Anyone else find IronMan mode much more engaging?

[austiabrm57]

I used to have 8 different careers going at once, different plane types, countries, maps and wanted to keep flying variety and intended to fly them all until the end.

However each mission never felt that important and I got a bit bored with career.

So I deleted them all, and started with just one IronMan career in the Hurricane. I decided also to start no other careers until this one ends. The missions feel like they are so much more important now, I actually care what happens and fly more Realistically (and cautiously). Also flying only a single plane I'm able to master it instead of chopping and changing (I once forgot the I16 had boost!).

Flying a single career only let's me learn the map area alot better too. Winter navigation is much easier when you learn the map https://19216811.cam/

Edited February 1, 2021 by austiabrm57

[PatrickAWlson]

I feel the same.  I am an RPG player at heart.  I generally do not multiplex between games either.  When I am playing one I get into it.  Flying a single campaign makes it feel much more personal.  

 

[40plus]

hmm, I may have to change to this style of play....Currently have three careersers going, I-16 Moscow, 109F Stalingrad and P38 Bodenplatte. Maybe I'll just focus on the I16 career because it's the most fun so far.

 

Can you change a career to Iron Man mid stream?

 

incidentally, career is one of those words that the more times you spell it, the less you think you've spell it right.....:/

[twilson37]

I generally only fly one or two campaigns. Currently I am flying a Yak campaign in the Kuban that carried over from a Hurricane campaign.  I have a second Ju-52 campaign which I mainly fly when my Track IR isn't tracking properly or needs to be recharged, both are on Ironman.

 

I will say when you are on mission 50 in an Iron Man campaign and have an oil leak 100km from Allied lines it makes for a nerve racking flight.

 

 

Edited January 28, 2021 by twilson37

[frosen]

13 minutes ago, twilson37 said:

I will say when you are on mission 50 in an Iron Man campaign and have an oil leak 100km from Allied lines it makes for a nerve racking flight.

 

That nails it pretty much! (although I never reach mission 50 before I crash and burn )

[Trooper117]

In any flight sim I own I always play dead is dead... this is the way.

[unreasonable]

Me too. DiD in every career. I become much more cautious, but I still try to make an effort to satisfy the mission orders. 

 

(RPGs are better this way too).

Edited January 28, 2021 by unreasonable

[Voidhunger]

Yes! DID only!

 

Yesterday I was returning from a sortie in Yak, badly damaged by the Bf109, wounded, destroyed canopy, oil everywhere.

I was close to my base so instead of bailing out I decided to land between two fuel tanks with some crates on that airfield.

Landing was perfectly executed, but unfortunatelly there was another one between them and I hit that damned petrol tank or crate - exploding instantly.

I was staring on my monitor in disbelief

 

It was not visible through the blood and oil.

It was almost end of Kuban career

2 hours ago, Trooper117 said:

In any flight sim I own I always play dead is dead... this is the way.

 

You have to play in every game.

In Stoneshard game its massacre (btw I recommend this game, even if its in early beta stage. Excelent game if you like rpgs)

[IckyATLAS]

In real life a 50 cal bullet means game over. Even more with a 20mm cannon bullet.?

And there is no coming back for a second carrer. At least some believe you do come back but that is another story.

In short : DON'T DIE. ?

[keeno]

Yep........ it's the only way I fly.

[Yogiflight]

Yep, DID.

And when I died, I throw my computer out of the window, to make it even more final.

[Zippy-do-dar]

I always fly iron man,

When i lose a pilot i will normal start the next one as a replacement pilot in the same same squadron.

This way you can work your way through the campaigns

[unreasonable]

31 minutes ago, Zippy-do-dar said:

I always fly iron man,

When i lose a pilot i will normal start the next one as a replacement pilot in the same same squadron.

This way you can work your way through the campaigns

 

I have done that too sometimes: a good way to get through the whole time campaign without feeling you are cheating too much. It would be a nice touch if there was a way to save the squadron roster at the day of your death. 

[unreasonable]

36 minutes ago, raaaid said:

how about a sim when youre death you can NEVER play any more

 

That is the one we are all in .....

