You want realism....No really???

[Bronk]

  To add to all this, i didn't really mean i meant this to be IMPLEMENTED in AH. I just brought it up as a fun curiosity. 

I'll explain what i mean...in IL-2 for instance your flying along. You have your rpm, manifold, and mixture set for a max economy (sometimes i do this for immersion, not necessary in AH). I'm jumped by Germans, i move my one switch on my control stick throttle to full rpm, push the mixture up, (two buttons mind you) and advance the throttle. I drop my DT's (same as in AH). Depending on plane, my supercharger is already set, (some you dont have to set). I check my oil intercooler or cowl flaps (another one button). During the fight i check my engine instruments to check temp and back out of wep or throttle and open or close my cowl flaps or intercooler doors accordingly, (for some planes this is automatic, again it's just one button).

I really just pushed two maybe three more buttons thats it, it's taken me two extra seconds. In Il-2 you can blow your engine out by over temperature, but you can put up a little gamey automatic message that says "engine overheat", or just use your actual oil temp and oil pressure gauge. I've never over rev'd in that game, don't know if you can. But you will hear your props speeding up quite a bit if your in a dive and gun the throttle.

Another thing Il-2 has a fire extinguisher canisters that can be fired maybe one to three times to put out a fire. After that you have exhausted your supply. It really works in putting out fires. And if the fire is too bad and you used up your supply your going to burn anyway. Also diving does put out fires, seems again if fire is too bad, or you can't gain enough speed by diving it won't help you. Seems like i remember AH having something like this, it doesn't seem to work now. Seems like this fire management would be a nice little addition, instead of being generically doomed to burn every time your lit up.

Another thing, no prop feathering? It's mighty fun if after your engine is shot out you can feather a prop and see that still propellor blade just sitting there, adds to my immersion. 

It's just little things like this that i'm talking about, and you could turn this complex features off like you turn off the stall limiter in this game.

Ledpig
S!

So you want to make the game MORE gear dependent?
With my stick I just set a macro.
Now think of the poor SOB who can't do that.

[EskimoJoe]

uhhhh....... NO!

I struggle enough getting my K/D ratio past 1 in the game after 200 fighter kills.

Uhh...YES

[LEDPIG]

So you want to make the game MORE gear dependent?
With my stick I just set a macro.
Now think of the poor SOB who can't do that.

You could turn it off or on like you select, auto takeoff or stall limiter. Or tracers on or off. Both those things can handicap or help you depending on how you look at it. Didn't you read where i said that Bronk?

You could go in your clipboard and click select "complex engine management" or leave it like it is. Now given that could handicap OR help you depending on how you use it, against a guy who is flying around in simple management. Not any more so than someone flying around with stall limiter or whatever...which we already have.

That way not everybody would have to do it. Only the diehards could do it. Of course you'd have to accept the extra responsibility of learning how to use it. But not any more so than someone who knows all the in's and out's of bombing, or gv's or any other skill.

Ledpig
S!

[Bronk]

Not the same led.
One click and stall limiter is the same for all.
However not the same for your complex management set up.

[Ack-Ack]

Maybe it would keep the zipcodes and whiners out.....

But those zipcodes, whiners and squeakers help pay HTC's bill just like the rest of us. 

The stated reason we don't have a more complex and advanced engine management system is that HiTech wants to the keep the game accessible to anyone that wants to play.  Players will likely get more frustrated and not stay beyond the trial period if they have to worry about whether or not their plane's engine is going to explode because they may not have the cooling slots open enough. 


ack-ack

[LEDPIG]

Not the same led.
One click and stall limiter is the same for all.
However not the same for your complex management set up.

Yes one click for stall limiter off or on, then you go out and fly around with the handicap of it being off or on to suit your choice.

Same with "complex engine management" with the selected click of one choice in your preferences menu would cause you to have to operate all things associated with "complex engine management" The Rpm, mixture, supercharger, cowl flaps, oil intercoolers, having to monitor your engine temps, auto lean or rich, prop feather, fire extinguishers. All that would be thrown under YOUR control. All with the choice of one selection on your clipboard menu. You could choose it or not, up to you.

Different planes would be basically set up different. For instance on the 51 you just select auto rich or auto lean. Other planes you would have to adjust your mixture with ONE (either up or down, same way you adjust flaps while flying)  button, while flying. I do it by ballpark charts, or listening to the engine and adjusting the mixture while flying.

The F-4u you would shift the Supercharger yourself, other planes would be automatic. Some planes you could select auto oil cooler set or open and close the doors yourself.

All this would be changed and available to you with that ONE selection in your menu. Turn it on or off, if you don't want it, it doesn't effect you, fly as you do now.

Could be as simple as us selecting auto trim, or moving flaps as we do now, a couple extra buttons, or mapped features.

[LEDPIG]

Maybe it would keep the zipcodes and whiners out.....

