Forgotten Battles isn't perfect!

Games
1

It may not be the ultimate WW2 combat flight simulator! Oh no!

Well, so far ive encountered two looming problems; the insane AI accuracy and the inevitable suicide missions.

Pretty much every AI level, whether rookie or ace, has precision accuracy. You cannot make head on passes, ever, with the AI. Rear gunner accuracy is similarly insane. Ditto with AAA fire. This starts to build up to the point where its just not fun because there is almost nothing you can do but die in some circumstances, especially if your playing in an early war model aircraft that is inferior to the opposition. In many missions the outcome is decided on the first pass, whether my team or their team kills on the first head on and shifts the balance.

The other is the ‘suicide mission’, where the odds are stacked against you and there seems just no way to win. Ive encountered several of these and its extremely frustrating. Right now in one mission we are going to encounter a similarly sized enemy flight, from an alt. disadvantage, vs. an ace AI. With inferior planes. Its just murder. And you have to replay it over and over and over until you can trigger either the mission failed or mission succeeded msg to continue. Perhaps there is some reality to it but its very aggrevating, especially if it takes 20-30 min. to replay it each time. These kinds of missions are apparently common no matter what plane you choose, unless your flying the best plane in that timeframe and always have a mechanical advantage you can use.

2

hmmm, I must be a better combat pilot than you then, cuz I don’t have any of those problems. :D

3

Full real baby? :)

4

Yeah, the campaign generator has Wing Commander syndrome. 2:1 odds or some other kind of massive disadvantage.

My most memorable campaign moment had me flying an Il-2, watching two I-16 fighters scout ahead and get creamed by 8 109s, and then having only two close escorts for the flight of 4 Il-2s I was part of.

Stuff like this happens constantly. You’re always outnumbered and outclassed.

The AI’s biggest problem isn’t the accuracy so much as its flying capability. It cheats the laws of physics.

(I’ll admit though I’m pretty tire of approaching a bomber and having my pilot killed by a laser-like burst of .303)

5

The dynamic campaign is fine … Starshoy developed it based on his earlier 3rd party dynamic campaign generator for IL2.

What he didn’t realise was just how deadly Oleg made the AA/AAA in FB. We have gone from one extreme to the other. Now you have no choice but to take out AA/AAA targets before taking out the main target. That still doesn’t help though when the AAA has 3km plus lethality range.

Ship AAA is even worse.

Apart from that the rest of the simulation is fantastic. Some great new aircraft and a highly refined damage model. But AA/AAA is definitely at the top of the list of things to be fixed - or at least toned down.

6

For me its the accuracy more than anything. We once outnumbered an Ace AI plane flight 6 to 2 yet he raped us about four times in a row. He would down two planes before even turning once, just crazy things like that. The UFO syndrome is even more pronounced on Ace AI since i think theyre supposed to get a boost in performance. Actually in the campaign so far ive rarely been outnumbered not counting bombers. The campaigns are really pretty nice just in the sense of being unpredicatable, as often i encounter an enemy way before or in a different way than i was expecting. Mostly in Il-2 vanilla the canned missions had you intercepting the enemy at about equal odds and alt, right at the end of your flight plan.

7

So what do you guys think of the padlock? :-)

8

Nope, it’s not perfect, but I love it anyway. The AI accuracy problems seem really hit-or-miss to me (pun intended). On the one hand you have the AI that can hit you at 0.5 km in a head to head pass, while on the other hand you can watch your wingmen and enemies who don’t seem to understand the concept of pulling just a little more lead on a gradually turning target. BTW, I think head-to-heads are supposed to be that deadly, but I doubt most players can get a guaranteed head-to-head kill at 0.5 km (maybe more like 0.25). The saving grace is that head-to-head deaths are pretty easy to avoid once you decide to stop going for a kill and figure out how to do it.

I’m also glad to see that the AI doesn’t seem to have omnidirectional vision anymore. You can sneak up on Veteran AIs now, whereas in IL-2 as soon as you came within 0.35 km, they started doing rolls (and that’s pretty much all they’d do, very few breaks or extentions, just rolling over and over again.) I haven’t gone up against Ace AI yet, and haven’t played much of the campaign because I want to fly the Hurricane MkIIc, but they’re only available in the Leningrad campains (slide show city).

