I’m vaguely interested in certain genres of modern computer simulation games that are playable and fun.
I’ve had bad luck getting some games to work and other games have been simplistic or overly opaque, so i am looking fo word-of-mouth endorsements more than anything else.
I’m particularly interested in submarine warfare simulations (modern or WWII) and fighter flight simulations (WWII more than anythng else).
These can be “offline-solo” or “play-online-with-others” games.
I used to enjoy various sub sims but never really found a decent/working fighter sim.
Examples of “never worked right”: AH-64 Longbow Apache combat sim – the briefing tent had a “click here to start briefing” button but nothing ever happened, game was a dud. Pacific Fighters (Might have the name wrong, was a carrier fighter sim) the planes all rolled to one side no matter what combination of controls I used; they just rolled slowly to that side and off the deck in splashed in, every damned time.
I am not familiar with what’s state-of-the-art these days. I rrecall hearing about Warbirds Online or something similar but that was a looong time ago. Sometimes I go to game review sites and try to read reviews but it’s pretty hard to tell from those reviews and nobody has a “what is the state of the art in sims” article for handy perusal, so I have been reluctant to purchase experimentally.
I have a good connection now and a semi-decent though aging machine, and would like to sink a few ships and maybe put a burst into a Focke-Wulf 190 if it’s not too much to ask of the people who create simulation games.
Yeah I played Aces High as well. It was pretty cool except that I always got my arse handed to me because I couldn’t devote myself to it the way others did, i.e., it didn’t seem to be that enjoyable for casual players.
Silent Hunter IV is my most recent favorite WWII subsim. It’s pretty impressively deep, and allows for a fairly open-ended approach. My only real complaint is that it has an extremely steep learning curve and insufficient tutorials, so even with the help of some SDMB folks and a forum, I found it too daunting: it was great fun to play, but I realized that my only reliable strategy was “Sail until you find a fleet, reload an earlier save game, position yourself to intercept, and blow up a freighter”.
Sturmovik and and Battle of Britain II both suffer from poor documentation and tutorials, in my experience–BoB2 was particularly awful, in that unless you navigated the horrifying menu interface and turned the difficulty down, it started you out with full flight dynamics. That would have been fine with fair warning, but those of us expecting a typical realism-oriented WWII fighter sim were not expecting to have to, say, map a control to compensate aileron trim to counter engine torque. Equally, without a guide to what the Spitfire’s cockpit indicators all mean, even taking off can be a challenge. (frankly,I have a beef with all “realistic-cockpit” flight sims that don’t include the VR helmet so I can just look down instead of fumbling for a viewpoint control)
I’d be interested in any decent flight sims as well. I’m equally interested in modern fighters, but to be perfectly honest I’ve never been attracted to Falcon 4.x–Jane’s Fighters Anthology was more to my speed.
If someone knows of a B-1/B-52 sim, though, I’ll pay almost any price. The big bombers (and associated “stomp the enemy airbase” multiplayer mode) were the draw for me.
Say what? Trim’s a pretty basic flight function. Even the online dogfighter sims (Warbirds, Aces High) have had it for the better part of a decade. In a Battle of Britain game it’s near on mandatory - the massive torque is a defining feature of the engine-with-wings-attached that is a Spitfire.
Anyway, the sim market has been pretty much dead for a depressingly long time now. Falcon 4.0 remains the gold standard of modern fighter, although it has at least been retouched & rereleased since its debut. Lock-On is the nearest competitor, although I didn’t really find much meat to it.
Longbow 2 is still king of helicopters, although I haven’t gotten to try this new Russian “DCS” thing yet. It sounds like it could put up a fight, but I’m a bit leery of the draconian copy protection.
IL2: 1946 is the only real contender in WW2 stuff, although the online dogfighters deserve honorable mention - they can be a lot of fun if you’re into that sort of thing.
GOG.com has a 30% off deal.
IL-2 Sturmovik™: 1946 for $6.99 or F/A -18A Super Hornet, Enemy Engage: Apache vs. Havoc and Enemy Engage: Comanche vs. Hokum for $4.19 each.
(Yes. They’re licensed, legit, and DRM-free.)
The IL-2 one is all previous games in one, comes with manual, reference card, plane guide, and renders. Pretty!
I should reiterate–I wasn’t expecting it by default on the “first flight for beginners” mission. =P I’m mostly a jet fighter/bomber sim guy, so “roll trim to compensate for the engine” is a new concept for me. Also, I don’t remember engine trim being a factor in IL-2 when I played it, which wasn’t very much, admittedly.
Plus, it just struck me as too much–I couldn’t even get the damn thing to take off until I figured out how to turn off engine torque because even with my trim wheel on my X52 all the way over I was still banking perceptibly. And the manual was ass for figuring out how to properly set the controls up so it was even flyable.
I’m ready to admit I missed something, but to be honest it was an impulse buy solely because I’m sick to death of Falcon 4.0, so I sold it a while back.
Blah. Falcon 4.0 would be nice if there was any selection of flyable aircraft for it. What it boils down to for me is that I want a flight sim where I can take a B-1 or B-52 out and hammer on something.
Back when I was in the Navy, I spent many, many weeks in submarine warfare simulators. And after spending 8+ hours going through a simulation with the whole control room section tracking party, you could look forward to heading back to the boat so that the XO could scream at you because you were behind in your quals and your division was behind in their maintenance. :rolleyes:
Next morning, back to the simulator. Rinse and repeat until you finally go to sea so you can back down from 18-hour workdays to a three-section watch rotation.
Good times.
Oh, you asked about a fun simulator? Never mind.
The simulators I’m referring to are the shore-based ones that replicate a submarine control room. You can also run a simulated engagement in an actual sub control room, simply by inserting computer-generated contacts into the combat control systems.
When I was a newly qualified Officer of the Deck (OOD) on a submarine, my XO once ran a surprise simulator drill on me when I was on watch at sea. Sonar reported an unknown submerged contact (which is a BIG deal). Seconds later, Sonar reported that there was a torpedo in the water. I started evasive maneuvers and was all ready to shoot a return snap shot when they ended the drill. (There were drill monitors in the torpedo room to ensure that we didn’t accidentally shoot a real torpedo. At $3.5M a pop for a MK 48 ADCAP torpedo, that would have been an expensive drill.)
That simulated engagement actually was fun, in retrospect. Especially once I had a chance to change my underwear.
Familiar with Free Falcon? Adds a whole host of new flyable planes to Falcon 4.0, and one screenie at the above site at least shows a Russian Bear bomber (not sure if it is flyable or not tho).
Robby, do you know about Dangerous Waters? Modern day subsim which gives you several playable platforms (subs, surface, & air, incl. helos).
Pacific Fighters (the game the OP complains about) *is *IL-2 Sturmovik with a different coat of paint. However, the planes slowly rolling to one side is per design - it’s due to the prop torque. The player is supposed to compensate for it using trim. In fact, the player is supposed to trim and re-trim his plane all the damn time depending on wind, altitude, engine RPM… Which is realistic, I suppose, but danged annoying as far as I’m concerned. Never really got into it myself.
Falcon 4.0 may be an old game, but it’s still patched and tweaked by fans and has a cult following. And with the engine and texture updates, it still looks gorgeous. As Mehkazzio, although Lock-On is technically impeccable (as was Flanker 2.0 before), and the different planes each have their feel, the lack of a single player dynamic campaign kills it for me. Strings of stand-alone missions haven’t done it for me since Jane’s F-15. Which is a shame, really, because it’s rare one gets to play with Russian birds and their weird gizmos.
