LOMAC Reality Check

[SJPhantom 0]

I was a Crew Chief on E Model F4's and F15's.....and I Bought LOMAC because I love Fighter Sims. Low and Behold, LOMAC lets you set up a mission, and you don't even have to fly it.

 

So I did a little experiment, One Vs One, Single Aircraft Strikes, Multiple Air Strikes. Heck, I even did Air strikes with aircraft notorious for being terrible in Air to Mud, and Vice Versa, Aircraft that sucked wind in Air to Air engagements.

 

Some observations. The Mig and SU drivers seem to be a whole bunch better....they don't stray off like the poor A10 drivers and get zapped by a SAM after the mission is over, and the F15 drivers get waxed right out of the gate by what seems like superior Russian Air to Air Missiles.

 

I know the game takes place in Georgia, where the Russian adversary would have an aircraft advantage, so Aircraft numbers would be superior...which in the game is well predicted....I did a mission where I let the game pretty much do everything and the good old US of A was handily outnumbered.

 

Here is my rub. The F15 is arguably Thee best Air to Air fighter, and the American Fighter Pilot is one of the best trained. If anyone here is up on their current events, Russian Military Might is scrambling hard to catch up.

 

So whats with this game? Match an "Excellent" Mig Pilot in a top Russian fighter, against an "Excellent" American in an F15.....8 out of ten times, the Russian smokes him.

 

And don't even get me started on the F14 (or the F18 for that matter)....This game really puts a beating on Navy Pilots.

 

I also Matched a Mig-17 VS an F4.....again, the 17 smoked the Phantom on Average, 8 of 10 times. (Vietnam will tell you otherwise...Pilots will tell you that SPEED lives, and a Phantom couldn't out turn a 17 but she could sure outrun one.) ( I know I know, I'll get an argument)

 

And SAMS....Jinking? Jamming? You'll be lucky to get your whole crew through on a Strike.

 

Being around Fighters, and Fighter Pilots, I have to argue the lethality or the skills of Russian equipment, and not just because I'm an American.

 

I'm going to keep "experimenting"...but I'm beginning to wonder and ask, how realistic IS this game.

[+EricJ 4,244]

Pretty realistic. However I remember reading one time that a true F-15 pilot laughed at it. Thing is, all the data they have is only open knowledge, and so on and so forth. Personally I have no fault of the sim (well okay, it's not as moddable as other games that's fo sho), so after spending years with it, sure it's not the greatest, but it's something, and prefer it still over most flight simulations. It's more high fedelity, than say the SF series. I like the SF series and it's improving, but so far it's preferable since I can fly alot of planes I'll never fly in LOMAC.

[JediMaster 451]

Game made by Russian developers. I think they get better info about Russian equipment than American, plus their own biases are going to mean a situation like you describe (F-15 losing 8 out of 10 times) will not be seen as unusual.

That said, there are acknowledged problems with the BVR missile modeling that causes imbalances. Maybe we'll get a 1.13 to patch it someday, but no word yea or nay at this point.

[WHOSIT 0]

Game made by Russian developers. I think they get better info about Russian equipment than American, plus their own biases are going to mean a situation like you describe (F-15 losing 8 out of 10 times) will not be seen as unusual.

 

 

Greetings All,

 

But, with that bias in mind and the russians having more knowledge of their oun aircraft rather than ours, doesn't that make it that much more of a challange?

 

This should be part of the "fun" of flying in this sim in my humble opinion. Don't you think so?

 

Laters peoples,

Rick " WHOSIT " W.

[+EricJ 4,244]

The only thing AFAIK the ED team has been privy to is the Ka-50, Kamov was actually quite nice in helping out than more than expected for Black Shark. And please could you reduce the size of your signature image to something around what we got? That's just too big man.

[SJPhantom 0]

I would agree that it is that much more challenging. It is a bit frustrating when you look at a scenerio where you have British Harriers and A-10's attacking a Georgian port city. One of the A-10 drivers hit the complex and in reality would have been humbled by the damage he inflicted, egressed low to avoid the high altitude SAMS, and got out of Dodge.

 

Instead he egresses low and fly's right back through the muck and gets shot down by AAA.

 

The radar too is much to be desired. You have a flock of 15's orbiting over the water and two SU's coming right at them, ready to mix it up. You would think with the radar the 15 Pilots would have split their formation and set up for a fight. At the very least they would have had a lock-on warning. Nope, they just sat there and all four got splashed.

 

Don't get me wrong, I think this is an excellent game. It just makes me glad I'm not flying feet dry in an F14 with an inferior MIG coming at me.

[Supernova22 0]

Game made by Russian developers. I think they get better info about Russian equipment than American, plus their own biases are going to mean a situation like you describe (F-15 losing 8 out of 10 times) will not be seen as unusual.

 

The guns on the F-18 are really weak too because I had one of on my tail shootin at me and after 50 hits my left engine had just started smokin.Later he flew across in front of me i fired twice and he went down

Edited April 3, 2008 by Supernova22

[sparkomatic 7]

Sounds rather like iL-2 in the biases...

[+malibu43 142]

Greetings All,

 

But, with that bias in mind and the russians having more knowledge of their oun aircraft rather than ours, doesn't that make it that much more of a challange?