9

My AI problem was completely different. I’ve had a keystone cops AI issue - wingmen escorting bombers colliding with each other or taxiing planes running into aircraft on the ground - over and over again. I’ve noticed that headon passes can be deadly but, then again, I’ve never really tried to fly that way in other sims - I usually try to close and maneuver into a position where I’m not likely to get shot at. (That said, before I took a break I hadn’t encountered multiposition bombers in a fighter yet.) As for the campaigns - I’d rather have them than canned missions but I haven’t encountered much of the variety of encounters others evidently have. The missions felt much more like EAW than Red Baron 3D or Falcon 4 with their truly unpredictable missions, close calls and targets of opportunity. (I have been informed I can increase the number of objects generated during a battle with a tweak to the init file - can’t say I’ve noticed a big difference yet but it could be more telling in a ground attack role).

10

One problem I’ve noted is that once a bomber is heavily damaged and loses lots of altitude, if it’s the formation leader then the other surviving planes in the formation start to swoop large ungainly circles round it in a most daredevil fashion, sort of like seagulls round a rubbish tip…

11

Don’t know - don’t use it. I either use my hatswitch with pannings views or I use my TrackIR which FB now has built-in support for.

I assume by your smiley that padlock is unchanged ? 8)

12

Yep. Still useless.

13

Anyone tried out the Finn version of the Buffaloes? This can’t be the same plane the Americans hated. It’s got a pretty snappy roll rate, and isn’t bad to fly.

But I would agree that the AI is very challenging. Spent some time watching the allied AI guys fly Pe-2 bombers and they got chewed up pretty bad by the AA.

What is your experience with the UBI.com multiplayer? I was out there a couple times last week and there’s a little lag but general performance was OK.

14

Writing a review of this for a more casual audience related mag, and I realized in trying to look at it from that view that FB is really pretty newbie unfriendly in a number of ways. So I ran a test - I took a copy over to a friend who can be described as a “casual” sim player. He likes MSCFS3, plays it on easy modes, loves EAW, still flies it. He’s just now getting into Enemy Engaged: Comanche v Hokum (I set him up on that, he sets everything to relatively easy.)

He installed it, just took the defaults on set-up. Set it to easy. Read through the manual fairly quickly. Tried a quick flight, and was stumped because his joystick and throttle weren’t doing anything. I just watched. He went in to where he thought he could calibrate his joystick (in IL-2) but that didn’t do anything. He looked everywhere for a place to select his CH joystick and throttle and couldn’t find it, and he looked at me and said “Where do I tell it what kind of joystick I have???” I just smiled. After a while he hit the HOTAS button, but he looked and said “well, that just tells which axis is controlled by what thing on my joystick - it should have that right.” He never did figure out until I finally told him that he had to go to that location and click on the directional control and wiggle his joystick in that direction and do the same for the other axis, and do the same for his throttle, etc.

Then he’s up and now his joystick and throttle works. A quick dogfight mission. But his firing button on his joystick doesn’t do anything. “Damn!” he says, “Don’t tell me it isn’t smart enough to know that a flight simmer might want to use the firing button on his joystick to fire the guns?” So he trudges back into the controls, pushes his buttons on his joystick to tell it which ones to use to fire which weapons.

Back into the mission, and he soon discovered that a LOT of functions which are controlled by the keyboard don’t have a default key set - he has to go in and set them all. He doesn’t like this - he wants the keyboard reference card to tell him what the keys are for different commands, he doesn’t want to have to set them, write them down or print them.

He gets into a dogfight and hits the padlock. LOL! He’s convinced (I’m trying to not say anything or help him) that the padlock is broken because it doesn’t actually padlock on the enemy, it constantly loses him. So now he’s convinced it’s just something else he has to set himself somewhere. I let him look for a while before I break my silence and tell him, no, it just sucks.

