What is the best simulation games for the PC?
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IL-2 Sturmovik is an amazing game. Also ArmA 2 is quite high up there on the simulator scaleIantheoned2d has this on sale for $5 do you guys think it is worth it even if i don't have a joystick?
[QUOTE="Iantheone"]IL-2 Sturmovik is an amazing game. Also ArmA 2 is quite high up there on the simulator scaleDJ_Headshotd2d has this on sale for $5 do you guys think it is worth it even if i don't have a joystick? IL-2 needs a good, precise joystick. Trying to play without one is even worse than playing an FPS or RTS without KB+M. However, US$30 or so for a Thrustmaster T.16000-M + $5 for IL-2: 1946 should give you plenty of hours of WWII dogfighting fun. There isn't much in the way of switchology/complex avionics, so don't sweat it if you can't afford a sophisticated HOTAS setup. All you need is a stick with good X/Y-axis response (and the T.16000-M should deliver there since it uses a tri-axis Hall sensor), four buttons, and a hat switch, really. (Well, I'd add TrackIR 4/5 on to that, but that's another US$100 or so unless you get a good second-hand deal.)
microsoft flight simulator X
operation flashpoint
arma classic (i personally do not subscribe to the idea that arma II is a worthy successor)
battlestations pacific??
janes ww2 combat sim isnt too bad but odds are there are more modern ww2 flight sims out here.
id keep my eyes open for world of tanks which is an online tank sim covering every ww2 tank and self propelled gun.
pt boat: knight of the sea (sea combat sim)
silent hunter 4: wolves of the pacific (sub combat simulator)
world of tanks trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hJd9iCbpwuI&feature=player_embedded
ooh that reminds me sail simulator 2010 if that sort of thing floats ur boat.
From what I played I would say Sim City 4, The Sims 3 and The Movies.
12qazx
Good list shame the movies never kicked off isnt it..
My choices for simulators. I am biased towards flight sims:D :
Aerial:
Flight Simulator X
IL-2 series
X-Plane 9
Falcon 4.0: Allied Force
DCS: Black Shark
The last two are truly hardcore. I've seen PCs running the original Falcon 4.0 (next to an actual simulator) in the simulator room of real-life F-16 squadrons years ago. I've seen both Flight Simulator and X-Plane 9 used in Ground School although X-Plane 9 does toot its horn about being FAA-certified.
Ground:
ArmA II
Sea:
PT Boats: Knights of the Sea
Silent Hunter series
Pre-WWI naval sims:
Ironclads: American Civil War: Cruise around the east coast of the US or up the Mississippi in your Ironclad and blaze away with cannon at the dirty Rebs or Yanke carpetbaggers. This is a fleet command game so it's played from a birds-eye view. The AI will slap you silly. Very nicely detailed ships but no weather or land.
Ironclads: High Seas: Hypothetical American Civil War era game which sees the Confederacy buying a blue water navy and fighting the Union out on the open seas in an effort to control the trade routes to Europe.
Ironclads: Schleswig War 1864. Naval conflict between Denmark and Prussia sees Denmark attempt to blockade Prussia in an attempt to disrupt the Prussian army's advance into Schleswig.
Distant Guns: Naval battles between Czarist Russia and Japan in 1905. Decent graphics and meticulously researched and modelled ships but the DRM is annyoing.
WWI flight sims:
Over Flanders Fields: Between Heaven and Hell. Truly amazing full conversion mod for CFS3. Good dynamic campaign and amazing level of historical detail plus a tonne of flyable aircraft. Flight and damage models aren't as robust as other sims, but the immersion factor is great. Play this one if you want to know what flying in WWI would have been like.
Rise of Flight. Pretty much the inverse of Flanders Fields. Amazing flight models, wonderful physics and damage models and some first rate graphics (although you can only use 4x FSAA max so you can get jaggies) but the campaigns are poorly done and there's almost no immersion. Great flight sim, so-so war sim. Play this one if you want to know what flying a WWI era plane would have been like.
First Eagles 2. Open source game from the creator of European Air War. Out of the box, it's kind of limited, but the open source nature means that there are hundreds of user made add ons ranging from new planes and new paint schemes to entire campaigns with freakin' flyable zepplins!
