IL-2 Sturmovik: Help?

The Game Room
1

A couple of days ago I bought IL-2 Sturmovik: 1946 from Steam – basically, it’s the whole IL-2 series for $10, I’ve always heard good things, and it’s old enough to be gentle on my wimpy video card, so why not?

But, problems. Some very basic stuff is eluding me. After a few tries I managed to take off successfully, but as soon as I throttle up my plane wants to veer off to one side, and compensating with the rudder is difficult, so I almost always wind up taxiing off the runway entirely, eventually lifting off with my ass a-bumpin’ on the ground (if I don’t slam into an airplane hangar before I get airborne). Once in the air, I have trouble locating other planes and, when I do, identifying friend or foe is near impossible. On my map, locating myself, let alone my objectives or other planes in the sky, is often problematic. I stall out with alarming regularity, and can’t hit the near side of a barn with my guns, though I imagine these are just a matter of getting some more experience. I don’t know how to land, though for now that’s purely an academic question: I’ve yet to reach the end of a mission in one piece, and even if I did I have no doubt I’d be unable to locate the airfield.

At the moment I’m scouring Google for any beginner’s guides and walkthroughs, and YouTube for videos of people playing the game without sucking, and even the game manual for basic info. In the meantime, though, if anyone has any advice (or links) to get a newb off the ground, that’d be great. I want to like the game, but if I don’t attain a bare minimum of skill soon, my brain is likely to give up on the thing forever.

And if you want to talk about non-beginner concepts, or just anything IL-2 related at all, that’s cool too. Everything helps.

2

Ok, so I can turn on auto-pilot which will, apparently, fly me through my waypoints on the way to an objective. And I can toggle various unrealism switches that will put labels on the aircraft I see through my windshield, or show flightpaths on my map, or even make it so that I don’t have to take off or land. Even assuming I never want to learn how to do these things on my own, there are still about 50 things I don’t know how to do, many of which are unknown unknowns. So, yeah, any thoughts on the kinds of things you learned how to do in the game that helped you to stop sucking, please to share. Thanks.

3

The thing about the plane wanting to turn on takeoff is real. There are a few different reasons for it, all based on which way the propellor is turning. (In most American planes that I know of, the prop turns clockwise (as seen through the windshield) and you have to apply right rudder on takeoff.) I have no idea which way the Il-2 turns.) For example, the blast of air blown backwards from the propellor also has a bit of a twist to it. It spirals along the fuselage and hits the vertical stabilizer. That pushes the back of the plane sideways.

In the real world, you know that it’s going to happen and compensate for it with the rudder. (One problem with flight sims is that the view is limited to just the monitor in front of you; no peripheral vision to see the sides of the runway or other visual cues. And it’s worst in a tail-dragger.) You can either do that, or look for something among the options that would let you dial down some of those difficult tendencies.

4

Another takeoff tip is to throttle up slowly. Not only does it slow the rate at which you need to fuss with the rudder, it cuts down on the torque skew. WW2 fighters tend to have very powerful engines for their weight, so slamming the throttle can do some “interesting” things, all the way up to rolling over a fighter with a narrow wheel base. IL-2’s runways tend to be far longer than you need to take off, so you can afford to take it slowly.

As for identifying friend or foe, IL2 does have view zoom controls that helps make up for the lack of resolution on a monitor vs an eyeball, but the primary method is going to be comparing your position against the mission briefing of what’s enemy territory. The terrain is kind of generic, so it’s pretty hard at first to keep a feel for where you are, feel free to leave the map position or aircraft labels on while you’re learning. Positional awareness is a big concept to be working on when you’re still figuring out how to just navigate.

For general new player tips, you’ll find, once you first get to the actual shooting bit, that it’s difficult to hit targets. IL-2’s gunnery modeling is not forgiving in the least, and so, if you’re used to other flight games, you’ll need to be at what feels like incredibly close range to reliably land hits. You can pretty much forget trying to hit a maneuvering target beyond anything but point blank range.

5

IIRC IL-2 is very much on the sim side. You really need a joystick.

Get yourself a decent 4-axis joystick, like the Saitek Cyborg. Applying opposite rudder will be easy.

Once you’re hooked, get yourself a full HOTAS like the Saitek X52 and a set of rudder pedals. But they’re expensive.

I’ve given links to Saitek, but other manufacturers are CH Products and Thrustmaster

Once you’ve got your stick, set one of the ‘hats’ to view up, left, rear, and right so you can quickly scan the area.

6

The Il-2 community is still very active and you can get a lot of help from the ubisoft forums here. Even more usefull is A nuggets guide to getting off the ground, which is stickied at the top of the forum.

