You could throw money at them all day long and they still would not have the time to make the AIs flyable.

I'm starting to see the problem with flight sims and our constantly demanding higher and higher levels of realism. The difficulty of producing these far more detailed models/FMs/DMs/weather/etc... is exponentially greater than in IL2.

However, the fan base is no bigger, and in fact it is smaller because I know lots of players who just want to fly and have fun and are very put off by the difficulty of just getting off the ground in the current sim.

So, we have reached a crossroads in combat flight simulation.

1. We continue on the current path of higher and higher realism, which means smaller and smaller numbers of aircraft and players. (A study sim).

or...

2. We settle for a lower level of realism that enables a developer to give us more fleshed out plane sets, more maps, more everything, and hence more players that pay the bills. In essence what IL2 was and is.

Tough choice isn't it?

The RoF model wont work here as WW2 aircraft, campaign maps, equipment, near trans sonic FMs, weapons of all kinds, are simply far more complex to make than the wonderful, yet very basic kites of WW1.

I disagree with much of what you say, and you are in danger (with your negative views) of swaying the mouth that feeds us to your pessimistic view ... IMHO

You are making impossible comparisons of your opinion and stating them like fact ... end of story ... that's just wrong.

There are many reasons IL2 was not a drop dead success and one of them was it never ran too well on the old school IL2 players PC's ... I know this for a fact, one of my friends whom is an old school IL2 player of online but not necessarily a totally computer literate person, never understood any need to upgrade his PC he spent thousand for the original IL2, he seriously expected IL2 CoD to play as it were with the original screenshots on his old rig as smooth as butter ... I blame the Consoles for this expectation as much as anything.

At some point, we all have to upgrade our PC's to keep up ... we'll moan and complain of course, but that's the way of it, its always been that way.

Bottom line, if you want a new State of the art PC Flight sim to run well, with all the bells and whistles, it aint going to happen on your old rig that can run Crysis very well ... invalid argument.

Now I'm not saying IL2 CoD is state of the art, but its what we have for this theater and we might get more out of it by being a bit more supportive.

If I were a developer catering to a minority fraction like us and saw all the abuse hurled their way ... I'd be inclined to take my developing skills elsewhere too, to make more money.

Some of you enthusiasts should think before you type or demand.

And yes YES, RoF is a massive success, its constantly evolving and hard core Flight Sim enthusiasts are helping by buying new Aircraft .. even those that choose not to buy are benefiting from the constantly improving AI, effects and theaters.

There is just no pleasing some people.

Also, there is nothing more complex than basic evolution, we as real humans managed to evolve from WW1 Cockpits to WW2 and beyond, you are suggesting we cant have more complexity in WW2 Cockpits with IL2 CoD ... we had it from the start, only recently has RoF allowed cockpit shadows (as an example) its getting refined in IL2 CoD as we speak.

I don't agree. In fact, I think the RoF model is our only hope for getting all the aircraft that we want. We're just going to have to pay more for the WW2 aircraft than we pay for the WW1 aircraft.

Not really....don't forget there is an SDK to come.

The way I see it, is there are two choices... one, stick with RoF or 2, take up MSFS.
Actually, MSFS would be perfect... not only can you buy all the planes you want, but you can buy weather, scenery. There are airports for days, to be purchased. In fact, there are more add ons than you could point your hard-drive at

Which I assume 3rd parties will use to make aircraft that we can buy. It's not exactly the RoF model, but it's pretty close.

Appart from the 3rd parties that release mods for free.....like all the mods for IL2, thats the great thing about a modding community.....they do it for free.

I'm sure that some stuff will be free. But these new aircraft models are pretty complex. I think people who produce them are going to want to be paid.

Not necessarily......moding something from scratch has always been alot of work but people still did it for free.

Don't get me wrong, I'm a big fan of free stuff. But if I can get a modder to produce 2 planes in 6 months instead of 1 by paying them, I think it's worth paying them.