CFS3 is a joke

[lord_flasheart]

CFS 3 is a Joke, and not a very funny one, as its on all of us, all of us who bought it!

I, like a lot of us, have waited patiently for the corrective patch to be released and this weekend i installed it
and found it a real dissapointment.
Sure its made cfs3 run a little better, but mine still stutters!
its made my force feedback2 joystick work a little better, but still not good enough! how is it that it works with
more "feel" and progresiveness in IL2, but not in a microsoft sim?
its made the gunner positions for the b25 and b26 a lot better, but now the speed indicator will not go over 50 mph
in the b25 h&j!
its also made level bombing possible for the ai wingmen,  but whats the point? they release their bombs the same time

you do
and while yours hit the target, thiers fall far short because they are in formation behind you!

the patch has made very little difference to a very poor game. this weekend i have flown 10 bomber missions in campaign

mode
for the lufftwaffe using the ju88 a4, in those 10 missions i saw enemy fighters only once, without any enemy opposition

the
game is too easy and therefore boring! if you play il2 you'll know that there are VERY few missions when flying the

soviet
bomber campaign, where there are no enemy fighters, and when they do show up you have to work to get past them, thus

making a rewarding
experience.

On this forum a little while ago a question was asked - what should cfs4 be?, well its simple cfs4 should be the battle

for
europe betwwen 1943 and 1946 only next time it should work properly!

well thats it, its all i'll say for the moment. cfs 3 will go back on the shelf, and i'll go back to playing il2 till

forgotten
battles is released. and sincere congratulations to Oleg Maddox and all his team for making a combat simulator so good
that it scared microsoft, so much so  that it forgot how to make a combat flight simulator.

[Woodlouse2002]

With the level bombing thing I think you'll find that thats how it was done in reality. The whole formation would drop there bombs when they saw there leader lay his eggs. If you find the Campaigns too easy then increase the difficulty and realism. The lack of enemy aircraft is explainable. If you are winning the campaign then the enemy airforce will be pretty much run into the ground. And if you do see enemy aircraft when your in a bomber then I hope that the enemy don't see me cause if they do then your dead. Your problem with the speed indicator might be a glitch in your program or it might not be. But then I rarely fly those B25's because the guns in the nose have no method of aiming.

May I just add that while IL2 might seem a much better game they failed to give it the gameplay of the CFS series. Combat Flight Sim has so much more potential than IL2 mainly because the range of addons is so much more vast. I have had IL2 for over a year now and I havn't seen 1 3rd party plane avaliable for download. CFS3 has been out for months and already 3rd party aircraft are being released along with a vast range of other addons. Also IL2 looses realism in the way that you can blow up a 6 engined bomber with 3 cannon shells at a range of 4 miles. THAT IS NOT REALISTIC!

Rest assured there will be more patches for CFS3. It took M$ 3 patches to get FS2000 correct. Just realise that M$ have turned to a whole new graphics engine for this game which means that there going to have some initial problems. I realise that M$ were to hastey on releasing the game in time for the christmas market and for that there probably kicking themselves. Most people here including me have tried both CFS3 and IL2 and we all continue with M$'s program because its so much more enjoyable. Don't just throw CFS3 away because of a lack of enemy aircraft in the campaign (remember the game is based on GROUND ATTACK and so enemy aircraft are not part of the game. If you want enemy aircraft then do a CAP mission or an intercept.) and because the AI in the bombers are more realistic. I found it really annoying that they would go and dive bomb a target before. Then they died cause they couldn't pull up. It's realism not M$ making a mess of it.

Just remember that CFS4 is very likely to be set in the pacific theater from 1943 onwards (the bit they missed in CFS2).

So there you go. I have had my problems with CFS3 and have fixed them. If you have problems then post them here and someone will try to eliminate the problem.

Remember CFS3 is a big step forwards for M$ and in a few years time CFS will leave IL2 and every other WWII combat sim for dust.

[lord_flasheart]

my realism and difficulty are on max!
you may have a point about not being intercepted on ground attack missions if you fly a typhoon for example, but iwas talking about a medium bomber flying at 15.000 feet! during the war every effort was made to intercept these attacks!  and what is the point of having gunner positions if they are not going to be used?
most if not all of the planes that came with the upgrades to il2 were  from 3rd party designers check out il2center.com/ for updates on new planes by 3rd party designers for il2-fb
if you can shoot down a bomber from 4 miles away with 3 cannon shells, then you can only have been dreaming - you cant even see a target clearly from 4 miles away!
its now that counts, not a few years time! by then ubisoft et al will leave cfs3,4 &5 floundering as it is now.
I'll stand by everything i said and to il2

[Bogey51]

As I remember CFS1's campaign was very easy also, but when third party developers started putting out missions and campaigns, like the piilot war series, you had to constantly scramble to survive. Microsoft, with the generic campaign that came with the sim, just built a platform for third party people to build on and I believe that CFS3 will be even better in time. There are already some pretty intense missions out there to download including a couple of add ons from Microsoft.
When the scenery and terrain sdk comes out in a few months we will see this sim develop into what it really is, the best combat flight sim to date.  I am sorry to hear that so many people are having so many problems after the patch. I have a low end machine and although the patch didn"t improve my framerates, the sim flies a lot smoother than it did before, even after putting the add on aircraft and Ghostponies effects back in.  This week I am finally going to upgrade my mem ffrom 256 to 512 and I believe this will give me all the performance I want.  I have seen some other posts like this one on other sites and I hope these people don't give up on CFS3 even though it can be a pain in the butt to set up on any given machine, because in a few months I think it will improve immensly.

[Woodlouse2002]

[quote]my realism and difficulty are on max!
you may have a point about not being intercepted on ground attack missions if you fly a typhoon for example, but iwas talking about a medium bomber flying at 15.000 feet! during the war every effort was made to intercept these attacks!