First thing to do is to go into the control options and assigns buttons to some of the more important fumctions that are left unassigned by default. Find the **Lock Tailwheel **option and assign a button to it, around there you should also find an option for Chocks, wing fold, tail hook, canopy open and seat adjust. All of these are usefull if you plan on trying carrier ops, which I wouldn’t just yet, but are good examples of important controls that the game requires you to enable.

Lock the tail wheel on take off to keep your nose straight while the tail is on the ground.

Tips to avoid stalling, keep your speed up to avoid a low speed stall and avoid yanking back hard on the stick to avoid a high speed stall. The best aircraft to demonstrate a high speed stall is the P-39, take one for a flight using the Quick Mission Builder and you will start in the air at 1000m. While flying level pull back hard on the stick, the nose will swing up and then violently to the side and down as the plane stalls and then enters a spin, you then spend the next few moments cursing Bell before you smack into the ground. The P-39 is one of the original aircraft in the sim and is very twitchy compared to later additions but almost every plane can enter a high speed stall if you push them hard enough.

The key to shooting down other planes is to get closer to your target, less than 100m, so close he fills your gunsight. Shots from 300+ meters are tempting but just waste ammo, get in close, aim for the centre of the target and fire *all *your guns, its no good fondling him with just your machine guns if you have cannon, press both your triggers and watch the cannon shells blow him in half.

The quickest way to get into the game is to play ground attack missions, in the Quick Mission Builder, take either an Il-2 or a Stuka, set the map to Smolensk select armour as a ground target and then go to town strafing and bombing them. If you can hit ground targets then other aircraft become less of a challenge.

7

Calibration of your joystick is very important IIRC. The default settings would accelerate pitch and roll far too sharply, making it near impossible to make small subtle corrections. It also made your plane much more prone to stalling.

Instead of a linear ramp, or even horizontal settings, across the joystick bands, I like a progressive curved slope (like an exponential function).

8

My biggest tip to not succumb to the torque during takeoff is to A: throttle up slowly, and B: there is a button you can assign to lock the tailwheel, which will take off some of the rudder loads during takeoff.

Geez, I haven’t played this in a long time now.

Second on not yanking on the controls, be gentle and smooth (though yanking on the stick was a way P-51 pilots could induce a quick tip stall and sharp roll to avoid fire).

Cheers and good luck on a fun game, Ive been playing it for 7 or so years, and am looking forward to the new offering that has been in the pipeline for many years so far.

9

Thanks to everyone who posted links and info.

I was well on my way to giving up on the game as a fun thing to do, but then I had a cool moment. I had toggled some of the switches to make the game easier/simpler: starting missions in mid-air instead of a runway, putting labels on friendly and enemy aircraft, and placing icons on the in-flight map. I adjusted the joystick profile in the manner suggested in yendis’s link (which did make the plane much easier to control). And, most importantly, I broke down and hit Ctrl-F1 to activate the see-through cockpit and give me the view from Wonder Woman’s invisible plane.

So I pick a single mission flying a German ME-262, figuring that I should at least try out a jet fighter before the game hits my recycle bin. The mission is little more than a free-for-all between (IIRC) eight 262s, in two successive wings of four, and a whole gaggle of Russian MiGs and Yaks. I’m in the lead wing, on autopilot, and I see on my radar/map that my wing is on course to slam into the enemy’s main body head on, with the other 262 wing maybe 1-2 minutes behind me. Obviously this represents a lousy strategy, so I lead my wing off on a tangent that will result in the second German wing meeting the enemy body head on while my wing simultaneously hits it at about a 60 degree angle. The maneuver comes of rather well, and my map tells me I should start scanning the sky visually for enemy aircraft.

And this is the cool part. I’m way way up there, about 2.5km. It’s a partly cloudy day (with great visibility), and these are the huge, tall , pure white clouds that are gorgeous to look at from the air. I break out of a cloud bank and and there’s a great big expanse of open sky between me and the next cloud bank. Holding course and scanning the white background in front of me, I make out eight distinct dots, grouped in pairs, on a collision course for the second wing of 262s. This brings a smile. Then four more dots break out of the clouds in the distance, these at a higher altitude than even me. Then, seemingly all at once, another dozen tandems, coming into view at all different locations and elevations, but all on the same heading, towards our second wing.

And then they broke formation, and there were anywhere from two to three dozen Russian fighters climbing, diving, and circling in every direction, and there’s nothing for me to do except dive into the middle of the herd, pick out the most appealing target (i.e., the one that’s showing me the most of its ass), and dive in full throttle. I do, in fact, get on his 6, dodging potshots on the way, and I even manage to blow the hell out of his wing for my first kill ever in this game. That said wing then broke off the Russian plane and slammed into mine, thus killing me, barely even put a damper on this awesome moment.
So, anyway, the point is that now I’m having fun with IL-2 Sturmovik. Thanks again to those who took the time to respond.