New player, a few questions

[Voelkar]

I was looking everywhere but couldnt find anything but if there already is an answer to that somewhere in the IL-2 forum than I am sorry that the question got raised again.

1) For bombing runs (especially night sorties): I noticed that objectives are most often near settlements, if not directly next to them on the map. If i drop bombs directly in the settlement (post war court marshall, here i come) will I hit the enemy or are they located outside?

2) Do dead crewmembers of bombers that die "respawn"? Does it affect the career?

3) Do you have any influence on the career for successful missions? Do you get a penalty for not completing a mission?

4) My HUD keeps resetting, while I prefer a game with the HUD turned off i still sometimes want to enable it to see where i have to go. I checked the ingame options but everything is enabled. Sometimes its on and in the enxt mission (without doing anything in the options) its completely gone.

5) How do I "confirm" kills? I swear i sometimes shoot down more planes or hit targets with bombs than the mission endscreen tells me

Thanks in advance!

[crigby46]

Most often, enemy ground targets near settlements are occupying perhaps one street and a field or three at one corner of said settlement. Easiest way to get an idea on this is to fly a few ground troop protection missions in a fighter, you can see how the units are most often dispersed about roadways and settlements. 

 

In-air, no. Between missions, yes. As far as I remember (I mostly play fighters) only the pilots are named and listed on the squadron roster, so while you're flying a crew member who is killed will not magically reanimate; however, you'll have a full crew again for the next mission. Best not to get too attached.

 

Successful missions, particularly for the Luftwaffe, lead to awards. A lot of German awards are given for consistently good performance, rather than necessarily for outstanding single actions. Note that you get awards in differing grades for completing X number of sorties too - though it doesn't say so explicitly, that's X number of SUCCESSFUL sorties. As such, the penalty for failure is that you have to fly more and more missions to achieve the same personal recognition. 

 

HUD is simple, hit 'i' for 'instruments'. M for minimap as well, and O for fullscreen briefing map. 

 

Kills are already confirmed when they appear in the mission end-screen, but those are done by a combination of the sim already knowing what aircraft has gone down where, who did most damage to what, and then a layer of fuzzy logic is applied. Sometimes you'll miss out on a kill because, while the aircraft in question is already spiralling down to the ground, an AI pilot snipes the enemy pilot in his already doomed aircraft. Sometimes a kill will simply be missing, and sometimes you'll get credited for an aircraft crashing a good 20 minutes after you've left the combat area as a result of running out of fuel because you punctured his tanks. For this aspect of the career, I'd most certainly recommend you look at PWCG, Pat Wilson's Campaign Generator, which is available right here on the forums under the Mods topic group. In this, you fly a career as normal, but you can assign custom skins and loadouts, scrub missions, change flight waypoints and cruise altitudes, change your flight's loadouts, etc. Note also that the routes tend to be geared more to historical missions than to gameplay, so you'll likely have longer missions and somewhat higher altitudes. 

 

 That last point is not a criticism of the standard career mode by any means though, I actually fly both regularly, as sometimes I'd much, MUCH prefer a relatively short flight time at lower altitudes, and the integration of the default career mode of course makes things a lot easier to use.