Thanks for your reply Captain Dawson.
I see that we're nearly on the same page, just looking at the same thing from slightly different perspectives maybe.
Concerning P-40 and Spitfire performance:
Sure, facing an expert 109 human pilot in your P-40, you are in trouble. Other than that, it doesn't perform all too bad if you adopt her flying style, which basically means that you don't enter any furball and instead plan your attacks wisely and always keep two things at hands: Time and an exit strategy. It ends up that you come to pick the lone wolf or, if you're a really brave man, pairs. Never more than two.
That way you can be quite successful, as for instance this sortie of mine shows: http://www.sas1946.rocks:8000/de/sortie/log/175/?tour=1
8 kills in total, Mc.202, 109F-4, 109G-2 each one of them, plus five 110E-2 - and it could have been more, if the last 110's gunner would not have cut off my right wing.
Spitfire is similar in terms of handling to the P-40, but it does everything slightly better, so you have to pay a slightly lower level of attention to the same things. Good thing about the spit is that you can turn with the 109s if need be.
Regarding Steam, all the things reported there appear to have been solved long time since.
You can't buy anything but Battle of Stalingrad and Battle of Moscow from Steam currently anyway, as you can only buy thing from Steam when they have been finished.
Nevertheless, you can always mix any Steam content with any il2sturmovik.com shop content and each of them have their sales, sometimes together, sometimes independently.
This for instance is how I started with IL-2 Great Battles:
I bought Battle of Stalingrad "Deluxe" (Steam didn't/doesn't call it "Premium") Edition from Steam 'cause when I decided to start playing BoS, there was no sales @il2sturmovik.com, but only on Steam.
Later I purchased Battle of Moscow Premium from il2sturmovik.com, and then later again I purchased anything else money can buy from il2sturmovik.com.
It all plays nicely together, and I don't have to start up Steam if I don't want to in order to play IL-2 Great Battles.
Heck, on reinstall I don't even need to install the Steam version of BoS, I can just use the installer from https://il2sturmovik.com/download/ and everything will be back in place (without Steam) once I enter my account credentials.
So Steam really isn't any bad thing about IL-2 Great Battles, it's just another distribution channel which, by the way, also brings money into the developer's pockets.
Cheers!
Mike
Good points, I totally agree! That's great that Steam resolved the DLC issue. I can appreciate that the Steam and website version can work in harmony, as opposed to CloD, which is another story. I like having the ability to get the Steam key from the IL2 site, so you really have both options while supporting the devs. The reason I don't like Steam is because my CloD disk was misleading about the requirements for Steam. (As in, no warning that it requires internet to install the game, and the disk doesn't really have the game on it.) It took me several months and endless troubleshooting to get CloD up and running due to the complexity of bypassing the Steam installer and fiddling with compatibility modes. Didn't help that I didn't have consistent internet at the time, which doesn't go over well for troubleshooting Steam... I just like having a stand-alone program because it makes it a bit easier to manage for me.
8 kills with the P-40 is impressive, even if they were AI. All the planes can be useful if used to their advantages, P-40's advantage isn't against other fighters as it seems. The P-40 does have a few over the other aircraft, even if it still seems overly underpowered. When you can get into a bomber formation, you can take out far more with the P-40 than the planes armed with a single cannon and machine gun.
Good discussion! We can all agree BOX is a great game.
BTW LuseKofte, I am also really looking forward to the A20! It was used by many countries, so it opens up a lot of new scenarios.