I discovered Il-2 in 2005, shortly after recovering from heart surgery. The first version I had came with separate discs for FB and PF (two discs for the latter), and a copy of Lock-On. At about the time I'd exhausted that first version of Il-2 (there were a TOTAL of 90 career missions for a German fighter pilot, 45 for a Russian fighter pilot, and 45 for an Il-2 pilot), the FB/AEP/PF combination appeared. I never did use that old, two-disc version of PF, and after fooling around with Lock-On for a while, I decided that, although the graphics were first-rate, there just weren't enough hours in a day. By that time I was facing a publisher's deadline, so I had to set some serious priorities. Then as now, I only fly late at night, at the end of what passes for my working day. I now have two versions of Il-2 on my hard drive, a stock, 4.13.2 installation, and a CUP installation with all four period modules.
I only fly offline, and although I have produced and posted a few single-mission sets (at sister station M4T), as a rule I'll fly either stock or third-party careers, at the rate of two or, at most, three missions per session. The number of missions per session depends upon the time required. For instance, I can recall a series of stock Romanian missions, in IAR 80s or 81s, each of which lasted more than an hour: about a half-hour across the entire width of the Crimean Peninsula, ten or fifteen minutes of combat in the Kerch area, then another half-hour for the flight home. As far as I'm concerned, no mission is truly complete until I've either had to bail out, until I've had to make an emergency landing somewhere along the return leg, or until I've returned to the home field, landed, parked in a likely spot, and switched off the engine.
After 11 years in Il-2, I'm still working my way through some of the long, stock careers. At the moment, however, I'm flying the Belchite SCW campaign in CUP/TGA.