Dev blog #189

Hello everybody,

As a teaser for the coming Career mode, today we present you one of the reports from our volunteer testers that was edited a bit to be less formal:

'Today I was flying in the Career mode (Battle of Moscow theatre of war, 'Typhoon' phase) for the 62nd ShAP (attack regiment). Career options were set to realistic career speed, easy difficulty and dense frontline activity.

The mission started on the morning of October 10th, 1941, from Vlasiha airfield near Podolsk town; the order was to attack the forward enemy positions near Turmino settlement. There were six IL-2 mod. 1941 sturmoviks including mine. The weather was clear, light frost (-2°C) and light wind (2 m/s near the ground and not more than 10 m/s higher, no turbulence).

After taking off, we proceeded to the rendezvous waypoint near Nazaryevo forward airfield where we met our air cover - six MiG-3 fighters from 512 IAP that were flying at 1000m altitude - and set our course to 260°. We flew together for around 10 minutes and traveled 65 km to the frontline uneventfully.

Unfortunately, when we arrived at the front line all the hell broke loose: we were greeted by as many as nine Bf 109 F2s. While MiGs tied the Messerschmitts in combat, we dropped our bombs on the targets (there was no shortage of them there) and the flight leader turned to fly back home. Shortly after this, I saw another group of enemy fighters while our cover already had had their hands full. I got lucky and one of the new enemies flew too close to the hail of shells and bullets from my cannons and guns - I saw the black smoke and he retreated. Another one was diving right on me - with ammo spent, I was running away as fast as I could. My IL-2 flight was 6 km away already and it looked like there were only two MiGs with them - German fighters seemed to ignore them for now, but MiGs understandably ignored me - I was cut from the herd and they were guarding the rest of the sturmoviks. In a desperate need of help, I turned with empty guns like mad. Suddenly another MiG appeared, it looked like he was trying to save me. After short series of mad maneuvers, he and the attacking Bf 109 hit the ground while I ran. I felt sorry for our pilot, but he just saved me.

I sigh with relief, but saw another enemy fighter getting close, for crying out loud! My plane was sturdy, but it resembled a sieve already - I wondered how it still flies. Not willing to spare the engine, I flew 50 km at maximum throttle, making suicide evasion maneuvers near the ground when the enemy dove at me. One time I saw another MiG, but either its pilot didn't see us or maybe he was wounded. I don't know how I limped to the airfield, but near it, the enemy fighter disengaged, maybe he was getting short on fuel or he was afraid of our airfield AAA (there were a plenty of them because of the easy difficulty setting). Works for me.

I would say there were too many Messerschmitts for easy difficulty, but I guess this will be tuned. In this flight my pilot got wounded and I was taken to the hospital until October 14th. After returning I got a medal, but in the new newspaper I saw a scary main title: 'City Under Siege'.'

Since this tester was playing the game in VR, his screenshots are not very clear, so here are several regular screenshots taken in similar circumstances. And to illustrate all the complexity and variety of the scenarios that are generated in the Career mode, one of the screenshots shows how this particular generated mission looks in the mission editor (so complex missions are built from many bits so they are hard to understand when being viewed as a whole):