WWI naval sims:
Jutland: Epic battle between the dreadnaughts of Great Britain and Germany in 1916. Uses an updated version of the Distant Guns engine. Again, great detail is paid to the ship modelling but the DRM is still annoying as hell.
1914-Shells of Fury. Command a U-boat for the Germany navy during WWI. It's interesting because it covers an era that no other naval sim does, but the graphics look very, very dated. If graphics are important to you, avoid this one. If you can get past the pixellated sea, there's a pretty interesting game under the hood.
WWII tank sims:
T-34 vs. Tiger: Very nice looking tank sim covering two of the most iconic tanks of the Eastern Front. Each tank is meticulously detailed and you can hop between all the crew positions. Damage modelling seems somewhat limited in this sim, especially since other aspects seem so thoroughly modelled. AI is decent but the campaigns are scripted and there are only a few missions for each side. There is multiplayer, but I've never tried it.
Steel Fury-Kharkov 1942. Another eastern front WWII tank sim. This one offers up more vehicles than T-34 vs Tiger. Graphically, it's not quite as nice as T-34, but it's superior in every other aspect. THe tutorials will drive you nuts though. Driving a T-34 up a long incline takes forever!
WWII Online. Offers up a wide variety of different armoured vehicles to go tooling around in. It's nowhere near as detailed as the two above-mentioned pure tank sims, but it does let you crew a tank with your buddies and rumble about, annoying the other side. Good times!
WWII naval sims:
Silent Hunter III Get the Grey Wolves X mod and you've got yourself pretty much the ultimate U-boat sim.
Silent Hunter IVGet the Trigger Maru mod and you've got yourself pretty much the best Pacific theatre sub sim. Not as good as SHIII, but still a great game.
Silent Hunter V Uhhhh....well.....it sure looks pretty. Hold off until it's been patched and modded to a better state. And hope that UBI will remove their stupid DRM scheme.
PT Boats: Knights of the Sea. Interesting game but leans a bit too much towards the arcade end of the spectrum for my tastes. Very nice looking though.
WWII Online. Not much of a naval component to this sim, but you can command a few smaller destroyers or gunboats, cruise the coastline and rivers and make things go boom. Good times!
WWII Air sims:
IL-2: 1946. As already mentioned several times, this is pretty much the gold standard of WWII flight sims. Tonnes of flyable planes and still a very active and robust online community. Single player is a bit lacking in that the campaigns are not very well done but the flight models are fantastic.
Battle of Britain II: Wings of Victory. Single player only and is actually a turn based wargame with a flight sim component. Fantastic attention to detail and still some of the best weather and explosion effects out there. Air battles with several hundred planes onscreen are something to behold. My only real gripe with the game is that you can't follow the career path of a single pilot.
IL-2 Wings of Prey. Sim-lite. Amazing landscapes and some great lighting effects but the game was designed for consoles and the twitch crowd. While you can change the settings to sim mode, the mission objectives are left unchanged so you get ridiculous situations where you, in a Mustang, are supposed to fight off 16 Bf-109s and destroy 32 tanks on the ground.
WWII Online. Again, not as robust as the pure WWII flight sims due to simplified controls and avionics (and a poor draw distance) but good fun to join up with some friends and go shoot up the bad guys.
Combat Flight Sim 3: Meh.... some good mods though. Check out the Firepower mods from A2A sims, makers of Battle of Britain II.
WWII Infantry/combined arms combat
WWII Online. Infantry combat is where this game excels. Vast maps leads to some very tense moments right before a firefight kicks off. (Nobody wants to be that guy...the one in Pvt Ryan who stepped off the landing craft only to get a round between the eyes. Nothing like slogging across country for 20 minutes only to die in the opening moments of a firefight. Still, that's what makes this game unique.)
Red Orchestra. Smaller maps than WWII Online and greatly simplified vehicles, but still a pretty fun "casual" sim. Some great mods out there like Mare Nostrum which covers Africa and Italy and Darkest Hour which covers the western front.
Hidden and Dangerous 2. It's old but it's still awesome. Command a squad of 4 SAS troopers as they fight their way from Norway to Burma and all points in between.
