We should enumerate the theatres we are most interested in and then making a poll to show the devs what expansion packs their customers would be most willing to pay for.

I would personally be most interested in a Pacific expansion pack with carrier operation (spotting and unspotting aircraft, for instance, so we could have proper day-long engagements, scouting patrols, etc etc), and quite a few of the planes. Who knows, maybe even an Early Pacific and Late Pacific, as long as the number of airplanes is adequate for both.

I understand the next expansion is the Eastern Front, which I really don't find very interesting.

There'd also be North Africa, perhaps including Mediterranean...

What else?

100% no

was done long time ago.
MTO won by far.................the next seems to be Eastern Front, so, go figure.

The Med is still not unlikely. Why would they go to the trouble of modeling Italian aircraft for BoB (they were there, but they weren't a big part of it), if they weren't going to use them in a future theater?

I think that both the eastern front and the Korean expansions are put on hold while the game's engine is being improved, but the initial plan was for Korea and battle of Moscow to be "subcontracted" to another studio and Maddox Games to work on BoB and the Med. Some of these studios might share know-how and even staff members, but they would still be separate design teams (just like certain IL2 expansions were made by Luthier's team in the past).

With Oleg leaving and Luthier taking up MG too i don' know how the restructuring will affect things, but in the long term i think their aim would be similar: get a stable engine as a foundation to get other developers interested and worth their time to work on, then have them work on one thing while the main team works on something else or just core engine improvements.

In any case, they simply can't ignore their Russian/Ukrainian/CIS states fanbase and it's not just a matter of sales alone. They get a lot more meaningful interaction there, both due to the lack of a language barrier and due to the fact that the Russian community are willing to get their hands dirty and provide content for all of us.

If you take a look around, you'll see that many of the earliest or most active posters in terms of user-made missions/campaigns and use of scripting are from the eastern European community. Giving them a theater of their interest to further encourage them to remain involved makes sense in many ways and would also benefit the rest of us, because these guys over there are the ones who mostly get to grips with the technical side of what the sim can really do for us all in the long term.

Anyway, i think the Med would be a much less daunting task once the basic foundation exists, simply because a lot of flyables can be carried over to that theater with a new paintjob, a few extra polygons on the model for the sand filters and a new map (mostly featureless too) to fly over, so i remain optimistic about it :D

The cool part of the Med is that there is a lot of content to offer/sell. Maps of North Africa, Italy/Sicily/Malta, even Greece , and the area saw action for the bulk of the war so there would be a lot of aircraft.

Of course I do have to say I have a soft spot for the Eastern front, I found the Eastern front maps from the old IL2 series to be very immersive and great for campaigns (takes me back to the days of VEF). Also great planes on both sides (especially by early 43) and a ton of tactical employment of airpower.

I think between the Med and the Eastern front theaters there could be content to produce and sell for years, they could easily do two expansions for each.

JD
AKA_MattE

NO, the cool part about the Med is the Curtiss P40.

:cool:

Med and pacific would be awesome, for the med north africa is a definitely tempting thing to me, nice change of scenery and well, the pacific with carrier operations....oh yeah :grin: