A Review of Desastersoft's Cliffs of Dover add-on Wick vs. Dumas by Fred "HeinKill" Williams

http://SimHQ.com/_air14/air_524a.html

Wonderful write-up HeinKill - thank you!

I think I'm going to give this a go. It certainly looks a challenge..

A fantastic amount of work has gone into it, but as I emphasised in my review, it is not for the feint hearted. You really have to like flying with complex engine management (which many on these forums do) to get anything out of the new career system. I found that my normal realism settings (ie just about everything full real except CEM and outside views) gave me a 'realism penalty' of 300%, which meant that if the mission target was to destroy 3 enemy aircraft, I would have had to destroy nine to get the same career points!

Using outside views seems to carry a particularly hefty penalty, and the manual also warns you to use only cockpit views for maximum career points. But I don't have track IR, and panning around with joystick hat is just naff, so yes, I use outside views.

That was a little disheartening as I was really looking forward to a career system along the lines of RoF, which lets the user decide how they want to play it, rather than enforcing realism settings.

But I can imagine if you are into CEM and have TrackIR, you'll love this add on!

Many of the missions are truly hard core, requiring you to navigate to an intercept point using compass and dead reckoning, which for me meant some missions where I missed the intercept and ended up just enjoying the view - though this was not too frequent because Desastersoft appear to have mastered the use of triggers, so that if you can get within distance of the battle area, the enemy aircraft are spawned.

When I put it to Thomas Voss that this hard core policy meant he was limiting the appeal (and therefore commercial return) on his products, because they were less appealing to casual simmers (ie not 'full real types', he said, "Yes, I know, but that's the way we do it, money isn't everything." Which you have to respect I guess.

One of the really great things for 'casual' simmers though, is that you don't have to play every mission in a campaign. The Desastersoft campaign interface lets you choose any mission in the package and fly it as a single mission. This is how I have been getting most fun out of it.

That, and peeking under the hood to see how they have constructed their missions! Mission developers who are into scripting, could no doubt learn a lot from looking at how Desastersoft designs their missions.

H

Bloody interesting review, Heinkill.

This is the product (and review) that's finally making me buckle up and buy CoD. I'm still a BoB2 lover at heart, but I've been itching for a reason to try CoD but could never see a reason (I'm strictly single player, so the bad campaign plus bad AI just killed it... now even if the AI sucks, the mission realism will be worth it).

I just hope I can use my printed Ordinance Survey maps for these missions, otherwise I hope I can use my kindle to read the new map.

Thanks again,

Itkovian

Very nice review, I'll have to check out that demo.

Always been frustrated with the Cliffs of Dover ai (even after tweaking the ai in the mission builder as per some recent threads). With this it sounds like playing as they designed it, staying in cockpit view only, navigating, dead is dead, etc. I might not notice it as much.

also, any idea why he named the company Desastersoft? Desaster means Disaster in English, right?

Great review Heinkill

I've had Wick v Dundas for about a week now and it's given CloD a whole new lease of life. Well worth it and I'm looking forward to the English version of 'Channel Battles'.

Loved the review HK, I'm dying at work now, can't wait to get home and buy this!

I did learn a couple of scary things, (I knew one already though):

1) you are a RAF flyer at heart

2) you don't go full real all the time?!?!
(Now I understand the difference in settings/AI routines when I play through your campaigns!)

Great write up.

I'm still a BoB2 guy, but this is one step closer!

It looked fantastic until I got to the part about the realism penalty for the career. Yeah, that's a deal-breaker for me. I don't fly full real, so that would mean I would have to outscore the highest Allied aces before I even got a minor medal/promotion... No thanks.

I find myself disagreeing with their statement on the most fun you get from a sim is playing full real. For me it is getting immersed in an accurate representation of the era, aircraft and weapons, but not having to worry about complex engine management and things like that. That I prefer to "simulate" by assuming my in-game avatar can manage it on his own.

I'm in that middle ground between hardcore simmer and arcadey flight crap gamer. A sim just won't appeal to me if it doesn't have a good "game" component to go with it. (pilot promotions, medals, tracked stats etc are a good start) Likewise an arcade flight game fails if it doesn't have some of the attractions of a sim. Like accurate aircraft and weaponry. (example being no FW-190s or ZEROs in a Battle of Britain game)

So yeah, I was seriously interested in this to add some of that "game" stuff I like to CLOD, but not anymore.

Try it and go baby-steps in upping the difficulty. I'm not sure if you fly online at all, or intend to, but since release, the vast majority of online players gravitate towards the full real servers. In fact, most times, 100% of the online population are on full real servers, and I've never seen a icons on or open views server with more people than ATAG has at the time.

It's a steep learning curve, but only for a short while until you get used to it. It probably took me a month back in IL-2 to become a full real flyer, but once you step off that cliff, you'll never go back.