the Defiant and Me 110. It would also make the night fighter experience really cool.

cheers,
Ratsack

[csThor]

I hadn't followed this thread but now that I've re-read the initial post I started thinking. And actually I think there are a few issues that may cause some disappointment.

I've played Il-2 since the initial demo came out and I've had contact with Oleg for even longer. All this time has formed a picture of the team "Maddox Games" in my head - and that picture is not all nice and cosy when it comes to inspiring gameplay. To me Maddox Games seems to consist mostly of "engineer developers" and not "gamer developers" as they seem to approach the problems of a combat flight simulation from the purely technical POV. They're going to great lenghts to simulate aircraft, weapons and flight but they never seemed to put any ressources into advancing the gameplay, to allow for a broader and more versatile mission base. Even DGen was an external development and so it had to deal with not being an integral part of the game's engine. Oleg himself said more than once that he has no use for dynamic campaigns and greatly prefers hand-made static campaigns because of their greater accuracy and to some degree he was right.

The problem of this POV is that seems to be diametrically opposed to what his target audience in "the West" thinks. I am not sure if I'm merely rehashing old stereotypes, but there seems to be the tendency within russian (or eastern european) development teams to go for the minimalist approach regarding gameplay. The hardware they want to simulate was often displayed in great accuracy and detail, but the gameplay part - the single missions, the campaigns, the online modes etc - always seemed to lack the same amount of enthusiasm and thoroughness. Is that the result of a drastically different POV in the russian simulation community? Or do the russian developers really think that simmers are satisfied just with well-simulated aircraft?
I mean what made the "great sims of the past" so great? Aces over Europe, Aces of the Pacific, EAW, Red Baron ... They're not even remotely comparable to what modern sims could achieve (tech-wise), but they have earned their special place in our hearts because they had immersive and capturing gameplay!

Maybe I'm doing Oleg and his team a disservice, but I think they should really take a look at the "blockbuster sims" of the past and why they had the following they had. If the russian market is content with just a fundament for dogfights and making missions so be it. I, however, know that there's more to a good combat flight sim than just a perfect FM/DM and astonishing visual effects. It has to have an offline campaign that does not rely on aftermarket products to be immersive and it needs to "weave a net" that captures the player's imagination. My 0,02 € ...

[Blackdog_kt]

I pretty much agree on the analysis about some of the older sims mentioned. I still remember Red Baron 1 and 2, Secret weapons of the luftwafe, aces of the pacific, aces over europe, etc.

For me, the best sim would be a hybrid between IL2 and European Air War. If you can combine the FM/DM/graphics from IL2 and the immersion factor from EAW, you'll have a real blockbuster on your hands. EAW is an old game by today's standards but it has a lot of things i'd like to see in a future project from Oleg.

First of all, the AI actually follows orders, complex orders. There was a very detailed method of controlling your wingmen to make concentrated attacks before breaking off, by use of the "rejoin" command. If you issued a disengage command they would do that and join up with you. However, rejoin tells them to stay in formation but not disengage. Which means that if you issue an order to attack bombers and then immediately tell them to rejoin, your wingmen will stay in formation while you circle around those bombers and they will attack whatever the formation's course presents them with. Ie, you can make head on attacks against a group of 36 bombers with as many as 12 planes in your flight in EAW.

Another thing is the menu graphics in most of the old sims. For example, there was a briefing room/tent with the map, then you clicked somewhere on the edge of the screen to go to the hangar where you could see some planes being prepared, then exit the hangar to fly. These don't even have to be real 3D images, just some static screens showing representative areas in an airfield. The top aces chalkboard in Red Baron, the Dora running engine checks in the background in EAW, your squadron roster showing your AI wingmen's kills and who is missing/killed/captured, all of these things add a lot to making you feel you are actually there and not in front of a computer monitor in your room.

Another thing is the ability to have random encounters with air and ground targets. This could be done by giving the FMB a series of parameters that it can then randomise. For example, scripting a 30% chance that a flight of 109s will spawn 10kms from you and bounce your escort group on the way home. Or even better, they spawn on the ground at a suitable airfield while you are heading in, they set up CAP under instruction from German ground control and wait for you to turn for home before attacking you. All in all, a detailed AI will open up more options for tactical variety.

[Tata]

Very good posts of csThor and Blackdog
+10