Bingo for Karnak and Camo.
Like Camo mentioned,
Graphics is 80% lighting and 20% details.
The truth is, you can draw a smurfy picture of nekkid lady and still make it look really sexy if you can give shadows and highlights where it is deserved. On the contrary, a simple line drawing, with no "lightings" whatsoever, will look pretty bland despite the fact that it's a 1:1 scale represantation of a Playmate. I mean, where's the fun in looking at the cleavage?
The quality of 3D modelling may be better in IL2, but that's not what makes people think it looks better. As for textures, AH plane textures, despite the fact that new standard uses only one BMP file, still in lot of cases are much more detailed than IL2 textures. Also, in many cases, even the quality of terrain textures don't make much of a difference.
It's almost SOLEY the lightings effect they use that makes the difference.
And like Karnak said, IL2 terrains are optimized to be viewed from the sky. The trees are everybit as much generic as in other games if viewed from low altitudes. Besides, they don't have much of ground detail in the first place. Grass, hedges, rows, none of that, because they don't need it, since they don't have playable ground warfare.
Another big trade-off is the fact that AH terrains are FULLY player customizable. IL2 landscape is like a beautiful painting of a building, whereas AH2 landscape is fundamentally, a "LEGO" building block. There can be more clever attempts to hide that fact, but in the end, there's no way a fully customizable terrain which the players can build and change as they desire, can ever be really comparable to a single, set terrain. IL2 map editors do not offer full terrain creation.
That being said, the limited lightings is probably the biggest problem. The plane lightings is fair enough, but the terrain lightings just don't compare.
