New to IL2 on PS3: looking for tips

[Rhino_WJB]

Hi,

I am a new player to IL2 on PS3, and cannot explain why I only just bought IL2!

As my previous experience is with PC sims (I was a member of the Free-Birds Wing for a while and spent most of my time in Falcon 4.0), I was hoping for a few tips to help me keep IL2 as realistic as possible. With the premise that I fly in Simulation mode, here are my questions:

1. How do you manage to keep eyes on target without padlock and the mega sensitive free-look camera? I have free-look on my right stick, but can never keep it steady enough to first pick then track a target. I find it easier to keep swicthing to Tactical Map to find the general position of the enemy, which is just not realistic.

2. Is there any easy way to pick out enemy planes and not go chasing after a friendly by mistake? Common threads for identification would help.

3. I am using a DS2 pad with custom keymap and Sony bluetooth pad-keyboard with a few keys mapped to that (IL2 supporting keyboards on PS3 just rocks!), Sometimes, after a mission where there is a Secondary option or when prompted to press "X" say, the game does not accept the input. Is this a common bug?

4. What is the best way to stop your plane following a landing? Does reducing the throttle to 0 activate the brake? There is no wheel-brake key so far as I know. Is it a case of just hold Reduce Throttle, or release then press again? I'm confused about this.

I would enjoy a free-roam, but this doesn't look like an option (unless you set the training parameters to fudge it).

I'm sure there will be plenty of other questions, but for now my main problem is free-look cockpit camera: just seems to hard to control :-/

Any advice on these points would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,

"Rhino"