Will SoW be boring and superficial?

[nearmiss]

Originally Posted by Feathered_IV

The Il-2 series is pretty. I have no doubt that SoW will be very pretty too. The weather will change. The AI will occaisionally sh*t their pants and the FM's will be great.

And we'll all go around, doing the same things as we are doing now. Just in a more detailed environment.

But really, don't you think there should be more to the future of air combat simulations than just cookie cutter dogfights and dropping a stick of bombs? Do you really just want to play the exact same pair of missions all over again for another five to ten years ?

What if other mission perameters were coded in? What other options could we get?

Maybe instead you'd like to pilot a Lysander for SOE. Fly over to France at zero altitude in the dead of night. Alone in the dark, you would struggle to find 'that little field' marked on your map and glide into it, engine off so as not to alert the Jerries.

Perhaps you'd rather fly a Storch, evacuating wounded from the combat area. Or maybe spotting for the artillery? What if you could give directions and targeting information to ground units?

What about unarmed photo recon? Take your Blenheim across to France to take photographs of the invasion barges. Photographs that the campaign generator can judge and pass you on.

Coastal Command perhaps? Why not have a crew that can actually call out the sightings of distant ships and other objects and give an intelligent description of their range, type and heading?

Or nightfighters with AI radar operators that can actually guide you to the kill?

Wouldn't you like to try to fly a danerously overloaded Ju-52 into the icy landing strips of Stalingrad one day? Or a C-47 over the Himalayas?


There has to be more to this genre than, fly to waypoint and shoot stuff down. Or fly to waypoint and drop some bombs. There has to be.

Do you want to have some fun?

You need to get the old MSFT CFS2 and work with the mission builder that is par excellence. You cannot imagine the things that can be done with a combat flight simulation game until you do.

There is also a very vibrant community of users for the CFS2 at http://sim-outhouse.com
Users are still building missions and campaigns, aircraft, scenery, skins for that great old sim.

There are of course a couple things that will never be fixed unless MSFT decides to either release the source or do an upgrade of the CFS2.

The CFS2 AI are just not competent, but there are workarounds. The scenery has limitations. The online game is no more, which is just as well it was so full of cheats. It is now possible to fly in any war theatre in the world as CFS2 includes all the war theatres.

You can still have an enormous good time, because the mission builder tools are absolutely awesome. You can build all kinds of situations for on-the-fly, navigation, etc. into your missions.

The Shockwave BOB II WOV with the new 2.07 patch has the best AI performance of any flight simulation game ever. Shockwave and the community devs have turned the old Rowan's bob into a significant combat flight simulation game. Currently, they are working on a Coop Online addition to the sim. This is great, because if you can fly with a squadron of real people against the awesome AI of BOB II you are going to be into almost real world scenarios. You'll get to fly against the largest mob of bombers and fighters you can imagine and be into some of the most immersive (close to actual) combat you can imagine.

Currently, the BOB II WOV has a campaign engine,which allows the player to jump into the battle at will or fly within the same squadron time and again. There is good flexibility for level of player participation. There are plans in the works for a competent mission builder, but they are too busy with a new addition to the sim now to build it.

The strength of Oleg's Il2 has always been the Online play. The current mission builder has been OK for building Online play missions, because the players on each side of the conflict are real people. AI performance doesn't have to be much, because the AI doesn't do that much in Online play.

If Oleg is finally going to really address the Offline game competently he has some tough competition. He will have to provide a mission builder equivalent to the MSFT CFS2 or Jane's WW2 Fighters, and he will have to spend some real effort to measure up to the Shockwave AI performance engine. I hope he will do it, because it would set the bar for Combat flight simulator games.

Don't get me wrong The IL2 series is still viable for players. I went back to the old MSFT CFS2 right before the Pacfic Fighters was released. I don't enjoy furr balls. I love building missions that recreate almost real world situations, how they would and did evolve during the war. I do the BOBII WOV for the best AI performance and boy does it improve your combat flight skills. It also supports 6DOF in TrackIR.

I hang around the IL2 boards and occassionally load up the IL2-1946 and do some flying and fighting. I still enjoy all the great replay features in IL2 and being able to go back over my flights to see what I did wrong,etc. I've bought all the IL2 series and still get a kick out of it, but not like I did for the first 3-4 years after it was released.