190's to the right... 190's to the left. Is BoN "harder"?

[RyanR]

Prior to BoN, I had been flying with the difficulty set to hard. I've had to dial that back to medium since *everybody* seems to die... in every mission. This last one: We took off with eight P-47's... and picked up another group as escort. Over the mainland, Four 190's come in from the SW.... then four more come in from the east. We were 10km from target, so I had my flight peel off and help the escort. I dropped the bombs on the target, mission satisfied.... I cranked the boost up and got back to altitude. At this point, nearly everyone is shot down. I got two bandits trying to save the remainder of my flight. A little "on-purpose" target fixation turned my plane into the below, but I was the last survivor and pointed the plane towards home, nosed down, and put all the levers to the firewall. Sloppy landing, but I couldn't see.

 

 

This seems to be fairly typical in BoN. Everyone dies. Fly Luftwaffe, and you run into all of the Spitfires.... and everyone dies. Only difference is if you fly P-51's for the Allies. Then you do endless escorts and never see the enemy. Does it get better? Is my computer broke? Attrition couldn't be this bad just a month before D-Day.

 

-Ryan

 

 

 

 

[Eisenfaustus]

True - engagements in IL-2 tend to be to lethal compared to historical accounts. 
In real Life the side with a serious disadvantage would rapidly disengage. 
Yet as I find the prolonged dogfights fun to play I personally can live quite well with this deviation from history

[Alexmarine]

Turn down the difficulty, as far as I remember that also changes stuff that kinda alter the forces you have to face for each mission (as it's not based on historical strength available for each sides). Play at most on Medium or if you want to simulate a more pronounced Allied superiority put the career on easy.

 

Hopefully one day the difficulty slider will be completely gone fron the career mode replaced by historical values generated by the game for a given period and theatre of operation.

[EAF19_Marsh]

 

Not just Normandy.

 

Randomly fired up a BoM career flying with I/JG51. Put it on 'hard' / 'dense' for a bit of a challenge...and remembered why I stopped doing this. My flight of F2s (in sparkling mid-1940 camo, BTW) scattered all over the sky and without icons I had little chance to follow my flight section leader but did my best to defend anyone that appeared to be under attack. MiG-3s everywhere but I disengage as ammo runs low and as - unbelievably - my flight starts requesting / confirming permission to land. Thanks, guys. Next time I'll 'Lucie Anton' with yo Momma and leave you by yourselves.

 

VVS orbiting the landing ground as per usual while the brave Molders Wing has tea and medals, not caring about the guy circling above and who is awaiting the AA to do its bit. Russians, full of military ardour, stick around to get shot at. Of course.

 

So it would seem that, for all the greatness of BoN, AI and offline combat has not improved. Oh, and could someone please tell the AI flight leader's 'AI' that t/o plus full-power climb is not helpful for the last guy, especially when the mission is long and fuel starts to get a little low. Call me Mr Picky, but I do believe that an orbit of the base for assembly was considered de rigueur.

[RyanR]

Thanks, all!

 

Does "dense" affect the air assets? Maybe I picked up some bad tips in the past. I'll dial that back as well.

 

-Ryan

[Eisenfaustus]

1 hour ago, RyanR said:

Thanks, all!

 

Does "dense" affect the air assets? Maybe I picked up some bad tips in the past. I'll dial that back as well.

 

-Ryan

According to the manual no - dense is ground only. Air is by difficulty. The last batch of manuals was awesome. 

[RyanR]

Anyway.... no joy.

 

I was all excited, because I researched best fuel economy for the Typhoon, and it was paying off. I was getting ready to write a post applauding the developers' attention to this kind of detail. Then we hit the continent.....

 

The enemies spawn at your altitude, I've known this since I first bought into the game. So, you climb to 10,000 ft to give your Thunderbolt escort a little edge to use their turbos. I counted 10 190A's in two groups.... and yet another single random G6-Late.... all of which that showed up above our altitude.  Difficulty is set to moderate, and within 5 minutes everyone is dead.

 

Ironically, if you fly for the Luftwaffe, you're not given enough lead time to even get to the attackers' altitude. So no matter what you do, you can't win.

 

This is all frustrating, because I was flying BoBP at similar difficulty levels. I'm definitely not the greatest fighter pilot, but I was hitting ground targets, getting kills, and returning to base without any bullet holes with P-47's. So far, in BoN, I've landed exactly two missions out of who knows how many. One was in a shredded Thunderbolt. The other was in a Typhoon, with three kills and no appreciable damage (but only 10 gallons of fuel remaining!). For the latter, the interceptors took off from the ground, so they had to struggle to catch us.

 

The salt in the wound is that you spend a ton of time flying across the channel... then everything goes instantly and completely wrong. That's basically an evening.

