Definitely impossible to change difficulty of an underway campaign?

[Drozdov]

I've been searching and I haven't found much of an encouraging answer but I'm desperate enough to ask here, just in case one's out there somewhere. Here's the situation: I've a relatively old 'vanilla' IL2 dynamic campaign on the go in which I've flown around a hundred missions (Sturmovik campaign, beginning in L'vov). The difficulty was set to realistic. All was well and good until I installed the latest patches (going from 4.08m-4.101m).

It's working fine, but they introduced some new difficulty settings which my pre-existing campaign had no setting for, things such as Reliability (whatever that is), G-force limitations, and a bunch of stuff relating to the map icons and navigation. The result is that now, when I load my campaign, I can see my plane's icon on the map, whereas before I had no map icons and had to navigate for myself. It may sound trivial, but it kills a fair part of the fun when there's no danger of getting lost and I don't have to do any navigation. It's not like I can just ignore it either since it's obvious where I am as soon as I bring the map up.

I've looked at all relevant files which could be fiddled with that I can think of. Nothing in the DGen or Missions\Campaign... folders relating to my campaign (or any other for that matter) have anything to set the difficulty (not the .dat files or the .ini files). As for my user folder, the settings.ini has a difficulty setting but that only applies to new missions and campaigns and doesn't affect the old. The most likely candidate seems to be the campaigns.ini file in my pilot's User folder, but that's nothing but gibberish. All it has are several lines of this kind of stuff: ꫰୤鴎ᫍ㢌镆뢬⺚䆙ᔎ. I'd say it could be Cyrillic since that's what non-Latin character sets can look like if you don't have the font, but if it is then there are no numbers there (except a couple of 4s on their own), and the difficulty setting is a numerical value judging by the user settings.ini.

Has anyone managed this? I don't want to start a new Sturmovik campaign after so long.

[K_Freddie]

There always has been no way to change the difficulty settings of a campaign, once underway. I don't think campaigns are compatible with patch upgrades either.

I'm not sure whether the MODs have a work-around, but for the time being I think you're stumped.

[jameson]

You won't like this, but I'm fairly sure that if you uninstall the game it will leave your career settings, skins and various other bits in the il2 game folder. If you have space on your harddrive you could copy your current game elsewhere and try it!
Otherwise, if you have another computer, you could install 4.07 from the dvd, play 2 or 3 missions of a campaign then uninstall and see what's left, to confirm this idea. A long shot, but maybe your only solution, if it works you could reinstall into the original folder and patch up to where you were.
Interestingly I've been playing the stock 109 campaign, (Army Group Centre), in 4.07 and the same missions in 4.10.1 and they aren't the same, similar kind of thing but completely different targets and locations on the same Lvov map. I have no explanation for this. Hope this idea helps.

[bladeracer]

Do you have backups of the campaign from before you installed the patches?
Why not install a second version of IL2, patch it up to 4.08 or 4.09 and copy your campaign into that.
I agree it would be annoying, but after 100+ missions why not just consider the map icon acceptable due to improved navigation and/or radio technology?

[EJGr.Ost_Caspar]

We have track of this thread and we will investigate the problem. Currently, we don't know, if we can help. Just wanted to inform.

[Drozdov]

Glad to hear the team are taking notice. I think you should allow difficulty changes during a campaign without any limitations, though that might not be so easy to allow if the whole game isn't designed to do it. Yes, some people might prefer not to have the temptation of lowering the difficulty, but in general it causes more trouble than it's worth.

I did make back-ups of the campaign before patching (think I have all the right bits). Reinstalling and reverting is obviously an option but I'd like to use some of the new patch features (really like that you can now have the proper mission flight path on your map without also having plane icons, it's much more sensible and realistic).