Just a note i did NOT say the above quote. Someone else did. I personally don't mind zipcodes and whiners. I like them, they add zest and zeal to the game. I was a zipcode at one point and so was everybody else, and i have been a whiner. 

And once again,.....select those extra features if you WANT too. Just go in your clipboard and select the function, turn it off or on as you wish. Same as with alot of extra features that make the game easier or harder that we have now.

Ledpig
S!

[Bronk]

Led your not getting my point.
By my having a stick that I can macro. I'd have an advantage.
It's not as simple as stall limiter off and on.

[LEDPIG]

Led your not getting my point.
By my having a stick that I can macro. I'd have an advantage.
It's not as simple as stall limiter off and on.

True it's more complicated Bronk, but it would be a personal choice based on whether you wanted to or not. If you don't have a stick complicated enough for all that don't worry about. Let the die hard numbnuts like me be flying around worrying if my cowl flaps need to be opened in the heat of a dogfight.

They won't have the added frustration, maybe it will give them an advantage, maybe it won't. Same way someone with stall limiter flies around. Sure it keeps them from stalling, but it limits their performance. If you fly with it off you have to monitor that but it also lets you max perform. Harder to do, accept that risk if you want.

Besides people that are not using "complex engine management" would have the computer set all this up for them at optimum parameters. Without this selected you'd have to do it yourself, now whether you did it as good as the game's artificial intelligence would be up to you and how good you are at it. Maybe by adjusting a few things you could eek out a little more performance with the risk of engine damage.

Same way you risk turning without stall limiter and you have to monitor your stall and airspeed. Maybe you can get a little more performance, but you won't have the computer program to do it for you.

[SgtPappy]

Just a note i did NOT say the above quote. Someone else did. 

That would be me

And I gave the same reasoning as Ack-Ack as to why we DON'T have CEM.

[Ack-Ack]

True it's more complicated Bronk, but it would be a personal choice based on whether you wanted to or not. If you don't have a stick complicated enough for all that don't worry about. Let the die hard numbnuts like me be flying around worrying if my cowl flaps need to be opened in the heat of a dogfight.

They won't have the added frustration, maybe it will give them an advantage, maybe it won't. Same way someone with stall limiter flies around. Sure it keeps them from stalling, but it limits their performance. If you fly with it off you have to monitor that but it also lets you max perform. Harder to do, accept that risk if you want.

Besides people that are not using "complex engine management" would have the computer set all this up for them at optimum parameters. Without this selected you'd have to do it yourself, now whether you did it as good as the game's artificial intelligence would be up to you and how good you are at it. Maybe by adjusting a few things you could eek out a little more performance with the risk of engine damage.

Same way you risk turning without stall limiter and you have to monitor your stall and airspeed. Maybe you can get a little more performance, but you won't have the computer program to do it for you.

Problem is that the person that has disabled these options would be at an advantage over the player that has these options enabled. 

Back in WB, there used to be an EZ mode option.  Enabling that option would prevent your plane from spinning your plane.  Players that had this option enabled had an advantage over players that didn't fly in EZ mode.  If you were in EZ mode, all you really had to do was pull back hard on the stick (remember, EZ mode = no spins) and watch the guy on your six get into an accelerated stall and spin in trying to match your turn.  Being called an EZ mode player was worse than being called a dweeb.

So if someone that wasn't flying with engine management options enabled wouldn't have to worry about his engine over heating and quitting and potentially losing the fight as a result, unlike the person with it enabled.  The clear advantage would be the person with these options disabled.  Because these players would have the advantage, guess which options would be the most common to disable first?

Using our stall limiter isn't that good of an example because it's coded not to give the person that has it enabled an advantage over a player that doesn't.  In fact, it penalizes the player that has it enabled because it prevents the player from being able to fully fly their plane on the edge and will never be able to turn it as tight as someone that has it disabled.


ack-ack

[LEDPIG]

Using our stall limiter isn't that good of an example because it's coded not to give the person that has it enabled an advantage over a player that doesn't.  In fact, it penalizes the player that has it enabled because it prevents the player from being able to fully fly their plane on the edge and will never be able to turn it as tight as someone that has it disabled.


ack-ack

Maybe it could be done how your saying AK. If you had the easy engine management the computer could be set at an estimate of max performance. Where if you did the "complex engine management" you could eek out maybe 5% more performance. And maybe get a little bit more performance where you would risk blowing your engine. Maybe nobody has the attention span and lack of a life for this but me? 

[BnZ]

Hmmm, just for the sake of argument, I submit the following:

CEM could be set up in a way to allow a player choosing to use it to eek out more performance from his engine, in the same way stall-limiter off allows a player to eek out more turn performance. You could get somewhat lower drag from manually managing cowl flap/radiator settings, more power from pushing the boost settings closer to disaster, burn your WEP longer at the risk of frying the engine, etc. Of course, they would have to model water injection and running out of it, nitrous for the TA-152, etc and so forth. That would be alot on the plate of HTC, who seem to have enough irons in the fire right now. This is interesting speculation, but things being what they are, I think AHII can live without CEM for now.