 

-Ryan

[Harlequin]

Hi.

One of the reasons I love PWCG so much is that the missions aren't predictable like you describe.  You might be outnumbered or you might not.  You might run into any level of ai pilots. Could be aces, rookies or anything. It'll be especially fun on the Normandy map I think.

[Avimimus]

11 hours ago, Eisenfaustus said:

True - engagements in IL-2 tend to be to lethal compared to historical accounts. 
In real Life the side with a serious disadvantage would rapidly disengage. 
Yet as I find the prolonged dogfights fun to play I personally can live quite well with this deviation from history

 

Or even just get disorganised and separated enough to return to base... in real life pilots often didn't like flying alone. So once the formations were gone there would often be attempts to disengage and regroup.

 

IMHO, we could really do with:

 

- An option to give us realistic probabilities of encountering enemy aircraft (or elevated probabilities)

 

- An option to cause AI to have more realistic aggression levels (especially when outnumbered). Probably by using a certain randomised chance of returning to base or attempting to return to formation (I suggest a randomised probability so that there is still a possibility of encountering an occasional hyper-aggressive pilot).

 

It's also be good to have a more realistic probability of a pilot losing track of their target after a pass and taking a few seconds to re-acquire after losing sight of the enemy (having more consideration of where the AI is able to look and happens to be looking - would also help get realistic AI spotting generally, especially useful in Tank Crew). It'd feed nicely into morale calculations.

[Airborne506]

Yeah I just did an escort mission on medium P47 career 4/1944, we lost all but 2 fighters and all but one bomber. Got picked up by one group of 190s at the English coat and another on the French coast that finished the job. To echo above more of a historical option would be great, not just easy, medium, hard.

[EAF19_Marsh]

13 hours ago, cosg_Paul said:

Hi.

One of the reasons I love PWCG so much is that the missions aren't predictable like you describe.  You might be outnumbered or you might not.  You might run into any level of ai pilots. Could be aces, rookies or anything. It'll be especially fun on the Normandy map I think.

Thanks for the reminder - I’ll have to give that at a go.

[Gunfreak]

I've found the BoN careers frustrating so far.

 

Airfield attack in P51 in April of 1944 wasn't a big thing. So felt wrong. It was also a 50 minute flight just to get to the target.(given your average IL2 mission last from 20 to 40 minutes) I felt a 1 hour 40+ minute mission a bit excessive (if I had survived the attack) that feel more like an DCS mission which I don't mind. Just don't fit into what I think most IL2 players are looking for.

 

Then did two attempts at a P47 career.  And just got murdered. 

 

Did another P51 career.  Where the first missions was fine. Then the second came along. To bomb some artillery. The AI flight flies directly into the clouds. And since the clouds cover the entire map. I never see them again. I fly by myself to the target and bomb it. Only to get gangbanged by 6 fw190.

 

Then did a typhoon mission for the caen part of the campaign. Instead of giving close air support to the troops on the front line(there was no troops on the front line. No war to be seen anywhere. ) we flew across the map to some random town far away attacked some AAA and got my plane more or less destroyed.  But manged to limp home.

 

Finally I did the beachhead patrol in a spitfire. The spit doesn't really have the fuel to cross the channel at the widest part and stay there long. But we did shoot down 6 fw190s and lost one of our own.(AI stealing two of my kills) as I land I see both primary and secondary objectives are complete and I spent an hour and 3 minutes in the mission. 

As I go to my headquarters. I get mission failed. With 0 minutes played on the mission.  No enemy shot down and no allies lost.

 

And now I'm rather annoyed by the whole career mode. And I'll probably wait for PWCG to update for BoN.

[RyanR]

Other campaigns have dry land for nearly the entire map, which scatters all the enemies. I wonder if the nature of the BoN map just compresses all the "action" into a small area. 

 

When BoN "works" it's quite fun... but nine times out of ten, something goes wrong. The AI P-47 fighter escort can't handle 190's or G6-Late's.

 

-Ryan

[sevenless]

On 9/11/2022 at 5:08 PM, Eisenfaustus said:

According to the manual no - dense is ground only. 

 

Nope not only ground. Fly bomber interception at dense and you get 12 bombers, fly that at scattered and you get 6. Density also affects air units. 

 

Best combo is "easy" and "dense". Try it. Everything higher than "easy" and you will get artificially unrealistic overpopulation of enemy air assets.

[percydanvers]

2 hours ago, Gunfreak said:

I've found the BoN careers frustrating so far.

 

Airfield attack in P51 in April of 1944 wasn't a big thing. So felt wrong. It was also a 50 minute flight just to get to the target.(given your average IL2 mission last from 20 to 40 minutes) I felt a 1 hour 40+ minute mission a bit excessive (if I had survived the attack) that feel more like an DCS mission which I don't mind. Just don't fit into what I think most IL2 players are looking for.