 

This should be part of the "fun" of flying in this sim in my humble opinion. Don't you think so?

 

Laters peoples,

Rick " WHOSIT " W.

 

I think being outnumbered could be considerd part of the challenge, but aircraft and weps modeled incorrectly (if that's the case - I've never played LOMAC) defeats the purpose of a sim and should be avoided.

 

my 2 cents.

[SayethWhaaaa 245]

Not that I wanna sound to like I'm towing the Flanker agenda, but the Flanker is superior to the Eagle in lots of areas. Only problem is that it's all out of context in LOMAC. In a 1v1 fight between similarly trained pilots, the Flanker should be getting a better than 1:1 kill rate if only because it's design was learn from the developments on the F-15 and improve on its characteristics. However, when you bring Russian missiles, AWACS, avionics, pilot training etc into the equation, the Su-27 is still on par with the F-15 and this should not be the case if one is keeping things as true to life as possible.

 

The differences between the two teams and their toys in LOMAC isn't bad. There'll always be trainspotters claiming the stats are off (not directing that at you Phantom! ). But when you play Flaming Cliffs, you'll see R-27s with comparable operational (and success) profiles to the Aim-120s which should definitely NOT be he case. The R-73s reminded me of the QAAM missiles from Ace Combat with their lethality in FC (particularly with reduced the missile effectiveness bar lowered) and this is not to mention the US weapons systems seemingly being much less effective and more prone to spoofing. Doing what I do to get an Aim-7 kill in LOMAC results in a much lower kill rate which for me was somewhere in the vicinity of 4/10, as opposed to around 7/10 in LOMAC.

I just got the distinct vibe that the US weapons systems were neutered somewhat whilst Russian systems were a bit too effective. And I love the Russian toys, but it just seemed a lot easier for them in FC. And people online seem to think its the differences seem to stem Russian dev team of FC. I hope this isn't the case as it would imply that there'll be two new types of Sim in the future, one based on effective US weapons systems and one based on effective Russian ones...

[kct 5]

You forgot this. The reason the US planes are not modelled correctly is because Ubisoft (who was supposed to be the ones in charge of the US planes) wasn't giving 100% of their effort into this game, since they were being too busy with some of their other games (stuff like Rainbow Six games comes into mind). That said, the developers are not able to get much of the data they needed to be able to properly simulate even half of the US planes.

 

Not to mention, the advantage for the Russian planes stems from the fact that ED was already making sims about Russian aircraft before LOMAC (the Flanker series comes to mind). The Russian aircrafts come into LOMAC with the advantage of having as much development data as possible (spanning back into the 90s, when the first Su-27 Flanker game first appeared), while the US planes jump right into LOMAC with almost no proper development data to speak of. Of course, things points to the amount of development and coding the team had for each side.

Edited April 4, 2008 by kct

[+streakeagle 871]

US data is not hard to get in any way shape or form.

The full details on radar/ecm capabilities are still somewhat classified, but flight performance is very well documented.

Lockon favors Soviet aircraft for the same reason IL-2 favors Soviet aircraft.

History favors the F-15 and US/Israeli pilot skills :)

In the end, whether you play Falcon 4.0, LOMAC, SFP1/WOV/WOE series, or any other PC combat flight sim... their main purpose is to entertain you.

The fact that the 3d models look very realistic and the flight/weapons/damage modeling is convincing enough to immerse you to some degree is the means of providing that entertainment.

The developers reserve the right to take whatever slant they want based on their own goals, which certainly includes making a decent living by making a game they think will sell well in their primary markets.

Personal preferences/bias is always going to be a factor given that the resources needed to achieve perfection are not available (not only technical data, but hardware/software technology, time, and money).

 

I don't fault ED for the way LOMAC is balanced, but I do fault them for not making the game moddable enough for me to have option to balance to suit my own preferences/bias.

A truly good game will either be open enough to allow modders to do their magic or have enough ingame settings to accomplish the same result.

 

In the end, the main reason I don't play LOMAC is because I simply don't care for the timeframe/planeset (same as Falcon 4.0: the age of the AMRAAM and all-aspect heat seeker).

The SFP1 series may be a little more arcadish out of the box, but provides the planes I want to fly in the environment I want to fly them in.

With time and effort, the flight models in the SFP1 series can be tuned to be more realistic than most if not all consumer sims available, including MSFS and x-plane.

But I am short on time and get most of what I want out of the box, so I pretty much fly just stock installs of WOV and WOI, with a little First Eagles and WOE thrown in for variety.

I get my WW2 fix from Aces High.

Every now and then I fly LOMAC, Falcon 4.0, Jane's F/A-18 and IL-2FB/AEP/PF, but it doesn't take me long before I go back to the others that are both more fun and in my opinion, more realistic.

Edited April 4, 2008 by streakeagle

[SayethWhaaaa 245]

The carriers are very nice in LOMAC though! The Kuznetsov is a ball to fly from. And having a Su-33 trap on the Kittyhawk is odd looking, but fun.

[kct 5]

That said, strapping a huge Kh-41 on a Su-33 is a way to get some insane fun.