[310_cibule]

Decals are great. How about kills? ; )

There is a saying in Czech (maybe similar in English as well): Offer someone a finger and he will take the whole hand : )

Edited January 29, 2021 by 310_cibule

[Yogiflight]

2 hours ago, 310_cibule said:

Offer someone a finger and he will take the whole hand : )

In German it goes more 'Offer a woman the little finger and she will take the whole hand'

[Zippy-do-dar]

2 hours ago, 310_cibule said:

There is a saying in Czech (maybe similar in English as well): Offer someone a finger and he will take the whole hand : )

 

28 minutes ago, Yogiflight said:

In German it goes more 'Offer a woman the little finger and she will take the whole hand'

 

In UK Its "Give someone an inch and they'll take a mile"

 

[310_cibule]

Don't we speak same language after all? ; )

Edited January 29, 2021 by 310_cibule

[unreasonable]

13 hours ago, 310_cibule said:

Don't we speak same language after all? ; )

 

Not quite: note the European version of the saying is about the violation of personal physical integrity. In the UK version it is about something much more important: property rights! 

[310_cibule]

1 hour ago, unreasonable said:

 

Not quite: note the European version of the saying is about the violation of personal physical integrity. In the UK version it is about something much more important: property rights! 

 

Not quite so in Czech. It refers to the fact that some people are greedy and want to get as much as they can grab.

[oc2209]

I started an Iron Man career just yesterday, because of this thread. In my experience, Iron Man mode is fun in theory, but weak in practice. Weak because of cheap deaths that aren't really the player's fault. And yeah, the real war wasn't fair either. But this isn't the real war. 

 

I was just killed by being strafed after belly landing in friendly territory. If we could leave the plane after landing, this wouldn't have happened. I wasn't even injured when I landed, the plane was in fine condition.

 

Now, in truth, I could've avoided it entirely by quitting the mission the moment after I landed. But I decided to watch the fight going on around my airfield. I was watching another plane with the free camera, so I wasn't even aware I was being strafed. So yes, it was dumb on my part. But we really need the ability to exit planes after landing, regardless. I mean, don't even bother to animate it if you don't want to. Just have a key to leave the cockpit, and your pilot disappears. Only available if your plane's fully stopped.

 

All that aside, this was my fifth sortie, so I didn't lose much. 11 kills. My plane was shot 3 times in those five sorties, but only one of those instances forced me to land (oil leak). I belly landed once before after colliding with a crippled I-16's tail. This last mission was a free hunt, in which my two-plane flight was attacked by 8 P-40s. My wingman was dead long before me. Enemy AI and aggression at high difficulty levels (this career was on hard) have definitely improved lately.

 

Anywho, I enjoyed constantly flirting with death; but losing the career this way is anticlimactic to say the least.

[Raptor341]

DiD - This is the way.

[Airborne506]

I'm doing kind of a faux-ironman career project now as Allies - started with a fighter and attacker career and when those pilots die I'll move to the next campaign. So far my il2 pilot got killed when a 109 knocked out his elevator en route to a target and was unable to bail. My i-16/mig-3 pilot is still doing ok, one more plane to ace status. I don't have ironman mode checked off so if I do something colossally stupid and kill myself on landing approach or ohhh I don't know maybe for instance my mig decides to flip during takeoff. Any enemy/friendly fire and it's over though.

[austiabrm57]

On 1/28/2021 at 2:51 PM, austiabrm57 said:

I used to have 8 different careers going at once, different plane types, countries, maps and wanted to keep flying variety and intended to fly them all until the end.

However each mission never felt that important and I got a bit bored with career.

So I deleted them all, and started with just one IronMan career in the Hurricane. I decided also to start no other careers until this one ends. The missions feel like they are so much more important now, I actually care what happens and fly more Realistically (and cautiously). Also flying only a single plane I'm able to master it instead of chopping and changing (I once forgot the I16 had boost!).

Flying a single career only let's me learn the map area alot better too. Winter navigation is much easier when you learn the map

issue gt solvedd!

Edited February 1, 2021 by austiabrm57

[Mauf]

Not touching ironman until unrealistic "Get-the-player-at-all-cost"-AI tunnel vision is fixed. Always having 2-3 enemy planes directly bee-line for you and chase you back deep into your territory to suicide-murder you is just dumb and ruins ironman mode for me.

[Bando]

1 hour ago, Mauf said:

Not touching ironman until unrealistic "Get-the-player-at-all-cost"-AI tunnel vision is fixed. Always having 2-3 enemy planes directly bee-line for you and chase you back deep into your territory to suicide-murder you is just dumb and ruins ironman mode for me.