 

 

Strafing airfields was very much a thing of the P-51

 

 

Though I'm not 100% sure they were doing in in April of 1944, so you may be right

 

 

[Gunfreak]

1 hour ago, percydanvers said:

 

Strafing airfields was very much a thing of the P-51

 

 

Though I'm not 100% sure they were doing in in April of 1944, so you may be right

 

 

Everyone did airfield attacks by the end of the war. Those poor spitfire MK IX who by late 44 was outmatched in air to air was delegated to airfield attack on all fronts, Italy, Germany etc.(some late comer spitfire pilots who only flew from late 44 and out. Never did anything else, their entire war experience was airfield attack)

 

On day by day basis more Spitfire pilots died from these attacks then during Battle of Britain or any other time too. The airfield flak seemed to have caused far more psychological damage then any other job for RAF pilots and probably the American one too.

[LukeFF]

5 hours ago, sevenless said:

Nope not only ground. Fly bomber interception at dense and you get 12 bombers, fly that at scattered and you get 6. Density also affects air units. 

 

No, sorry, that's not the case. Density solely affects the number of ground objects that are generated near the front lines. The Easy/Moderate/Hard difficulty levels affect both the number of enemy planes you can encounter and the density of AA guns placed around the objective. That info comes directly from the developers. ?

[sevenless]

1 hour ago, LukeFF said:

 

No, sorry, that's not the case. Density solely affects the number of ground objects that are generated near the front lines. The Easy/Moderate/Hard difficulty levels affect both the number of enemy planes you can encounter and the density of AA guns placed around the objective. That info comes directly from the developers. ?

 

It is. You can easily reproduce it. Select a unit which flys only anti-bomber missions, like Kdo. Nowotny and try it out for yourself. Fly to the interception point and count the bombers, then abord the mission and restart it with the other settings. It is like this for years already.

 

easy/scattered setting = 6 bombers or less (had one mission with only 3)

 

 

easy/dense setting = 12 bombers

 

Edited September 12, 2022 by sevenless

[EAF19_Marsh]

20 hours ago, Gunfreak said:

Everyone did airfield attacks by the end of the war. Those poor spitfire MK IX who by late 44 was outmatched in air to air was delegated to airfield attack on all fronts, Italy, Germany etc.(some late comer spitfire pilots who only flew from late 44 and out. Never did anything else, their entire war experience was airfield attack)

Err, you might want to check on all your facts. Literally all of them.

[blockheadgreen_]

On 9/12/2022 at 6:14 PM, Gunfreak said:

Everyone did airfield attacks by the end of the war. Those poor spitfire MK IX who by late 44 was outmatched in air to air was delegated to airfield attack on all fronts, Italy, Germany etc.(some late comer spitfire pilots who only flew from late 44 and out. Never did anything else, their entire war experience was airfield attack)

 

On day by day basis more Spitfire pilots died from these attacks then during Battle of Britain or any other time too. The airfield flak seemed to have caused far more psychological damage then any other job for RAF pilots and probably the American one too.

[RyanR]

Bombed a V1 site with a Tempest.... bagged four 190's over the mainland. Guns are empty. An A-6 follows me 100 miles across the channel at wave top height as I milk everything I had out of the engine. I got a little too close to a tree over the Isle of Wight, which ended that.

 

-Ryan

[Gunfreak]

19 minutes ago, Lythronax said:

 

Fighter group

Clostermann's biography 

Spitfire a very British love story.

[RyanR]

Welp. I flew the same mission 6-7 times. This time our P-51 escort simply ignored the 190A-8's. At least all six P-51's were there to watch us all die. In the previous attempt at this mission, two P-51's just crashed into one another.

 

Do I have to set it "easy" to survive more than 3-4 missions into a career. On the upside, you don't have to worry that the career mission generator doesn't give you enough fuel for a two way flight.

 

How was none of this turned up in the lengthy beta period? Almost nothing in BoN works.

 

-Ryan

 

 

[percydanvers]

Having a similar experience with JG 3. This screenshot doesn't even do justice to how much flak there was shooting at us. Pretty much everybody died on this mission. At least in the case of the Luftwaffe this is pretty historically accurate since their losses in Normandy were pretty catastrophically high in real life.

 

[EAF19_Marsh]

18 hours ago, Gunfreak said:

 

Fighter group

Clostermann's biography 

Spitfire a very British love story.

Err, you might to reread them as clearly you did not undertand them. 

Try Shores’s 2nd TAF books

[Alexmarine]

16 hours ago, percydanvers said:

 

 

 

This screenshot but on the left there is a beached in the Philippines and, instead of a 109, a Yokosuka D4Y3 Suisei dive bomber... ?