No. You get a box full of toys. A guitar, a drumkit and a bass. You make the music. Or buy a couple records (the DLC campaigns). Thereās also a ton of user content that is fun and interesting. A mission or series of missions in DCS are best compared to a song in which you get to play a part. They rarely are very dynamic in that things will play out the same way according to the script. And some of those scripts are really fucking great. You can also roll your own. The editor is not that hard.
Both the spitfire and mustang are in DCS. The spitfire is also in Il2 in two different marks. il2 is no longer strictly ww2 ostfront. They are working on a battle of the bulge late war western front map and planepack and also a ww1 western front map. The DCS spitfire gets the nod from me as a pure man-and-plane experience. Itās also really fucking hard. I would not reccomend a n00b to go and try tame those motherfuckers. You need to know flying to be comfortable in a spitfire. Or turn it around, master it and then you can master anything.
Sidenote, the damage modelling in il2 is far better currently than DCSās so for fun and engaging destruction of planes up close (such as your own ride), il2 BoX canāt be beat.
Of these, the F/A-18 would be my reccomendation to you. The harrier is very fun, but squirrely and weird as a plane. The warthog is awesome but slow, underpowered. It does one thing and does it real good. Same goes for the F-15C (the FC3 one) which does another thing real good but that machine just is boring as fuck. It flies like its on rails, has all the power and only one role.
Now the hornet is a roaring hotrod compared to the hog but has almost all of the tools to make the things on the ground go boom. It also fights other planes quite well, and has some really nifty tools to do that such as heat seekers that you aim with your head and that can do 180s.
And you get to fail at carrier landings as well! Thereās no feeling like your first succesful carrier trap.
Now the hornet is āyoungā and does not have all of its goodies. Stuff like guided bombs, an electro-optical targetting pod, antiship missiles, etc. Not like youād need those as a noob. Just doing circuits and 1v1s and throwing Mk-84s at ammo dumps should keep you occupied until itās all done and people start building elaborate scripts for it.
And the tomcatā¦ Well it aint out yet so thereās that. Itās also twenty years older tech than the hornet, so even though it gets almost as diverse a toolset as the hornet, it will be far harder to not fuck up in. You need to do some of that pilot shit, and better know your rudder from your stick if you donāt want goose to die every time a bandit crosses your nose.
What you need to dance the pedals to counter torque in a tail dragger is your inner ear, your sense of balance and accelerations. The sim doesnt have any way to speak to that (yet!). So yeah. We need to compensate with experience or turn a realism slider down ;-)
