Career mode zooming ahead in time

[FlynHarbs]

Folks,

Question for you. Anyone know of a way to "zoom ahead" in time during these long distant missions? Droning along kills a lot of my gametime. Wondering if there's other options besides "times 8" to get missions done faster. The old IL2 had a "alt N" feature that zapped you ahead to the next action. Am I missing this feature somehow in Great Battles? 

Respectfully,

Harbs

[LukeFF]

No, the only option right now is the time compression feature.

[MAJORgoonMADLOU]

I miss that feature in the old IL2.  That was before my retirement when I never had the time (or patience) to fly long distant missions. I have always hated using time compression. Takes away from the immersion.

These days, when I don't want to fly long distant missions, I play a German career.  Their flying times seem to be much shorter, even when starting on the runway.  But sometimes,  I think a lot of these German missions get me into the action TOO quickly.   For instance, many times I have flown a career BF109 or FW-190A bomber escort or ground attack mission and two or three minutes after take off the flight runs into enemy planes long before we get to the bombers or ground targets.   Many career FW-190D missions involve defending ME 262s taking off from your airbase so as soon as you are airborne you are in the thick of dogfighting. 

 

I have never played the Russian side so can't comment on that.   Flying a Normandy or Rhineland campaign as a U.S. or British pilot seems to take the longest.  But I do like those to practice my formation flying.

.

[JG4_Moltke1871]

42 minutes ago, MAJORgoonMADLOU said:

I miss that feature in the old IL2.  That was before my retirement when I never had the time (or patience) to fly long distant missions. I have always hated using time compression. Takes away from the immersion.

These days, when I don't want to fly long distant missions, I play a German career.  Their flying times seem to be much shorter, even when starting on the runway.  But sometimes,  I think a lot of these German missions get me into the action TOO quickly.   For instance, many times I have flown a career BF109 or FW-190A bomber escort or ground attack mission and two or three minutes after take off the flight runs into enemy planes long before we get to the bombers or ground targets.   Many career FW-190D missions involve defending ME 262s taking off from your airbase so as soon as you are airborne you are in the thick of dogfighting. 

 

I have never played the Russian side so can't comment on that.   Flying a Normandy or Rhineland campaign as a U.S. or British pilot seems to take the longest.  But I do like those to practice my formation flying.

.

I remember I played a German Bomber career on Kuban map but can’t remember I got a long range mission to Maikop or Adler. But those missions would be perfect for He 111‘s… Also the AQMB not offers tasty long range missions like that ?

@LukeFF, is there any chance get missions like that for the germans in the future?

BTW: I really hope the FC western front map will have some rear live in the future to challenge the fuel capacity of the Gotha ang Handley Page bombers…?

Edited May 10, 2023 by JG4_Moltke1871

[LukeFF]

6 hours ago, JG4_Moltke1871 said:

@LukeFF, is there any chance get missions like that for the germans in the future?

 

Not sure at this point. Plus, from what I have read (especially in Black Cross / Red Star), during the 1943 Kuban air battles the German bomber force didn't really fly that far anymore. 

[bycomet]

8x time acceleration is not actually achieved due to some technical restriction. The more units in a mission, the less acceleration it does. In career or scripted campaign, I guess it only achieves 2x or 3x acceleration which you can figure out from the clock in your plane.

A common solution is:

1. to start your career as team leader, this allows you at the planning stage to drag "way point 2" as close to "way point 3 (mission objective)" as possible on the map.

2. choose to start a mission in the air which is from way point 2.

3. once finish primary objective, simply fly to friendly territory and exit the mission, it will be deemed as mission accomplished.

4. only take interception mission and let your AI teammates to complete other mission, especially those escort bombers missions

 

[FlynHarbs]

Thanks for the comments and tips everyone. It's appreciated.

[Aleksander55]

9 hours ago, bycomet said:

8x time acceleration is not actually achieved due to some technical restriction. The more units in a mission, the less acceleration it does. In career or scripted campaign, I guess it only achieves 2x or 3x acceleration which you can figure out from the clock in your plane.

