Install Steam
login
|
language
简体中文 (Simplified Chinese)
繁體中文 (Traditional Chinese)
日本語 (Japanese)
한국어 (Korean)
ไทย (Thai)
Български (Bulgarian)
Čeština (Czech)
Dansk (Danish)
Deutsch (German)
Español - España (Spanish - Spain)
Español - Latinoamérica (Spanish - Latin America)
Ελληνικά (Greek)
Français (French)
Italiano (Italian)
Bahasa Indonesia (Indonesian)
Magyar (Hungarian)
Nederlands (Dutch)
Norsk (Norwegian)
Polski (Polish)
Português (Portuguese - Portugal)
Português - Brasil (Portuguese - Brazil)
Română (Romanian)
Русский (Russian)
Suomi (Finnish)
Svenska (Swedish)
Türkçe (Turkish)
Tiếng Việt (Vietnamese)
Українська (Ukrainian)
Report a translation problem
Discussions Rules and Guidelines
Report this post
1. Intercept bomber/recon mission: Ignore fighters, only fire at big things, you won't hit wrong target. Don't play intercept attacker mission, the target is usually il2 which is difficult to shoot down.
2. Bomb train station/bridge mission: The target is easy to identify. Drop bombs and fly straight home.
Don't know how to identify enemy aircraft? Go to this folder: IL-2 Sturmovik Battle of Stalingrad\bin\viewer, open view.exe, select an aircraft and observe it using WEFT method: wing, engine, fuselage, tail. But even if you've done well here, it's still harder to identify in the game than in real life because of FOV, resolution, frame rate.
For radio message, you need to know your call sign from mission brief first, because not all messages you receive are coming from your squadron. Some aircraft also allow you to receive enemy message (LAlt+C to select channel).
https://forum.il2sturmovik.com/topic/38978-mod-icons/
* You'll need to enable mods.
There is also an option to run a mini-map in the bottom corner of the screen. It will show your course and waypoints and also the presence of aircraft around you. You can toggle it on and off as you need to. I believe the toggle key is M by default.
Just a thought, it's what I did when new to this sim.
Also, you can "record" the tracks, and go back and look at them from all sorts of different views and angles, again you can slow time down. This allows you to see how the AI pilots fly and fight, and help identify where you went wrong when/if you get killed.
Don't be hard on yourself, just take the tools available and use them to your advantage to help you learn.
Your AI wingman could care less about you. You can have 4 enemy chasing you, and unless the AI decides it is to their advantage, they won't care. They will form up and fly away from you and not give it a second thought.
And they won't be grateful if you bail them out and kill someone chasing them. I do try to get to know the pilots and take care of them, but don't put yourself in a dangerous spot to help them. It doesn't matter, they'll be replaced.
So, knowing that, use them to your advantage. Basically, use them as screens and decoys.
Keep them between yourself and enemy fighters. When you see a group of enemy fighters approaching, move yourself to put your wingmen betwen you and the enemy.
Then, when the combat "furball" starts, stay a bit out of the battle and watch, until you see an opportunity to dive in and engage. Follow up on your attack until you kill your target or it becomes pointless, then move away and repeat the cycle again....watch, pick a moment, engage, and then disengage, rinse and repeat. If you get in a tight spot and are being chased by a couple of enemy, try to fly towards one of your wingmen and hopefully the enemy will decide to peel off and engage your wingmen instead.
Also, if your target starts to run away from the battle, don't chase him, disengage, and turn back to the main fight where your flight is. Don't get too far from them. Because as I said, they will leave you. While you're out chasing an enemy, your wingmen will form back up and go back to their route to the next waypoint, not giving you a second thought. They won't wait around or wonder where you are.
Just realize it's about YOU, and your wingmen are there to act as alternate targets for YOU to survive. They don't care about you, they won't wait for you, they won't look for you.
I started a new career flying the Normandy campaign last week with the Luftwaffe (odds were already stacked against me) and seeing a squadron of P-51's dove right in and promptly got myself buried in an orchard in France.
Almost "bought the farm" yesterday flying my P-51 B on an escort mission. I took the bait, strayed from my flight, and got tangled up with two Fw 190 s off the English coast. Fortunately, I made it back from that particular scrape.
Just the other night, was flying a campaign in Pat Wilson's generator, and I have the configuration set to a lot of aircraft since I have a good system that can handle the load.