There were a lot of other places in the sim where he was frustrated (e.g., trying to figure out waypoints, etc.) As I watched him I realized that Oleg has perhaps bowed so deeply to the hardcore crowd (and the multiplayer folks) that he has completely neglected the novice. Or - he doesn’t care about that segment. For a hard-core simmer, or just a very experienced simmer, it’s a good sim. But I think it’s a challenge for the novice.

15

I flown more of the Buffalo (B-239) than any other plane because of the campaign. Its more or less equal to the I-16/24. The I-16 has a slight edge in turning and acceleration, the B-239 has a very slightly higher top speed and a great engine that is almost impossible to overheat (better than the I-16s) even running at 110% for a very long time. I also feel somewhat better protected in a closed cockpit. Its a good plane but its definately a pre-war model. I like the cowl .50s because theyre easier to aim, and the engine doesn’t die under negative-gs like the I-16. In I-16 vs. B-239 its all about numbers because they both have such similar characteristics once one gets on the others tail there is really no way to lose him, and it will pull the dogfight right to ground level. Flying the B-239 try to get within .2km and get some slight deflection on the I-16 since its ass is way too padded for .50s to do much.

I agree FB has little to facilitate newer players and it has no documentation on plane idiosyncracies. Didn’t know that early model 109s lacked a rudder trimmer? Don’t know which planes have which type of propeller governor? Which planes cut out under negative Gs, ect? Actually there is a ‘second’ tactics pdf manual on the second cd, but even it lacks in details. This same problem hurt IL2; i remember pulling out my EAW manual for flight combat tactics after playing IL2 and finding its manual inadequate. This FB iteration could really use a 200+ full color detailed manual of just planes, their nuances, and a fleshed out, interactive flight school instead of just training tracks. There is a certain standoff-ishness about flight combat training, and i think one track says something like “no books can teach you what you need to know”. Sort of like asking some uber-gosu FPS or RTS player for training tips and they just shrug their shoulders and say dismissively “Oh, its just instinct, practise, ect. I can’t really help you; you just have to have it you know?”. Ah thx ^^.

16

Agreed. IL2/FB is not really a good sim for the novice. So i assume he hasn’t touched Complex Engine Management ? That requires about 20 extra keyboard command assignments. :wink:

17

I have just read Jakub’s review of IL2FB.

I guess you were writing the review from the perspective of a mainstream game player so I can’t fault you on any of the points you raised in the review. It’s a good review.

Yes the UBI.COM multiplayer service is absolutely terrible. We all complained long and hard to UBI about it and they promptly ignored us. Therefore 90% of IL2/FB online pilots use HyperLOBBY. If it wasn’t for HyperLOBBY I would predict that IL2 would not be as popular as it is now.

As an IL2 grognard I didn’t mind paying full price for Forgotten Battles. If it helps Oleg finance future flight sim projects I am more than happy to accomodate him. I purchased two copies of FB for that simple reason.

18

The lack of key assignments is annoying to the experienced sim player too…

I’d love to see a program that would print a keychart based on your IL-2 assignments.

FWIW on Jakub’s story, though, I wonder what was up with that joystick. With my Saitek X45 (just working as a joystick/throttle, programming software not installed), the stick and throttle worked out of the box, and the first button was assigned properly.

Ah. I bet I know. He’s probably got a gamepad, etc. as well. IL-2 by default assigns to whatever device was assigned the #0 slot. I had to reinstall Windows with the original IL-2 because IL-2 couldn’t be convinced the USB rudder setup I had once plugged in wasn’t my joystick.

19

Yes same here. The first thing I had to do when I got FB was spend two hours assigning keys and testing them in the sim to make sure they worked properly.

A keychart utility is a great idea. How are your programming skills Denny ? :)

20

Denny, I had the same problem with my CH USB HOTAS set-up: FB didn’t recognize it at all. And I didn’t have any other devices plugged in. My buddy had a Logitech set-up, as I recall, and it didn’t recognize that either.

And yeah, a keyboard reference card that is 50% filled with “user defined” is just lazy on the developers part. At least fill it with default keys, and then let the player re-assign anything he wants.