[lord_flasheart]

il2 forgotten battles is a standalone ww2 simm, not an add on.
The campaign i'm currently playing is for the lufftwaffe using the ju88 a4 as i said in my 1st post today.
in my last mission i ordered my flight to bomb the railyard which was the target for the mission, and for 20 minutes i circled around the area waiting for them to do so, this was in suffolk possibly nr ipswich, and as you probably know there was a heavy concentration of airbases around there, as there is in cfs3, without a single enemy fighter coming up to intercept!

after 20 mins i gave up on my flight who had refused to attack the target, and did it myself.
being intercepted was part of a bomber pilots "life" (for want of a better phrase) so why should'nt it have a bigger part in cfs3?, i'm not some kind of nut who only gets off on playing games at the hardest level, but some sort of opposition to bombers would  make it more interesting and raise the realism.
after all what is printed at the bottom of the cfs3 box?
"As Real As It Gets!" and at the moment cfs3 is not.

[Woodlouse2002]

Forgotten battles is an expansion pack which means it uses the same graphics same engine same aircraft etc. It is not an entirly new sim like CFS2 is to CFS1.

I'm sure you know to get your AI wingmen to attack you press A and that in bombers they will attack at the same time as you. The lack of fighters I find is great for bombing missions. Being intercepted is not part of a bomber pilots life it is one of the jobs hazards and the less your intercepted the better for you. I generally realise that I find myself seeing enemy fighters in long flights of 300 miles or more and never on the front line. Try that.

[lord_flasheart]

forgotten battles is STANDALONE simm.

belgium to suffolk is approx 125 miles - no fighters.
yes of course fighters were a hazard to bombers, and if you recall i said "life for want of a better phrase"
the point here is that if this sim is to be as real as it gets then there should be more interceptions. to answer a point in your previous post, at the moment the allies hold paris and the rest of north east france, so you could say i'm loosing at the moment. taking il2 as an example again, fighters appeared in almost every mission but they do not automaticaly shoot you down, ie you can evade or shoot back, this does not make it any less playable, in fact the opposite is true!
so why should cfs3 be different? should anything that is difficult be left out?

[Woodlouse2002]

IL2 forgotten battles is a standalone sim in the same way Medal of honour allied assult spearhead is a standalone game. IT IS STILL AN EXPANSION OF A PREVIOUS GAME!

Just remember that FPS plays a role in this. In CFS3 you can fly anywhere within the breifing map I.e. the whole of northern europe. within the map there are Airfields enemy facilitys, convoys, emplacements etc. Not to mention the friendly units streching along the entire front. In IL2 there are purpose built missions for a campaign that will be almost identical every time you play it. In CFS3 you choose what you attack and so the missons have to be created within the game. All of these factors draw off your FPS and adding swarms of enemy aircraft to that and you'll have a slide show. CFS3 is about hugging the ground and getting blanketed in flak. Not about buzzing around at 20,000 feet and evading fighters. It is a ground war your assisting not an attempt to wipe out the enemys airforce because thats already been done if your winning.

[BFMF]

Several days ago after installing the patch, I flew a bombing mission. When I reached the target I ordered all my wingmen to attack it. They flew nice and level and when I got over the target I dropped my bombs followed by my wingmen dropping theirs, but I accidentally missed the target. Guess what, all of my wingmen successfully hit and destroyed the target and the mission was a total success

[Black ZR-1]

The CFS3 vs the IL2 war will always go on.  Both are great sims.  Some people may like one sim better than the other just like Coke vs Pepsi.

[Whitey]

Let me settle this fighter thing.

Who's read 'Bomber' by Len Deighton?  If you have you will notice that it says that crewmen rarely ever saw fighters!
You're group will be part of a huge bomber stream in the game.  The stream is so wide and long that is likely that you'll never see any friendly aircraft.  You have to look at that way and then ask yourself where the fighters are...they're attacing the damn bombers that arrived before you.

As for them all dropping there bombs and missing...tell them to attack, give them a few minutes because they do it all by the book (as they did before the bloody patch) so it takes them longer than you.  Once they've all got rid of there load, then you finish the taget off or destroy a nearby installation.

One thing that's wrong though...B-24s were used by the RAF for anti-shipping and submarine attacks, while the other bombers performed night raids only.  But since there is no way to have a Mossie fly before and mark the target, this can be forgiven.

Thank you...I'm off to get the No CD 3.1 and pound the Huns into submission.  

[lord_flasheart]

yes whitey i read bomber some time ago now, as i recall it was based on raf bombers crews, not the lufftwaffe bombers as mentioned in the above post,
in ww2 german bombers could not attack in numbers anywhere near the allied bomber force so there is a very good reason to be able to see a few fighters now and then.

woodlouse if cfs3 is about hugging the ground to attack, why include medium bombers at all? and why, if you warp to the target does the game put you at about 15,000 feet 10 miles or so away from the target?
because cfs3 is a joke!

[lord_flasheart]

yes dad

I'm sure that woodlouse would agree that this is only a difference of opion and not any sort of personal attack on each other

[Black ZR-1]

ozzy, why would you threaten to lock this thread?  Call it arguing but there are reasonable people debating over a reasonable topic. Is CFS3 a joke?  Sure, if you're an IL2 lover!  Keep in mind Forgotten Battles is about a month away from being released & you're going to start seeing a lot of tention between IL2 & CFS3 users.  I would understand if he came on here bashing the game & it's loyal users on this forum but he didn't.

Let lord flasheart talk all the smack he wants about CFS3, the thing is, you & I know he's sitting right in front of his monitor playing it as we speak.

At the end they get their cake, but we eat it.