During a furball of 6 of my flight and about 10 of german fighters, eventually 4 german 109's all locked in and started chasing me in a P-51. I tried every tactic I mentioned to shake them. The germans would not bite on any other friendly aircraft, and none of my flight would attack them. I took some hits, and even lost half on side of my stabilizer. Luckily the P-51 still flies ok even damaged like that. So I took the only available option, to beat feet.
The germans followed me as I ran home, locked in. I came across a flight of 3 friendlies on the way, and climbed up to see if they would assist or the germans would tangle with them. It was 3 British Spits, and even though I flew close enough to them to see their heads, and did a circle around them, not a single Spit tried to engage the 109's. Acted as if they and I didn't even exist. Left that, and came across another flight of 4 P-47's, Same reaction, they didn't care, neither did the 109's.
Eventually my route brought me across Antwerp, and it was LOADED with friendly AAA and Flak guns. YAY!, I thought. The AAA and Flak opened up in a glorious display of firepower, it looked like Baghdad during the first Gulf War when the F-117's were attacking at night....tracers filled the sky. I circled and circled, and eventually the AAA brought down 1 of the 109's. Any sane pilot would have broken off the attack at this point, but not these Germans.
I realized at that point that if I left and tried to run for home again, the 109's would just keep following. I've had them chase me all the way to my home base before. So I decided to cut my losses and just land at the Antwerp airfield and end the mission. I was still given a "Success'.
But yeah, that's my 'tude. You're really in it alone, all friendlies are there to be other targets, and thats how I use them. I DO try to help them when there is no danger to do so, especially if there is a furball on the way to the target, because I need them to stay alive until we get to the target.
It's really a shame it's like this, because since they have names and you see their names in flight, immersion wise I do get a little attached to them, and it stinks to have to treat them as nothing more than tools to keep myself alive, but it is what it is.
And the sooner one adopts that perspective, the easier things go for you.
I imagine myself as the brooding loner, staying detached, aloof to my fellow pilots, and avoiding idle chit chat with them. I sit alone at the end of the bar, read in my bunk, and just keep the fraternization to a minimum. I'm focused on making it home at the end of the war, and as a result I watch many a good young man descend while burning alive in their cockpit. Any feelings of remorse are minimal, things like that can cause one to lose focus on the primary goal, getting home alive.
Hey, one other thing, as I also have a Normandy campaign going in the PWCG.
When your mission is up in the north, the distance between France and England is minimal, and the missions can be short. But missions flying down toward Normandy will take up your entire fuel load, and run from 2-2/12 hours, basically a full bag of gas. And those missions make you realize that they only really had about 15-20 minutes of actual on-station time near the target area before you have to head back home. And many times I've really sweated the fuel situation on those long flights back, having to really manage how much throttle I'm using to keep the burn rate down to a minimum.
And really intense when you are hurt and/or your aircraft is damaged, that can really be a tense flight flying back from Normandy in a broken plane hoping the engine doesn't quit in the middle of the Channel.
The Normandy Campaigns are interesting flying the allied side, as it really makes you realize how relatively small the combat area was, and the difference in distances and how they affect your game. You are basically going through what the real pilots did, flying a full fuel load. Sometimes it's so intense you don't realize that you just spent 2 hours on the mission. The ground crews had enough time to go get a bite to eat and maybe grab a quick nap before the aircraft were back. And they probably did 2 or three of those a day. And raids happened so quick they really had to hustle to get in the air, and some of those engagements probably only lasted 10-15 minutes, as noted there wasn't a whole lot of time on station because of fuel limitations. Guys on alert might have to do those quick 30 minute defense missions time after time all day long during the Battle of Britain.
I did 20 years IRL as an Army Blackhawk Crewchief and later an aircraft inspector, 19 of 20 years on flight status, so I really think about the entire mission "cycle' and what goes on before, during, and after the mission. For many years I led the maintenance "BDAR" team (Battle Damage Assessment and Repair) which consisted of evaluating Battle Damage and running a dedicated team of mechanics specializing in field expedient repairs to get the aircraft back into the fight as quickly as possible. The film "Battle of Britain" is great, I don't know how many times I've watched it. Covers pretty much every aspect, including a brief scene on the maintenance side of the struggles the British had during that fight trying to keep as many planes up as possible, with the mechanics working 24-36 hours straight.
That battle was literally a battle for their existence, and it's really hard to express what those pilots, ground crews, command HQ and the airspace controllers went through, but the film does a great job of conveying exactly how difficult it was, and how close Britain really came to losing that fight. If England had fallen, the Allies would have to had to somehow find a way to invade England, or manage the invasion from North Africa and Italy, and that would have been a much different war in Europe.