Death to Spies. Interesting mix of Stealth and FPS. You play as a Soviet SMERSH agent during WWII. You'll be engaged in such wholesome activities such as assassination, sabotague, theft, terror, and brutality. Psst...buddy, does this rag smell like chloroform to you?
I'm out of time for now so I'll post the post WWII stuff later.
they don't make them like they used to
Jane's F-15
Janes's F/A-18
Longbow Gold
Longbow 2
Total Air War
IL-2 Sturmovik
Flanker 2.0
Enemy Engaged
Falcon 4.0:Allied Force
What no love for sim city game or sims or something
143C5
Sim City games have been traditionally considered as strategy games.
Also, Oleg Maddox' Storms of War: Battle of Britain is considered the spiritual successor to IL2. Of course, we're still waiting for it.
I'm getting a little worried with the updates Oleg keeps putting out for SoW. They all seem to be focussed on ground vehicles. I don't really care if the hatches on a PzKw II all open correctly when I'm flying overhead at 300mph.
Why doesn't he release anything on the planesets, flight models, campaign style, etc?
Pre-WWI naval sims:
Ironclads: American Civil War: Cruise around the east coast of the US or up the Mississippi in your Ironclad and blaze away with cannon at the dirty Rebs or Yanke carpetbaggers. This is a fleet command game so it's played from a birds-eye view. The AI will slap you silly. Very nicely detailed ships but no weather or land.
Ironclads: High Seas: Hypothetical American Civil War era game which sees the Confederacy buying a blue water navy and fighting the Union out on the open seas in an effort to control the trade routes to Europe.
Ironclads: Schleswig War 1864. Naval conflict between Denmark and Prussia sees Denmark attempt to blockade Prussia in an attempt to disrupt the Prussian army's advance into Schleswig.
Distant Guns: Naval battles between Czarist Russia and Japan in 1905. Decent graphics and meticulously researched and modelled ships but the DRM is annyoing.
WWI flight sims:
Over Flanders Fields: Between Heaven and Hell. Truly amazing full conversion mod for CFS3. Good dynamic campaign and amazing level of historical detail plus a tonne of flyable aircraft. Flight and damage models aren't as robust as other sims, but the immersion factor is great. Play this one if you want to know what flying in WWI would have been like.
Rise of Flight. Pretty much the inverse of Flanders Fields. Amazing flight models, wonderful physics and damage models and some first rate graphics (although you can only use 4x FSAA max so you can get jaggies) but the campaigns are poorly done and there's almost no immersion. Great flight sim, so-so war sim. Play this one if you want to know what flying a WWI era plane would have been like.
First Eagles 2. Open source game from the creator of European Air War. Out of the box, it's kind of limited, but the open source nature means that there are hundreds of user made add ons ranging from new planes and new paint schemes to entire campaigns with freakin' flyable zepplins!
WWI naval sims:
Jutland: Epic battle between the dreadnaughts of Great Britain and Germany in 1916. Uses an updated version of the Distant Guns engine. Again, great detail is paid to the ship modelling but the DRM is still annoying as hell.
1914-Shells of Fury. Command a U-boat for the Germany navy during WWI. It's interesting because it covers an era that no other naval sim does, but the graphics look very, very dated. If graphics are important to you, avoid this one. If you can get past the pixellated sea, there's a pretty interesting game under the hood.
WWII tank sims:
T-34 vs. Tiger: Very nice looking tank sim covering two of the most iconic tanks of the Eastern Front. Each tank is meticulously detailed and you can hop between all the crew positions. Damage modelling seems somewhat limited in this sim, especially since other aspects seem so thoroughly modelled. AI is decent but the campaigns are scripted and there are only a few missions for each side. There is multiplayer, but I've never tried it.
Steel Fury-Kharkov 1942. Another eastern front WWII tank sim. This one offers up more vehicles than T-34 vs Tiger. Graphically, it's not quite as nice as T-34, but it's superior in every other aspect. THe tutorials will drive you nuts though. Driving a T-34 up a long incline takes forever!
WWII Online. Offers up a wide variety of different armoured vehicles to go tooling around in. It's nowhere near as detailed as the two above-mentioned pure tank sims, but it does let you crew a tank with your buddies and rumble about, annoying the other side. Good times!
