Progress at 90%

[CFC_Conky]

Hello Chaps,

So, I've had a chance to fly a few campaign missions in the sim. Visuals are very nice and while there is quite a bit of action on the ground, the skies a relatively empty, not unlike the single-player campaign in the original IL2. Missions are generated randomly with the boundaries of the mission type, intercept, escort, ground-attack, etc. Sometimes there are a number of bandits, other times only one.

Comms are as user-friendly as in IL2 1946; there is no comms menu, each command is assigned to a particular set of keystrokes. Friendly ai kites fly relatively well albeit a bit close at times. I haven't tried to give any orders yet so I'm not sure how well they respond. Enemy ai is fairly benign at this stage of the campaign although like IL2 1946, bomber gunners are very good shots.

Mission briefings are very cursory but I believe the devs are working on that. Intercept missions have you flying fairly high compared to the old sim, 6000 or so meters most of the time. This will mean loooong climbs and careful maneuvering for 190 pilots. The 109 on the other hand handles well at altitude.

There are currently only two difficulty settings; Normal and Expert. On the Normal setting everything is set to automatic and you even get an aiming helper. Luckily many of these things are still selectable in the control menu so you can fly with full CEM and realistic aiming. You also get small icons showing the location of air and ground targets. In Expert mode you get no in-flight map, well, sort of, since you can select the full-screen map but if you spend too much time on it you'll probably crash. No aircraft or ground object icons either making it very difficult to navigate and virtually impossible to find ground targets, particularly at night/dusk/bad wx.

Final thought? Well, it's neither fish nor fowl at the moment. A bit hard for beginners and pretty boring for experienced simmers, but looking on the bright side, the sim is relatively bug-free.

Pip, pip,
Conky