It's really fascinating.
Flying in VR mode today, I found myself lost once more in the experience, and when my face could no longer stand wearing my Meta Quest Pro any longer, I took a break to enjoy an adult beverage and thought of those men ( of all nations ) who couldn't take a break, who lived and died in those turbulent skies so long ago.
“I see 2 rivers coming together in a city, can I find that on my map?”
Probably the best value gaming utility out there, can be used with any applications that has keyboard presses. Also supports joysticks and HOTAS, and so many other functions I can't even list them all.
It's not hard at all. I make my profiles match the exact settings in each sim/game by name, and then add the multiple voice commands i might use (Landing gear;gear down;gear up;deploy landing gear;retract landing gear) etc. Spending a little time training the voice recocgnition in Windows is required.
It's so advanced you can do little "scripts" also. For instance, in my DCS Apache, I set up a little "script" in voice attack to adjust every instrument lighting knob, external lights, etc. for NVG / Night flying. So I say one command "Night flight", and the voiceattack script sets every instrument lighting just how I want. No fiddling with each knob. I also have it give me text to speech feedback for each adjustment, for instance it will say "Left MPD, set".
Anyone who flys VR is probably using it. You can't be fiddling with the keyboard in VR, and you can't fit everything on the HOTAS.
I use it for all flight sims, also Elite Dangerous. I never take my hands off the HOTAS.
It will do about anything. I think I even have a command to open Edge, pull up a page that has WW2 era music, and launch some era music as I'm flying.
Son of a gun if you're not loaded with great information. Looking for VoiceAttack now and will get to work on setting it up,
To get you started, I have uploaded my basic Voiceattack profile for IL-2 BOS you can download and import into your new Voiceattack (it's a .vap profile)
This will let you see how I prefer to set things up. You'll see the "Description" of each command mirrors the keybinding in IL-2, and the "Category" mirrors the categories in IL-2 settings also.
Be advised this profile was taken from another guys profile, and there are a LOT of unused/junk commands in there. As I have slowly modified it with the ones I used I have appended the Categories with "Mike" to show the ones I use.
But it will let you see how it's done. Just follow the instructions in Voiceattack to "import" a profile.
I also loaded my DCS AH-64 Apache profile, so you can load that and see an example of a multi-command script/macro I mentioned, it's under "3-Multi-Command Scripts / Night Flight". If you open that command up, you will see the script and how I did it. Basically what it does is execute other voiceattack commands one right after another.
So again, it will look a bit intimidating once you start using it, but VA is really pretty easy and has a massive amount of things you can do with it. The first thing you will want to do is run the "voice training" in there several times in a row at first, and then maybe once every few days for a month or two to keep fine tuning it to recognize your speech pattern and dialect. There are instances and dialects that VA struggles with, I hear that Scottish is probably the most difficult language for VA to interpret.
Another hint, when creating the actual "words" you are going to use, say the words with the voiceattack window and look at how it interprets and what it prints out when you say it. Just think logically. For instance the number 3. It will recognize 3, but it may misinterpret and print "tree", and it will go unrecognized. So, make one of your voice commands for 3 "tree". For something like "Jettison", in addition to the command "Jettison", also type in "Jetty son". For something like "FCR" (the apache fire control radar), you would type in "F C R", "eff see are", etc. etc. See what I mean? Type in commands/word that VA might think you are saying. WHEN TYPING IN MULTIPLE COMMANDS, SEPERATE THE COMMANDS WITH A SEMI-COLON ( ; ) For instance "FCR;F C R;eff see r;F see are" Just think about it, and make sure and put in multiple variations of words you might say to do something, as I had mentioned before. Don't just try to use one voice command, because you may not remember that exact command.
Best of luck.
IL-2 Voice attack profile download link:
IL-2 profile .vap download link [drive.google.com]
AH-64 Voice attack profile download link:
DCS AH-64 profile .vap download link [drive.google.com]
Just anyone who downloads that IL-2 .vap profile be aware, it is chock full of unused and some erroneous commands, as mentioned I took it from somewhere else and have slowly been modifying it to my liking and deleting unused stuff. There's just a bunch of stuff in there not relevant and needs to be cleaned out, which is why I've been labeling certain areas with "Mike" appended to them, meaning those I use. But even some of those are still getting cleaned up.
I may post a seperate thread with an ongoing link to download as I update that profile.