WWII naval sims:
Silent Hunter III Get the Grey Wolves X mod and you've got yourself pretty much the ultimate U-boat sim.
Silent Hunter IVGet the Trigger Maru mod and you've got yourself pretty much the best Pacific theatre sub sim. Not as good as SHIII, but still a great game.
Silent Hunter V Uhhhh....well.....it sure looks pretty. Hold off until it's been patched and modded to a better state. And hope that UBI will remove their stupid DRM scheme.
PT Boats: Knights of the Sea. Interesting game but leans a bit too much towards the arcade end of the spectrum for my tastes. Very nice looking though.
WWII Online. Not much of a naval component to this sim, but you can command a few smaller destroyers or gunboats, cruise the coastline and rivers and make things go boom. Good times!
WWII Air sims:
IL-2: 1946. As already mentioned several times, this is pretty much the gold standard of WWII flight sims. Tonnes of flyable planes and still a very active and robust online community. Single player is a bit lacking in that the campaigns are not very well done but the flight models are fantastic.
Battle of Britain II: Wings of Victory. Single player only and is actually a turn based wargame with a flight sim component. Fantastic attention to detail and still some of the best weather and explosion effects out there. Air battles with several hundred planes onscreen are something to behold. My only real gripe with the game is that you can't follow the career path of a single pilot.
IL-2 Wings of Prey. Sim-lite. Amazing landscapes and some great lighting effects but the game was designed for consoles and the twitch crowd. While you can change the settings to sim mode, the mission objectives are left unchanged so you get ridiculous situations where you, in a Mustang, are supposed to fight off 16 Bf-109s and destroy 32 tanks on the ground.
WWII Online. Again, not as robust as the pure WWII flight sims due to simplified controls and avionics (and a poor draw distance) but good fun to join up with some friends and go shoot up the bad guys.
Combat Flight Sim 3: Meh.... some good mods though. Check out the Firepower mods from A2A sims, makers of Battle of Britain II.
WWII Infantry/combined arms combat
WWII Online. Infantry combat is where this game excels. Vast maps leads to some very tense moments right before a firefight kicks off. (Nobody wants to be that guy...the one in Pvt Ryan who stepped off the landing craft only to get a round between the eyes. Nothing like slogging across country for 20 minutes only to die in the opening moments of a firefight. Still, that's what makes this game unique.)
Red Orchestra. Smaller maps than WWII Online and greatly simplified vehicles, but still a pretty fun "casual" sim. Some great mods out there like Mare Nostrum which covers Africa and Italy and Darkest Hour which covers the western front.
Hidden and Dangerous 2. It's old but it's still awesome. Command a squad of 4 SAS troopers as they fight their way from Norway to Burma and all points in between.
Death to Spies. Interesting mix of Stealth and FPS. You play as a Soviet SMERSH agent during WWII. You'll be engaged in such wholesome activities such as assassination, sabotague, theft, terror, and brutality. Psst...buddy, does this rag smell like chloroform to you?
I'm out of time for now so I'll post the post WWII stuff later.
bogaty
Add combat mission, kharkov 1943, combat mission series and m1 tank platoon 2 and steel beasts pro to that
Add combat mission, kharkov 1943, combat mission series and m1 tank platoon 2 and steel beasts pro to that
Artosa
I still haven't gotten around to posting my picks for the post-WWII era sims (doesn't seem to be much interest) or I would've included Steel Beasts.
I really like Combat Mission and Achtung Panzer, but didn't include them here as I consider them to be wargames, not simulations.
If you liked M1 Tank Platoon, you should be happy to hear that they're working on number 3 now. (ignore the crap writing in the article. It's fairly obvious that the site is a business news one, not a gaming one.)
In other sim news, the latest patch for Rise of Flight was released this morning. It added some new multiplayer modes, improved performance, and added 2 new planes for purchase from the developers, the Nieuport 11 and the Albatros DII.
Finally, a new version of Lock On: Modern Air Combat, called Lock-On Platinum is going to be released soon. Looks great!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=99_hoJNj3ys&feature=player_embedded
as far as military combat simulator goes i would say for arma 2,world war 2 online, and project reality mod for bf2.DJ_HeadshotAir combat is military no? There are plenty of amazing air combat sims!
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