"How was I ever entertained by that?" -- As a single player game il-2 46 taught me (and most people I suspect) a ton about WW2 aircraft, particularly minor aircraft, and gave me a 'hands-on' experience with some of the flight characteristics of the aircraft; maybe not real experience of those characteristics but in comparison to other aircraft. So, (and I'm curious of course to see how this match up plays in Combat Pilot), the F4F turned like a pig but it could take damage and had a great roll rate and could out-dive the zeros. The zero's were freaking amazing in a turn fights but couldn't dive and were made of paper and were easy to burn. In the european theatre... Spitfires were simply iconically great (and would eat zeros alive when transported ahistorically into the pacific... no idea if that's right) Me109s were tricky pigs. You earned your victories in them. FW190s very different model to model but were classic boom and zoom planes. There were some questionable FMs to be sure. The P51 seems to have been despised by the russian developer. How else to explain it's horrible performance? How accurate were the flight models, 'really'? I don't know. But il-2 was the first game I had ever encountered that actually simulated aerial gunnery. This was absolutely eye-opening for someone raised on arcade-style plane shooters... holy crap, you suddenly understood aerial gunnery is <hard> and the guy who could fly acrobatics wasn't nearly as dangerous as the guy who could hit what his was aiming at. With the unlimited ammo setting "off" it was hard to score a single machine gun kill at first. And all that said, as a single player it got old fast. Il-2 Single player was <meh>. What made il-2 an experience I will never forget was the mulitplayer community. This was before Steam had conquered the pc-gamerverse, and il2 was played on Hyperlobby. There were game modes for everyone, but the passionate playerbase was committed to flying "full real" -- meaning no gamey icons or vision lock-ons or unlimited ammo or assists of anykind etc. And the full real communtiy grew and squads formed and then some really crazy A+ guys developed a way of creating a persistent (these games lasted months) WWII ground battle campaigns in which our squadrons would fight an air war that influenced the war on the ground. This was competitive, allies vs axis. I recall a Soviets vs Crimean campaign, and a post DD France campaign... particularly vividly. Hyperlobby and il-2 supported 100 planes in the air, too, the campaigns took place over a huge map. Everyone was on coms with a chain of command... flight leader getting missions from the central hub. You got ONE life to fly with on a game evening, and if you died, your stats, your kill streak, died with you. You would scout for enemy, call out contacts, bring in help on coms, improvise and ride to someone's rescue... Your team had limited planes, especially front line fighters, you didn't want to run out or you'd be flying trainers into battle. So you <did not> bail out if you could avoid it. And limping a wounded plane back to base and safely on the ground was its own kind of heroics. Hyperlobby and the <<<amazing freaking community-developed game that arose organically in it>> made il 2 something very very special. Of course there are now some massively multiplayer war games playable on the net and that's ok, but they are all a bit arcadey afaik ... but hyperlobby il-2 hit a home run because the hardcore combat flight simmers there weren't concerned with needing return on investment by satisfying the casual customer, they were bent on squeezing every possible drop of realism out of what was available in the il-2 game. It made for WWII flight-sim gamer heaven. In my RL Parenthood had me dropping out of flight-simming just as il-2 transitioned into Steam based and Cliffs of Dover and Battle of Stalingrad etc. So I have no experience with those... they were sure advancements in the flight sim, but I'd be amazed (and jealous of what I missed) if they had anything like that persistent hyperlobby campaign thing going.
**edit** LOL. Either because the server was slow or it was my first post or user error... but the OP I replied to is NOT the actual OP of this thread... thus my rather long-winded reply -- I thought the topic was il2 46 and it's issues/benefits. *sigh* oh me...
