Mitsubishi Stuka and Thunderbolt

[horseback]

The realism isn't sometimes in history, but it is in trying to reproduce the danger of a war situation.

I agree with most of what has been said by Horseback, however, historcally, nothing flying was easy meat for a WW2 pilot (unless he was a great ace), and this must be represented in game, with AI skill improving with years (BTW that's why i'm not really happy with fighter AI ace aiming in 4.12, it was so much better in the previous patch).

Bomber defensive fire during WW2 were as described by Horseback, but still the majority of fighter pilots weren't ace and did not even have a single kill.
We cannot pretend we are in WW2 when we run IL2. A sim, has to make us feel the danger of a combat situation: IL2 does this well and still we have the confortable choice to decide whether we take the risk or not.

Compared to the real WW2 combats, what we have in IL2 is immensely easier.

I agree with several points you make, but I’d go about increasing difficulty differently. The original explanation for the gunners' unGodly accuracy and range was 'scale'; there was a fairly small limit on how many aircraft you could put into a mission without overtaxing your computer and crashing to the desktop, so every aircraft and gunner had to 'stand for' four or five (or ten) other aircraft. That excuse is no longer valid.

Hitting other aircraft was more difficult in real life; turbulence, prop wash, wing flex, guns jamming, mechanical aborts or (shockingly often) the pilot forgetting to unsafe his guns. How about the need to change the bulbs in your gunsight in the middle of a dogfight? Finding the enemy was the greatest problem by far; unless he came to you in huge numbers and you were directed to him by Ground Control, chances of actually seeing and engaging enemy aircraft were exceedingly low. Even with radar direction, finding them in any kind of cloud cover was often a matter of luck; early systems couldn't give you accurate altitude information.

Making the enemy rare would lead to people leaving the game in droves, as would most of the other stuff I mentioned. We play for the combat ‘experience’, or what we imagine it to be; for the offline player, at least, using the actual tactics the aces used should almost always be successful. They are not.

If you are flying a USAAF fighter campaign in Europe, your primary natural prey is not single engine fighters, but the twin engine zerstörers, whose rear gunners were practically useless at their guns at those speeds and altitudes; their primary value was as an extra set of eyes. In this game, they are the most dangerous opponents you can encounter and the rear gunner’s twin 7.9mm guns are several orders of magnitude more dangerous than the two cannon in the nose. At any range or angle, it is usually safer to take on four Ace FW 190A-9s than it is to approach one Rookie Me-110G from the rear...

In that sort of situation, the frustration factor is huge. You know that you are doing everything exactly right, and you are still getting hammered. Ultimately, you put the game away and move on to something else, at least for a while. I would expect that the game loses at least ten offliners for every online player every year—and it is almost certainly the grotesque accuracy of the ai gunners that is the main cause. I’ve taken at least four ‘breaks’ of eight or ten months over the last 12 years, but I have come back. How many don’t return, ever?

The attraction of the online game is not re-creation of the actual air war but the competition; since the ai gunners are a relatively minor factor in that environment, the guys who want to fly bombers want the extra protection factor of the ai gunners' accuracy, since they will be found by the opposing fighters.

The off-liner looks for immersion; let's define that as a temporary escape into someplace else--we might as well call it a role playing game as much as a 'shooter'. In that context, you want things to work consistently according to the historic rules you know, and in those theaters where the enemy came to you, the individual good & aggressive pilots consistently scored heavily, even when they were flying technically inferior aircraft (see Finland, the Battle of Germany, the Battle of Britain, Malta and Guadalcanal for examples). Bombers and multipassenger aircraft were 'easy meat', most definitely including the 'heavy fighters', regardless of the number of defensive guns they carried, because of the limitations of human accuracy at any range or angle with hand fired automatic weapons and their lack of ability to maneuver or run away.

At the very least, the offliner should have a 'Full Real' option for the defensive gunners, to implement the changes I've suggested in whole or in part. Making the fighter to bomber contest disproportionately difficult is neither competitive nor realistic for a WWII fighter oriented simulation.

cheers

horseback