Will SoW be boring and superficial?

[Bearcat]

Good points all.. but I think we may see a lot of that with BoB.. If I am not mistaken there will be triggers in it... That alone would make for interesting missions.. especially if you could proggram in a certain amount of randomness... even in QMs. I also thik that to implement the recon photo option... and for it to really work well.. we would need to be able to pull up a brief... like the map now... and perhaps the recon photos could be limited to a certain size and be stored in a separate place within the mission files.. much like each individual mission map is called up. It is certainly doable... Didnt F117 Night Hawk have recon photos in it? I sem to remember that..

[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???

[tater]

Actually, a cool recon idea would be to have a recon plane loadout possible. Then a recon missio type where you are assigned a target. You fly passes, and the "weapon" takes images at the same time it "shoots" targets visible in the swath. The game could then count the number of units "hit" with the invisible camera bullets, and present that information on the next briefing. Useful for online war type play.

[csThor]

IMO a "recon loadout" is not really the way to go as the aircraft assigned to recon units were often specially designed for the job and/or had special equipment on board. IMO creating both close-range (tactical) and long-range (strategical) recon aircraft variants for player use would be much more realisc. Anyone fancy artillery direction while flying a Hs-126 over the front?

[tater]

Yes, obviously purpose modified planes would be prefered where appropriate. I didn't mean putting it on any plane, but for the guys who build the actual planes. They make it look like an F-5 instead of a P-38, then to make it function as a recon plane, they add the "recon weapon" loadout to it.

So I wasn;t trying to imply that any plane would be a recon plane with a mouse click, simply that such a loadout would exist in the toolkit for people building the actual aircraft.

That said, I seem to recall spitfires with cameras behind the cockpit shooting laterally. That would be an easy "loadout" type change, perhaps.

[csThor]

I'm wary of "crutches" like that as they tend to become the end-result. I'd prefer a solid and historical representation.

[tater]

Excuse me?

What is the crutch, exactly? I suppose then having a Hispano-Suiza gun as a unit to be placed into the functionality of a plane is a "crutch." Instead, every plane built for SOW should force the guy making that plane to have to make an entirely unique engine, weapon system, etc., instead of reusing them like IL-2 does.

That's a "loadout."

Everything in the game is just a piece of code, pointed to someplace. A plane looks like a fighter, and functions like one because it has an engine pointed to in the fmd file. Planes with the same engine share the same emd (engine) file. Guess that's a "crutch."

If you want proper recon missions for things like online wars, you need a camera "weapon." The game actually has LOS (trees, buildings, etc have a collider), so you can easily make a weapon that shoots like a shotgun—if the plane used lateral cameras, the "gun" would be pointed in the right direction, with the spread pattern of the "shotgun" matching the FOV of the camera. Any targets (side based) that are hit by the invisible shotgun get marked on a map the game keeps internally. It can then use this to generate follow up missions.

DCG uses road networks and abstracted forces to move the front along, this is a similar tool, but creates the possibility for player interaction in the recon process.

Inability to "think outside the box" is the primary reason we have stale content.

Building a perfect replica plane isn't enough.

People who work on this stuff should take a break from computer games and play old wargames for a while. There is much goodness there to borrow.

[csThor]

You misunderstand me. Most of the aircraft configured for the recon role were permanently equipped as recon. What I mean is not to have a "recon loadout" but dedicated recon aircraft types - so not just a P-38 with cams but a F-5 and no Ju 88 A flying as recon but a Ju 88 D. Doing it "right" would certainly force the developer to think things through - including spending brain time on how to incorporate recon missions into gameplay

[tater]

My appologies, I thought I made it clear that dedicated recon types would be prefered. If a given plane only became a recon platform via replacing one or more weapons with a camera, with no real changes, the sticking the camera in as a load would be fine.

I'm sure bombers were used this way in the SWPA since they were short on planes. They'd stick a camera up in the glazed front of a B-17 and take pictures. If there were fighyters so modified, then cut a new window behind the cockpit and add the camera load (if they knew that was a variant, they could make the figher with the camera hole waiting, then create the recon variant by opening the hole, sticking the camera in, and dumping ammo/guns as needed.

[I/ZG52_Gaga]

These voices of agony are definitely justified.

I strongly believe that we are hostage to the wishes of the trigger happy bunch that is single minded and obsessed with shooting at something and watch it blow.

It's very sad that this regime of halfwits is the the main stream that decides for the rest of the virtual pilots that want & need more than riding the fastest AC & shoot at something without this helping them to solve their real life "Shortcomings" if you know what I mean ......

We definitely need and expect more than just overmodeled Allied AC and undermodeled Axis AC to make a game interesting....