One thing I'd seriously like though...how about making WEP available on the throttle instead of a button? Like, you could set up to make the first 95% of your throttle axis control MIL and pushing it past that point would cut the WEP on? That would free up one of the six buttons on my cheapo stick and make power management in fight smoother, IMHO.

[LEDPIG]

Hmmm, just for the sake of argument, I submit the following:

CEM could be set up in a way to allow a player choosing to use it to eek out more performance from his engine, in the same way stall-limiter off allows a player to eek out more turn performance. You could get somewhat lower drag from manually managing cowl flap/radiator settings, more power from pushing the boost settings closer to disaster, burn your WEP longer at the risk of frying the engine, etc. Of course, they would have to model water injection and running out of it, nitrous for the TA-152, etc and so forth. That would be alot on the plate of HTC, who seem to have enough irons in the fire right now. This is interesting speculation, but things being what they are, I think AHII can live without CEM for now.

One thing I'd seriously like though...how about making WEP available on the throttle instead of a button? Like, you could set up to make the first 95% of your throttle axis control MIL and pushing it past that point would cut the WEP on? That would free up one of the six buttons on my cheapo stick and make power management in fight smoother, IMHO.

I agree this is all just interesting speculation and AH has alot to do as it is, and they are doing a great job....bravo to them.

If i want to fly around like this in full on anal realism mode i'll just fly Il-2, which seems to get a bad rap from alot of AH'ers. I don't know why. Check again, the flight model is just as complicated (you have to install the desired patches and updates) and the realism with everything else and the graphics are unparalled.

And IL-2 does have the wep on the stick. Only problem, sometimes its hard to judge just how far to push the throttle up is wep and how far to pull it back is mil power. Most real throttles have a detent.

[Kweassa]

 Bronk, you obviously haven't read the lengthy explanation on why the CEM in IL-2 is but an illusion for immersion, and there's practically nothing more complicated in IL-2 than AH2.

 Let's me put it this way.

 There are "zipcodes" and "whiners" and "n00bs" and "braindeads" in IL-2, too. Curiously enough, they have no problem in adapting to what IL-2 has to offer by pushing one or two more keys during combat than AH2. Are you suggesting our zipcodes and whiners are so dumb, that they can't do what the same grade of zipcodes and whiners can do in IL-2?

 Perhaps, we should stop using the "zipcodes" and "whiners" and "n00bs" as an excuse for our own tastes - since they are everywhere in everygame, to which they most usually, willingly adapt nicely. The "zipcodes" and "whiners" in IL-2 whine about as much as their bretheren in AH2, but they never whine about the game being "too complicated". They whine how the P-51 is undermodelled, the 50cals are too weak, the German planes are misrepresented, and on and on and on... but not a single complaint on how "IL-2 is too difficult in CEM".

 ...


 If CEM or the likes of it would ever be implemented in AH, then it no doubt, will become global. You wouldn't be able to turn it on or off, just as you won't be able to use externals in MA. However, this is hardly a relevant matter at hand. The point of contention is whether a CEM would benefit the game or not, and I say it would.

 There's another point I've purposefully not mentioned in the previous post, and that is the "realism" is what draws in the younger crowds to the game these days.


 Many of us are well over the age of thirty or forty, have been playing combat sims since the late 80s or early 90s, during the days when the technology wasn't enough to really depict the finer aspects of aerial combat. Like it or not, we're used to having things simple, and although this may be a painstaking revelation, us old birds like to think our own standards would last forever.
 
 Unfortunately, the younger generation grew up on a wildly different environment from us, with PCs, internet, high-end graphics and visually stunning games are the norm. These young kids, in about 10 years or so, would replace us as the main customer base for HTC, and they should - when a game is permanently fused with only one generation of players, then it means the game is growing old and dying.

 Our generation has our fathers who fought in WW2, some of us fought in Vietnam. To the generation below us, the tails of war and combat are so far and beyond that the very notion of "realism" appeals to them in a manner different from us. Some of those kids actually willingly prefer to fly a "20-step checklist" takeoff, much to our amazement. They thrive on details both systematic and visual.

 
 AH2 is a great game, but frankly, its getting older and older everyday.
 
 Maybe its time to admit that we aren't the only people with preferences that matter. Because, seeing how IL-2 became an amazing hit despite the fact that its a boxed-game in a genre market that was previously thought as dying out, it makes one think twice on what kind of impact the prospect of "realism" can have on the younger people. Many of us think AH2 is still the best, and I think so, too.
 
 But how long do you think it'll be until someone comes up with a game with high realism and details on the level of IL-2, and makes it into a MMOG format like AH2?