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Ok so I had a great time last night, but playing only convinced me that I need more practice if I'm gonna play this on a regular basis, which is something I would like to do of course. Steel was right, it's funny what I get upset about. But when it comes to dogfighting, I really, really hate to lose.

German fighters are really no problem. They are challenging, dangerous, but typically you can hang with them. Japanese fighters, on the other hand, require the zoom and boom tactics that I personally dislike using. After numerous tries today, I managed to learn how to take on ONE Japanese fighter and be successful rather consistently. Fire going head to head, unlike their German counterparts, these guys are very aggressive. You might get lucky. If not, have enough airspeed to split-s or loop over, then come back on him. Don't bank turn on these guys, you'll die. Now as he passes by you a second time, throttle down and ease in behind him. Don't lose the advantage. If you do, extend away and repeat. This is a completely different sort of dogfighting.

Now I have set up a training regiment for myself. I'm using the corsair for now. Next step is to take on two fighters. Then go back to one fighter, but use another plane, say the hellcat. Then, use the hellcat against two and so on. The whole point of doing so is that when we fly together I don't stall out and miss the fight before it even starts or die almost immediately in my first encounter with the japanese, which sucks because then you have to wait. I don't mind losing. I just hate losing pathetically. LOL Anyone want to fly with me just let me know. I'll practice with them.

I'd say about half the time I die in Il-2, it's from the initial merge. The AI are crack shots regardless of how well they fly, and somewhat oddly they seem to have a BETTER chance of hitting you when attacking from the front quarter than the other 3!
The other thing that bugs me is when I get a hole in my wing, my plane flies like someone is trying to roll it that way, but the AI can get holes big enough to walk through in theirs and they shrug it off. Only LOSING a wing affects them.
I can't even count the number of times I've seen an AI lose their vertical fin (not just the rudder, the whole fin!) and continue to fight effectively.

O.K. - that's it. We should stop playing this game! ;)

Well, ideally we'd have enough people flying to populate BOTH sides, because then we'd be truly even. Unlike FPS games where adversarial can become tedious due to people taking WAY too long to do anything followed by several seconds of frantic action, in WWII dogfighting the action is continous without being too tiring. No button pushing or missile jousting, which also often frustrates players with less experience in that particular game.

It's sort of universally acknowledged that the AI in the Il-2 series get unfair advantages to make up for their shortcomings--namely fudged FMs because they'd be unable to fly the ones we do and super aim. I hope that BoB fixes that.
Of course, Il-2 remains hugely popular in part because so many people NEVER fly with any AI, just humans-only H2H/coop. You start talking about AI and they just tune out because it means nothing to them.

Well I have to say, given the frailties of the various aircraft and their lack of compatabilities with their adversary, I find it hard to believe that there were any true dogfighting situations fighter versus fighter - or maybe I'm just a hamfisted jet jockey! :roll: :lol: