Desastersoft's Fighter Aces! Adolf Galland - The Expert add-on for IL-2: Cliffs of Dover
Reviewed by Fred "HeinKill" Williams

http://simhq.com/_air15/air_576a.html

If anyone reading this has also tried the KG53 campaign and in particular the simulation of the Knickebein navigation system, pls share ypur impressions of it. I know the devs are looking for ways to get more out of it, or include it in more missions.

Great stuff again, Hein. I'm really impressed with the effort that Deastersoft is putting into these "content" packages.

I'm playing Wick vs Dundas again, and I can vouch for the quality of Desastersoft's work.

It's not perfect, mind you, but this is clearly due to CloD's own issues, not their scripting. Their missions are very well done, and I've been having a blast (currently I'm playing the 111 Sqn campaign, and I imagine they only got better as time went on).

I do have a couple of comments about the review:

- How are the night-bombing missions too dark? Is it that you can't even see your own cockpit, or that you can't see outside? If the latter, isn't that the whole point? Unless you have a moon out, nighttime is _dark_. You're basically flying blind, so its normal that no amount of contrast/brightness setting could help you: it shouldn't in the first place.

- As for the difficulty of the missions, quite frankly I stopped caring about the mission goals, myself. Think of them as more of a scoreboard thing, than an indication of actual success.

The actual mission objectives are mostly performance related, never "mission critical" objectives ("kill 2 Me110s" instead of "Stop The Bomber So London Doesn't Get Nuked!!!"). Even if you don't meet the objective, realistically there's no reason the next mission couldn't happen.

If there's one thing I love about CloD, is how it really pulls off the sort of experience we can read from actual historical accounts (at least when you turn off labels). You navigate manually (or following the Sqn Ldr, which I usually do, but sometimes you have no choice but to navigate on your own when you get split up), get to the mission area, make contact for a few seconds of insane fighting, and next thing you know you're completely on your own. You might have had time to send a few squirts at the enemy, maybe bag one or two targets (or more if you're _really_ lucky), and then its time to head home, and bugger the mission objectives!

Same goes with the DiD structure, which I admit is very brutal. If it didn't allow you to start a campaign at any point it'd be a deal-breaker, but fortunately you can start a new campaign at the same mission (or the next). As it is, you simply must accept your pilot died, and you're playing a replacement (though I still redo the same mission with the new pilot, just to experience it). At least that's what I do when my pilot doesn't die to a CloD bug (which is rare, admittedly). It certainly teaches you to fly carefully.

In short, I don't think I'll ever "complete" a campaign as per DesasterSoft's standards... but I can still complete it in actuality.

Hopefully this makes sense.

Thank you.

Itkovian

Totally fair point. Knickebein was developed to help with night bombing and/or in poor visibility (though the mission I was referring to does take place on a relatively clear night with only scattered cloud - and you still can't see squat).

But yes, Knickebein was developed to overcome the problem of finding and dropping bombs near the target, at night, in the dark.

With one proviso: the Luftwaffe didn't have a game criteria to meet that required you to hit in the middle of the target or get a 'mission fail'. Sure, they were supposed to hit their target. Mostly, at night, they didn't. Unless their target was 'London'.

In these missions your target can be a single factory. And you don't have a gruppe of bombers with you, you have six.

It is actually very exhausting to fly the Knickebein missions as it requires more than an hour of flying time (first you have to navigate manually to the beam intercept point, then from there to the target, and home again, and land in the dark), using instruments all the way, and navigating according to the instructions from your radio operator, and then drop on his command. After all that, to get this message:

Mission failed!
Your bombs have missed the target.

It's more than annoying. After five attempts (more than 5 hours), it is soul destroying.

I almost guarantee you too will find yourself wishing for just a little moonlight, so that you have a chance of hitting the target. Not sure what Desastersoft has simulated, but Knickebein historically was only accurate at marking the target to an area of 1 square mile. We aren't talking GPS style accuracy here. To this, you have to add the human factor (altitude, attitude, wind vector, reaction time). So what are or were the chances of hitting a target of only a few hundred square yards size even if you try to drop exactly when the radio beam navigator calls it?

That's the context of my comments in the review.

I think it is amazing work by Desastersoft to simulate the Knickebein sytem so well. I know Olaf of Desastersoft ('NSU' on these forums) put in a lot of work on Knickebein and it really is a creative idea, well implemented. I've told him so.

If you love instrument flying, and aren't so worried about achieving the mission objective, then you will love this.

But as I said, as a gameplay element, for me, the jury is out. I'm very conflicted about it.

Cheers

H

Good point, Heinkill. It is rather discouraging to spend so much time.

And yeah, I'm fairly confident in RL the night bombing missions did not require such accuracy. Bombing a city was more like it, or if a specific target was needed an entire gruppe would be used.

But really, I just stopped caring about their mission objectives. Its nice when you succeed, but ultimately they're irrelevant to the war effort (if I shoot down a single 109, I think that's a pretty good job all around. The intel officer won't berate me for not keeping up with my "quota" ).

Though desastersoft has mastered the art of taunting, with their "mission failed" messages.

Nice writeup Heinkill.


Wheels