Pacific Fighters Bombed - inadequate maps

[Former_Older]

Originally Posted by nearmiss

Funny thing is.. if you read some of the accounts of real pilots during the war many trimmed their aircraft carefully and took a nap on long flights. Pappy Boyingtion mentioned it in Baa Baa Black Sheep as I recall.

Yes

He rigged the stick with rubber bands, as well. According to Boyington's ifirst hand account he did this often

[Golf Pro]

nearmiss - I wasn't making any reference to modders or mapmakers.

I suppose I was thinking about the original PF as a commercial product. IL2 was kind of configured around Eastern Front/European air wars, where generally well-matched opponents used tactical air power to influence the outcome of battles and the positions of the front line. Battles like Stalingrad and Kursk went on for months, or in the case of Leningrad, years.

There are maybe 3 or 4 scenarios in the Pacific where this kind of air war prevailed (sort of): New Guinea & The Solomons (as mentioned by Tater), The Philippines and the early CBI, and even these became walkovers by 1944. Okinawa is an interesting sustained air battle, but of little tactical consequence to what happened on the ground.

So you could replicate these with the right maps, but they are self-contained actions with hardly any crossover i.e. Whereas a Russian pilot could go from Lvov to Smolensk to Moscow to Kursk to Kiev etc., an American pilot in New Guinea generally stayed there.

Also, when most people think of the Pacific war, they think of the classic carrier actions and Cats Vs. Zero's. I think that's what would have attracted most people to PF, but most of the great Pacific air battles lasted 2-3 days max. You could do an F6F campaign with all the major air actions in about 10 missions. If you wanted a sustained F6F campaign you'd need a map for pretty much every atoll in the pacific, each of which would be good for 1 or 2 missions. And even then, you'd just be peppering runways and destroying sheds and outhouses.

I dunno, I can see 1C's problem with PF - the main attraction (carrier ops with classic dogfighters) doesn't suit IL2's basic configuration, whereas the sustained land battles that do suit it (SWPA, CBI etc.) are more obscure, less glamorous and less likely to pull in large numbers of punters.