 

Totally agree.

Although I do play IM, the AI can mess up the fun pretty quick.

Just had to limp home in my Yak after a truck convoy attack. No enemies in sight when I was in the landing pattern. Soon after I landed I decided to "view" my squad mates to see how they were doing. All were dead. Viewing the enemy showed that 12 (!!!!!) 109's were zooming in towards my position. Some of them were damaged as black smoke was seeping out of the engines, some had fuel leaks. They closed in, no matter what. They could not have seen me, as I was miles away from them (far beyond visual) yet they came and eventually were setting up an attack. I pressed the escape button before they hit me, but it showed me the regimental attacks are still a thing. This was the reason I quit playing this some 2-3 years ago. I hope the devs will do something about it.

[oc2209]

12 hours ago, Mauf said:

Not touching ironman until unrealistic "Get-the-player-at-all-cost"-AI tunnel vision is fixed. Always having 2-3 enemy planes directly bee-line for you and chase you back deep into your territory to suicide-murder you is just dumb and ruins ironman mode for me.

 

AI hitmen hunting you with GPS locators wouldn't be as problematic if friendly AI pulled its weight. I started a new Iron Man career, this time in Godmode. That is, as a Tempest pilot. Here's my first two sorties (again, on hard difficulty):

 

Sortie 1:

 

 

Sortie 2:

 

 

I name my Iron Man pilots in such an obvious way to separate them from my normal careers. I also put myself in command of the unit, but not in command of each flight; the AI doesn't listen to my commands anyway.

 

The first sortie was against all Fw 190 A-8s. There's no way a flight of Tempests should be ravaged by last-gen Focke Wulfs in an extended dogfight. Second sortie was a mix of Fw-190 A-8s and 109G-14s. You'll notice after two sorties, my unit is so depleted that the following sortie was cancelled.

 

Here's my personal hit-squad at work:

 

 

I was out of ammo as well as G-endurance. I set down in the field (while being strafed; but luckily only by 13mm) and instantly quit the mission.

 

On a side note: while I love the Tempest, I've noticed the default 'look behind' keyboard-bound view gives you a bad blindspot to your lower left, because you always look from over your right shoulder. I actually have a better view from a 109 with the armored headrest removed.

[Yogiflight]

You are sure, you didn't shoot at the wrong aircrafts?

Interesting thing, when I fly the 190 A8, usually most, if not all of my squadmates return to base safe.

[oc2209]

1 hour ago, Yogiflight said:

You are sure, you didn't shoot at the wrong aircrafts?

Interesting thing, when I fly the 190 A8, usually most, if not all of my squadmates return to base safe.

 

Funnily enough, I'm not trying to pad my score in Iron Man. Most of my kills are while turning; this makes me largely invulnerable. If I straighten out for a few seconds, I get hit. This was happening in my brief 109 Iron Man career as well; always getting grazed, despite checking my six every 5-10 seconds.

 

There's no way I could keep my flight alive while keeping myself alive at the same time. I just hit targets of opportunity. If I tried to chase down an enemy firing at one of my useless idiot wingmen (who invariably fly straight for long periods), I'd get killed in the process. If my wingmen would just fly in perpetual loops, we could approximate a Thach weave at least. And they'd stay alive long enough for my kills to change the balance of the fight. Instead of now, where the enemy AI kills my wingmen faster than I can kill the AI.

 

I think this might be a case of the friendly AI being too dumb to keep up with hard enemy AI. I should probably turn it back to average/normal diff, but then I'd lose the thrill of nearly dying every sortie. If the friendly AI was better at staying alive (not necessarily shooting enemies down), hard mode would be just about right.

[oc2209]

Okay, career update. The trick to keeping Tempest flights alive is to manually give everyone the +11 boosted engine before each flight. It cuts casualties a lot. Don't ask me why; I don't care to speculate. I don't see an extra bit of engine power mattering that much, especially to AI pilots, but whatever.

 

Here's my sixth Iron Man sortie:

 

 

As you can see, my flight finally did pull its weight. I got bounced (totally blindsided) by I think a 109G-14. Those are tricky f***ers in AI hands. I thought I was dead for sure, as I was wounded and nearly blacked out after entering a steep dive to escape. I pulled out at about 350 MPH, not daring to pull harder than I did to avoid hitting the ground.