As for sub sims, well, if it’s the old tin cans you’re into, it’s pretty hard to beat Silent Hunter III/IV. Number V is in the works and due out any time now, I think (although the previous two games needed a lot of fan mods to become fun for me - especially the add-on of triangulating tools and knots-cum-time-to-kilometers-travelled ruler right on the map). As for modern subs… don’t know really. I used to play Jane’s 688i and its follow-up game with the Akula, but never found them as fun as WW2 sub sims. Shooting a torpedo from beyond horizon range just isn’t as satisfying as a balls-on under the smokestack, right under the keel fish that you can watch all the way in. Boom, heads err… steamroom shot
This was almost exactly my problem with Battle of Britain 2–a lot of prop fighter sims apparently have confusing trim mechanics to go with their realistic engine torque.
I hadn’t heard of Free Falcon, I’ll give it a look. Mmm, Bear bombers. Now if you give me a realistic Down Beat surface search radar and a bunch of networked-in buddies in the Tu-160s loitering off in the distance, my life will be complete.
How would IL-2 or other flight sims that are a few years old run on my computer given a video card that’s pretty lame (Nvidia GeForce 6150SE nForce 430)? Thanks.
I do apologize if I’m being a dick with this answer, but there’s an easy and surefire way to know : grab the demo.
An easier, faster but also iffier way would be to use this. IL2 isn’t listed (too old, maybe ?) but Pacific Fighters is and as I said earlier, it’s basically the same game with different planes.
I’ve been going to the websites for Aces High II and WarBirds, which are apparently the two competing giants of multiplayer fighter sims…the Coke and Pepsi, the PC and Mac, the FedEx and UPS. I’ve also Googled some for “WarBirds vs Aces High” looking for comparison opinions.
So far, it’s been hard to tell what info is current and what is years old. Looks like the technology is comparable; some claim WarBirds is a smaller community but socially better…?
I’m still undecided whether to try any multiplayer sim community, and further undecided between these two, so I’d welcome any comments or opinions.
Even tho I am an old Air Warrior, I have been reluctant (economy’s part of it to be sure) to get involved in MMO flight sims again. My main issue is how they bowdlerize things down to the lowest common denominator (which in this case is pandering to the 30+ plane furball monkeys-been there done that 20 years ago). Both games have strategic functionality, but things get rebuilt too quickly for it to be worth your while to bomb anything other than forward airfields. The more realistic arenas apparently don’t see much traffic, thus apart from the occasional historical scenario there’s little new under the sun for me.
The problem with things like trim in a flight sim is that it’s all well and good in a real aeroplane when you can feel what’s happening and you have big knobs to adjust the settings with, you can do it without thinking, but in a sim it takes up much more brain space than it should. It’s a bit like rudder, in real life, you don’t think about using the rudder, you just do it, in a sim you only have very limited visual cues to use and trying to coordinate the rudder with the aileron is much more work than it should be. Also if you were having to adjust trim for wind and altitude then that’s not realistic, wind and altitude should have no effect on trim, just engine power and indicated airspeed.
Another problem with flight sim trim is that it doesn’t work realistically. Trim is used to change the neutral position of the stick and rudder pedals, it does not give you any more control movement than you already had. Yet I’ve flown sims that, for example, won’t let you lift the nose for take-off if the elevator trim is in the wrong position, the reality is that if you are strong enough to be able to move the controls all the way then you will get full control surface deflection regardless of the trim setting.
Finally, I’m having a hard time finding something to back this up, but the idea that a WWII single engine fighter is unflyable without setting the aileron trim correctly doesn’t sit right with me. For one, the time when engine torque is most obvious is when at a low airspeed with a high power setting (e.g., when taking off), and this is also the time when when the controls are the least effective which also means the trim is not effective AND the control forces are the lowest so there is no requirement for trim. This is quite different from trimming the rudder on take-off because, unlike the ailerons, the rudder is in the slipstream and so not only is the rudder trim effective but there are also high aerodynamic forces that require the use of trim.
It seems to be a case of sim designers thinking they’re making something more realistic when they’re actually just making it less realistic and less fun to boot.
Thanks for any light you can shed.
