[Seeker]

IIRC, the following was going on, on or about the time IL-2 came out:

Air Warrior was dying, Aces High was starting, Warbirds was in decline (it's chief staff having left to start Aces High) and EAW was beginning to sink into mod madness and suffering from a graphics card generation change it couldn't cope with, and I can't quite remember when Rowen's Battle of Britain was released but I think it was around the same time or slightly earlier.

I certainly bought IL-2 as soon as at came out (I'll buy any WWII prop sim); and I was wonderfully impressed by the graphical beauty, but I very quickly shelved it again due to the funky view system (this was long before Track IR) and the lack of Spitfires!

I picked up again for Forgotten Battles (Spitfires again!).

The only apparent revolutionary things in IL-2 were the bail out animation, plane set and the fact that it was Russian, which was unheard of at the time, every thing else had been seen before (from a features/end user perspective, I've no idea if the code had new solutions to old problems).

Edit: I'll take some of that back, there was something new for IL-2: The training missions. A genuinely new idea as far as I know. Unfortunately, every patch seemed to break it, and Oleg never seemed bothered about one of the few features that were genuinely unique. Thinking back, the Current crew could probably avoid a hell of a lot of moaning by including training tracks on how to cope with CEM, and maybe even a "Technical officer briefing" on game set up including graphic options and what they do.

Another huge, massive hole in the whole IL-2 series has been some sort of collated documentation on the finer aspects of conf.ini and RCU file tweaking. The RCU idea _could_ have been developed into something unique, but for some reason it never seems to get any attention, being hidden away in the file system, a place where ordinary users have no business!

In many ways, Clod is only now catching up with EAW's feature set, and then only just. It still lacks Airwarrior's online mission briefing tools, Aces High's linked buff AI, any online sim's multi crewed buffs and a slew of features common in the better sims of the last centuary.

Nothing about Clod is revolutionary, not a thing.