A common solution is:

1. to start your career as team leader, this allows you at the planning stage to drag "way point 2" as close to "way point 3 (mission objective)" as possible on the map.

2. choose to start a mission in the air which is from way point 2.

3. once finish primary objective, simply fly to friendly territory and exit the mission, it will be deemed as mission accomplished.

4. only take interception mission and let your AI teammates to complete other mission, especially those escort bombers missions

 

Use this technique, but be warned, it seems that the game *doesn't* calculate the fuel burn, or not correctly anyway.

 

I always thought that in an air start the game calculated fuel burn depending on wind, atmospheric conditions, etc, but in my experiments, even pushing waypoint 2  almost 100 kilometers away from the airfield, the very small fuel tank of the I-16 was showing being completely full.

 

This means that you and your brainless AI wingmen will be *heavy* on fuel when you get to the objective. Keep that in mind.

 

Besides this, pushing waypoint 2 has some other gameplay 'game the sim' consequences in my experience:

 

1 - you can cheat long distance missions (good for very short range planes like the I-16, especially in the hands of the crazy/broken/useless AI) by pushing the waypoint to almost the objective area.

 

2 - In attack vehicle column missions, pushing the waypoint to the closest possible to the target and flying very fast the rest of the way will let you catch a good bunch of them still parked on the side of the road.

 

3 - This also breaks the timing of interception flights in any ground attack mission, allowing your wingmen to do at least a second attack run before you are swarmed by hordes of interceptors. Tell them to 'go back to base', even the zombies who still haven't dropped their bombs will ditch them and make a run for home.

[IckyATLAS]

On 5/11/2023 at 3:51 AM, Aleksander55 said:

Use this technique, but be warned, it seems that the game *doesn't* calculate the fuel burn, or not correctly anyway.

The only way to accelerate correctly such a game is to have the CPU "fully play it" just faster. As this game is CPU intensive you need a CPU that has enough computing power to run the game 2x or 4x or 8x. We do not have such a CPU, so depending on the mission load or complexity you will be able to do maybe 3x or maybe 1.5x or less. All other methods will create issues because you are artificially moving certain items but not others and this does not correspond to having the mission be accelerated, hence an incoherent behavior.

A campaign or a career is not an instant arcade style flying. It is designed as a sim of a pilot career. To me (personal opinion here) there is a conceptual difference between the design of a career and a campaign, compared to the Quick Mission Builder. I do not mention here the PWCG  because I do not know it and how it works.

 

The career is what it means a development over time of a pilots life and progress in a given theater of war (map), and each mission should be like a real mission in which you get in your plane take-off fly your mission whatever it is and come back and land and be alive (maybe wounded but alive). Again (my opinion here)  you cannot have success if you have not landed back either to your base or a friendly one or crash landed alive or parachuted in friendly territory. All other methods to artificially change that may have drawbacks and issues.

You can complain that the career missions are repetitive or lack this or that,  and I would agree with it (there have been many posts on that), but you should not complain that you are not able to zip through the campaign missions in a few minutes have them done and jump to the next one. 

 

Here comes the quick mission builder is exactly made for that need. For each map you have many missions that you can define from flying alone and up to 16 planes and be in the midst of an aerial combat in seconds. You have many places on the map you can fly over, you can define multiple parameters , choosing your planes, starting altitude, positions of you and the enemy, ground targets, the weather etc. All this in a matter of one minute, and then go and in a matter of seconds you fly in a furball and voilà.

 

 

[Aleksander55]

Just to make sure we are talking about the same things: I was talking about starting a mission with an air start, having previously moved waypoint 2 closer to the objective (waypoint 3) to spare time.

 

When I complete a mission I always fly back and land at my airbase, I don't quit or jump out the moment I'm back over friendly lines. Doing this too much would leave your squadron without any planes before replenishment anyway.

 

I agree with you that doing an air start, along with accelerating time hurts the 'purity' of the sim. Unfortunately bugs and flaws with friendly AI/mission scripting still happen even when doing a mission with a take-off and not accelerating time.

Edited May 16, 2023 by Aleksander55