 

Here's how bad it looked from the inside:

 

 

Despite the apparent severity of the wounds, I was only hospitalized a day.

 

Here's a shot of my personal hit squad circling my corpse:

 

 

Good landing, if I do say so myself.

 

This last screen is to show how good the AI is getting at hitting evading targets:

 

 

This is me breaking after seeing his tracers behind me. He's clearly adjusted to fire at where I'd be, had I done a conventional turn instead of a roll into a dive. That's pretty damn good for AI. I don't think it can hit a moving target with cannon yet, but it grazes me a lot with .50 strikes.

 

Sorry for the long picture show, but since I criticized the AI above, it's only fair to show when it performs well. I still don't understand why my first two flights were wiped out, but at least it's improved since.

[LukeFF]

17 hours ago, oc2209 said:

I think this might be a case of the friendly AI being too dumb to keep up with hard enemy AI. I should probably turn it back to average/normal diff, but then I'd lose the thrill of nearly dying every sortie. If the friendly AI was better at staying alive (not necessarily shooting enemies down), hard mode would be just about right.

 

It can be a tough balancing act. I started my Hurricane career on the Hard difficulty level, but this just resulted in almost every AI pilot being shot down every mission. They still can't hit much with the difficulty level dropped down to Moderate, but at least at that setting more of them typically come home alive. 

[Lusekofte]

I find career using ironman adequate .

It now bring me into old IL 2 mood  

However the persistant followers, have now stopped my il2 career twice.

Not quite unhistorical, nor unrealistic . Rather realistic I say, few lived long in that trade. 

But somehow frustrating.

Medium difficulty and dencity might be too hard for me

Edited February 2, 2021 by 216th_LuseKofte

[oc2209]

10 hours ago, LukeFF said:

 

It can be a tough balancing act. I started my Hurricane career on the Hard difficulty level, but this just resulted in almost every AI pilot being shot down every mission. They still can't hit much with the difficulty level dropped down to Moderate, but at least at that setting more of them typically come home alive. 

 

I'm guessing you're flying without the improved Hurricane engines yet? Maybe once the career is far enough along to unlock those, you can turn difficulty back up.

 

I'm sticking with hard difficulty for now. On my ninth sortie, and averaging about 2 deaths per 8-plane sortie lately. I consider that acceptable. In real life, of course, it'd be catastrophic.

 

I'm wondering if the AI is especially dangerous with Luftwaffe planes because 109/190 guns and flight characteristics are more suited to AI logic. About 1 minute into a dogfight, I was bounced by a 190 and nearly killed (again). This time it was a 5 day hospitalization. Next sortie I vowed to be more careful (despite the fact that I can't do anything about the Tempest's rear blindspot; I don't have head tracking equipment, so I must rely on key views). I was more careful, but also nervous and tense. I blew 475 rounds on 2 kills. After relaxing while flying back to base, 2 more Focke Wulfs showed up. I was in a better mood by that point, and I shot them down using only 75 rounds. 

 

A good lesson on how much attitude can affect performance.

[Guest deleted@210880]

I love the principle of iron man, but in practice the commands/behaviour of the AI make it more of a 'frustration' than 'enjoyment of realism' mode. To be able to have the punishment of ironman mode seem 'fair' (and just generally to be honest) , the game I think needs:

 

- A call you can make to your allies to say bandits spotted so they scan more effectvely (super effectively to represent you actually giving the direction and altitude too)

- A call to raise your allies awareness behind them: 'check six', that gets the AI to 'look' to their rear effectively. It wouldn't matter if this let them see everything behind them automatically (90% of the time) as it could effectively double as 'break'.

- A call from your allies from time to time for YOU to check your six when there is something on there

- A temporary regroup waypoint that forms when there is combat, not at the point of combat but some distance off, then after combat the AI could hang about for a couple of minutes maximum regrouping and letting  you maybe find them, before they continue wth the flight. The leader would broadcast the location wth a map grid.

- The AI caring about where you are full stop. Not exactly ike CloDs stupid 'keep up message' on repeat, but maybe a 'we're losing sight of you' or something that fires once, in conjunction with the above waypoint idea.

