homepage Forums Air Combat & Civil Aviation IL-2: Great Battles Normandy for beginners?

I saw som videos of the IL-2 Normandy game and was wondering if it is something a beginner can/should try.

There are a bunch of different difficulty/realism settings in this sim so anyone has the option to make it play like an arcade game all the way up to a hardcore high-fidelity sim. I myself play with all of the realism settings enabled except I allow external views and a couple of the map objective and waypoint markers.

Thanks, I am currently in France but will be back home in Idaho on Oct 7th. I do have IL-1946. EAW and WOTR loaded but really liked the video of Normandy. On an iPad now though. Down load speed in rural and I mean really rural Idaho is 1MBts so need to be careful how big a program to download.

I feel your pain Snow46. It took 19 years to get fiber optic internet in my rural town. Have you looked into Starlink ? Elon Musk's project. We were looking at that before the government paid for the fiber optic infrastructure.

Thanks for the idea Wango. Unfortunately we live on the Western slope of a mountain in a little valley surrounded by forest. I purchased the Starlink equipment only to return it as there were just too many trees between the house and the satellite. Since they seem to be launching more satellites in our area in 2023, I am hoping one of them will be usable. I will be going down to Southern California for the winter and am planning on buying a remote hard drive and downloading game files and patches to it and then installing them upon my return. Not sure if it will work. Until the internet issues get resolved, no multiplayer for me. But then I am still learning to die a lot…smile.

Well hopefully Elon will be able to help you one day.
At least you have the opportunity to download them to a hard drive. I don't much care for multiplayer myself. Offline gaming suits me just fine.

My trip to Normandy has come to an end and I really enjoyed seeing where my Father landed many years ago. I am now looking at buying the game but am wondering if I should get it from Steam or the IL-2 web site. Steam offers the game with, if I remember right, with 8 fly able aircraft but the IL-2 website offers an additional 2 aircraft for an additional $20.

When I download the game to my windows 10 computer, is there a particular place I should put it? Should I just put everything wherever the computer loads it or create a separate folder like C:IL2Battle of Normandy? Sorry, but am really new at this.

Purchased the premium version of game from IL-2 and downloaded it. Is anyone playing this online?

I play it online quite often but only in Cooperative mode with a friend. He creates the missions via the in-game mission generator and it works quite well!

Tried this:

https://forum.il2sturmovik.com/topic/43276-il2-great-battles-easy-mission-generator/

It's pretty sweet

I logged into the game yesterday offline, (due to a really poor internet connection), and was disappointed to find that there was no campaigns available. The only campaigns available required me to buy other games. I was really hoping to find a campaign that would allow me to follow the invasion of Normandy from both sides. While generating a mission and playing it is OK, I really wanted to follow the history. Are all the IL-2 Great Battles like this?

This is why many veteran simmers, who had invested a lot of money in both uprgrading their PC, the game's different theatres plus the 'collectors' aircraft etc. at full price on issue, disillusioned by the gameplay reverted back to the '1946' version so enhanced and updated by the talented community. Or migrated to revised 'CLoD', 'WoFF' and 'WotR' to name a few alternatives.

Thanks for the reply BD-123, while I didn’t upgrade my machine I did waste the money in buying the premium version and 60gig of disc space. I do have the ‘1946’ version loaded and am playing it and WOTR now on single player. In about 3 weeks we will be at our other house that has great internet and I intend on down loading the BAT files on my computer there. I am trying to figure out if it is possible to download the BAT files onto either an external hard drive or a flash/thumb drive and bring it back to Idaho in February. Do you think a 256gig thumb drive will do it?

You're getting bad information Snow46. There is indeed a "Campaign" for Normandy, it's the Pilot Career. You can play British, American or German. Its been researched too, it uses a more dynamic mission generator. The static campaigns are almost always a separate purchase, a couple are free, but they are static so one play through and you've played it. They're nice, but once you've played it then you've played it. The Pilot Career, though, will have different missions each career.

A static campaign I'm sure will come out eventually, Normandy just released recently and static campaigns usually follow a good while after because they have to be hand built with all features in place from the module.

there are built in missions for each of the il2 crap box games, you have to dig through the menu options to find them.

the "campagin" where you pick a nation and fly for it, you HAVE to do it online only. Cant even see the menu option until you log in online with the game.

As far as saving stuff to a thumb drive, i dont see it working.


The IL2 great battles verifies files on your system as you are watching the game start up screens. It WILL download and install files to your system no matter what. The removable hard drive is the best option. as long as you ONLY play off of that hard drive and dont try to swap files between hard drives.



and snow, you may not have the whole game if you ONLY needed 60 gigabytes of disk space. I deleted great battles and flying circus and tank commander BEFORE the official release of the normandy game, and the hard drive i freed up was 70-75 gig's.

all the premium edition does is keep you from paying for the two premium normandy planes seperately, thus you got those two planes at 50% off.

Happiness is all up to you when playing great battles crap box.. if you want authenticity for german weapons and aircraft, you WILL be dissapointed. If you were expecting honest interactions with players online, you WILL be dissapointed.
I only managed to get to the online multi player a few times. and I did get murdered by a moderator flying the same side i was on.

There is also the PWCG you can read all about inhere [url=https://forum.il2sturmovik.com/forum/99-pat-wilson-campaign-generator/][/url]
BTW how is this Normandy map quality compared to the Chanel and Normandy map from DCS?