Ground unit damage models, and in the case of ship, AI, needs to be FAR superior to Il-2 to help maintain interest. As long as players can fly bomber/attack aircraft, this is the case since their primary targets will be mere cartoons otherwise. Take ship attack in il-2. It's
boring knowing that you can always sink a DD in one pass with a fighter as long as it carries a big bomb. The DD never evades, the bomb ALWAYS sinks the ship.
Mission builders should be given more control of the AI, too, since in campaigns, AI oddities ruin immersion. Ie: in RL, an airfield attack for minimum alt B-25s would be come in, line abreast. At max range, open fire with the MGs—no particular targets, kick the rudder a little and spray unless a target is right in front of you. Get over target, drop parafrags (207 of them, not 40
). Egress target area and head home.
In il-2, they'd not shoot on ingress to target. They'd drop their parafrags (though since they form line astern, the rear planes must climb to avoid the lead ones, and by the 3d plane they are barrel rolling while they drop). They'd then turn around and come back and strafe. A mission that should be one pass with minimal losses will likely result in the squadron being nearly wiped out. Not immersive.
Mission/campaign builders need a handle to control the AI. They need the ability to tell the AI to make "1 pass only." They need to be able to tell the AI to fly and attack within certain parameters even if the AI doesn't like it. Ie: a radio button for a given waypoint that says "ignore AI safety" and the planes do as they are told, even if the AI thinks it is too dangerous (like flying at 15m alt and dropping a 500lb bomb). Ideally, assuming the AI code has various variables that are tweaked by 1C to get them to behave in a desired way, those values should be available in a config file, perhaps one that is mission specific. You might design a campaign where for the good of the campaign, the min alt that the AI considers safe is 5m, but for another over some very hilly terrain, you might set it to 140m (current in il-2 I think from testing b-25 skip bombers).
tater