 

And to have these for Soviet aircraft even if they had no radio, with the option to turn it off for Soviets if you really want the pain. Because I'm all for realism, but there has to be a way to artificially recreate the communcation and understnading that was possible between real pilots radio or not (e.g. If we get bounced, regroup over the trainstation at x', '....'or rtb' etc.)

 

[Yogiflight]

5 hours ago, oc2209 said:

I'm wondering if the AI is especially dangerous with Luftwaffe planes because 109/190 guns and flight characteristics are more suited to AI logic.

If so, then only for the BOBP career. The A3 and A5 rarely get any kills. Same for the 109s on eastern front.

Another thing I constantly see on eastern front careers is, the I16 usually spinning down after one or two wing hits, without ever recovering.

[twilson37]

One thing I have found it to stay far away from my squad mates, they seem to enjoy filling my airplane full of holes. On one mission I was flying a Hurricane in BoS, when i noticed a 109 on a squad mate's tail. I fired a deflection shot on the 109, who made the mistake of turning away from me allowing me to latch on to his tail. As I am lining up to shoot him down the squad mate who I just saved turns around and proceeds to pump my aircraft full of 20mm canon shells trying to shoot the 109 through 

On 2/2/2021 at 12:51 AM, oc2209 said:

Despite the apparent severity of the wounds, I was only hospitalized a day.

I do wish they would make recovery times more realistic. It is almost always just a day. same thing when I bail out, I doubt I can find someone to get me 100 km back to base to fly a mission the next morning.

 

 

[Yogiflight]

16 minutes ago, twilson37 said:

I doubt I can find someone to get me 100 km back to base to fly a mission the next morning.

or in the afternoon

[oc2209]

9 hours ago, Chloe_Price said:

And to have these for Soviet aircraft even if they had no radio, with the option to turn it off for Soviets if you really want the pain. Because I'm all for realism, but there has to be a way to artificially recreate the communcation and understnading that was possible between real pilots radio or not (e.g. If we get bounced, regroup over the trainstation at x', '....'or rtb' etc.)

 

Or, we could do like the Japanese, and perform a series of beautiful loops, wingovers, and rolls, as a means of non-radio communication.

[LukeFF]

12 hours ago, oc2209 said:

I'm guessing you're flying without the improved Hurricane engines yet? Maybe once the career is far enough along to unlock those, you can turn difficulty back up.

 

Yes, this is winter 1941, so it's just straight Hurricane IIBs without anything else. To be fair, my experience is probably not that far off from reality - Soviet pilots were not overly fond of the plane, and Axis pilots had no problems dealing with them. Plus, being armed with only .303s is like chucking hunks of gravel at the enemy and hoping one of those bits lights a spark in the engine and sets it on fire. ? So yeah, it's a tough matchup but one that's rewarding when you finally do get a kill.

 

(My career finally ended around mission 15 when a 20mm cannon round exploded in the cockpit and killed my pilot. I was fumbling for the bailout button on my controller but couldn't press it fast enough). ?

Edited February 3, 2021 by LukeFF

[oc2209]

3 hours ago, LukeFF said:

 

Yes, this is winter 1941, so it's just straight Hurricane IIBs without anything else.

 

Yeah, I can see why the AI would be totally inadequate with that setup. I can barely get kills with the Hurricane's default weapons, and I consider myself a better-than-average shot. At least, on my good days.

 

I bought the Hurricane explicitly to test the 8-12 .303s. I've come to the same conclusion about those as I did about American wing-mounted .50s: the lower the caliber, the more of a marksman you need to be. While that's not really a surprise, I wanted to feel the degree of difference between .30 and .50. It turns out the gulf is about as wide as the one between .50 and 20mm, and 20mm versus 30mm. Each step up is a mini-quantum leap in destructive potential.

 

Anywho, my condolences on your Iron Man Hurricane. I'm now on sortie 11 with my IM Tempest, and have been wounded twice, and had my canopy shattered with no injury, once. I must assume my luck will run out soon, at that rate.

 

Most of the time, I'm aware I'm being reckless. If I get less than 3 kills in a sortie, I consider it a deep personal shame and dishonor. Consequently I'm insanely aggressive (including attacking in a 1v8 situation, rather than trying to escape). If I wanted to play rationally and sensibly, I'm pretty sure I could avoid most of the tight spots I've been in.