True enough. From an apolitical, purely historic view point, it is pretty hard to pick any specific region of the Middle East that your quote could not apply to.
That said, I am not too excited about a map like this. With the exception of the recent air campaigns, this part of the globe only mildly lends itself to big air battles. But the same can be said for the Balkans so…we shall see.
I must say I have a little mixed feelings about this map. The humanitarian catastrophe that is happening in the area and the role that air power has in all this leaves a sour taste in my mouth. Looking at those screenshots and knowing what these Su-24 from this air base are bombing for real is tough. I am fully aware that I am highly hypocritical here, as I enjoy to play war games and I don’t have any issues with playing a B-17 for example. I guess some distance to real events helps a lot.
On the other hand, the 1982 Operation Mole Cricket in the Beqaa Valley looks very exciting tactically, as well as air combat during the 1973 Yom Kippur War. So this map definitely has something for it.
I hope that they will include a lot of Easter Mediterranean sea space (as adding ocean is basically for free), as this is an excellent area for naval operations involving the US 6th Fleet and the Soviet Fifth Eskadra. The area also lends itself for some grand fleet defense scenarios for the Tomcat. The Soviet’s Naval Aviation bases on the Crimea are off map (air spawn), but the Eastern Med is exactly where these Backfires were destined to strike US carriers.
I surely agree.
Because like which war didnt cause humanitarian catastrophe, sour feelings ( put lightly ) and all the other bad things ?
I am OK with maps like NTTR where no real conflict was fought.
But remember part of ED customer base complained about exactly that.
I can think of at least 10 other places in the world that would make better DCS maps than this. I’m thinking this is perhaps for the Russian market, but it’s the 3rd DCS desert map already.
Also, as this group are the makers of the DCS Normandy map, if that got upgraded for speedtrees and better performance then I would perhaps be a bit more interested.
Yep, it got developed at an awkward time, before SpeedTree tech hit 2.5 (like it is used in Caucaus and PG). Because of the large amount of hedgerows as trees it could really do with the update to the new tech, as it really drags on my system.
I guess the balance for them is that a free update to an old map offers no new revenue but the other side of the coin is that I’m less keen to buy more of their new maps.
Liberation from terrorist, lol.
Just like the American conflict “The War for Southern Indpendence” AKA “The War of Northern Aggression”
And a lot of WWII backers crying for their map. Not saying it was pushed out, because it is a beautiful map. But they didn’t exactly wait for the new tech…
we all know that there is only one place we are interested in, it is the whole world ( map ) 
Nope, DCS map tech is awesome, it’s different from Il-2. I prefer DCS feeling of flight and how it looks and feels, but thats just my opinion, and you know what those are like, right? 
I wouldn’t call any of our sims crap. They are all awesome, except maybe that one overly monetized arcade multiplayer-only thing.
It’s so easy to call something crap and “blah blah” but you are not in the trenches so to speak. So sierra tango foxtrot uniform m8.
I’ve only briefly stuck my nose into any of the current BoX games, but aren’t the current maps smaller in area than the current DCS maps? Also, if you fly over somewhere like Vegas in NTTR and happen to know the area, the layout of the city itself is pretty much exactly spot-on with not only the main buildings, but also the outlying roads and areas. I seem to remember the map that is currently shipping with Flying Circus felt less spot on- not surprising, seeing as it’s a recreation of an area from 70+ years ago.
So, I think it’s a bit of an apples and blueberries comparison there. Just saying.
Dude, you must be joking. Take a look at @EightBall’s video again and tell me it’s crap. Individual blades of tall grass are an insane example of how good it can be.
And this one, look at the lighting and all of the tiny details, like the rain effects and the secondary explosions in the target area.
I also think that BoX scenery is wonderful, but to call DCS scenery crap is about 180 degrees from what I observe.
It sounds silly but I cheered sitting in my lorry last night when the stick of bombs caused those secondaries. It looked so stunning. The rounds cooking off and than that shockwave was fantastic.
I find it still not overall good as Il2 maps and engine. Performance / image quality / colors > not so ”balanced”
(And talk about caucasus) PG is better
Plus, it wasn’t until the release of the Kuban expansion that we got -gasp- mountains in BoX. Otherwise the scenery, while true to it’s subject matter, was pretty dull.
Also, BoX has the advantage of building for breadth; aircraft have simpler systems to model (eg. no fire control or FBW computers to simulate), no advanced navigation systems, moving map displays, Radars, MFDs, etc. Also there’s no modern ATC or AWACS during WWII, so that’s another item not on the BoX punch list. (although admittedly DCS also has room for improvement here too).
While they have a dynamic campaign, at the same time they lack a mission editor (not counting the quick mission builder, as it’s nowhere near deep enough to count).
Basically, they’re building a shallower representation of a simpler period of aviation versus the scope of what ED is aiming for. So with that in mind, having a potential edge on map tech isn’t such a massive advantage over DCS, when you add everything up.
Couple things to keep in mind, in addition to what’s already been said:
IL2BoX focuses on lower-altitude, less complex aircraft and combat. I don’t believe they have a map stretching from England to Germany, for example – at least, not yet. Even IL2’46 didn’t go that far. This leaves them free to both have smaller maps as well as greater detail, which is preferred when your focus is at the tactical level. By contrast, DCS has to have a bit more room as well as higher altitudes because of the sheer capabilities of what’s being simulated. Very few WW2 era aircraft were designed to operate at altitudes greater than 40,000ft. DCS has several aircraft modeled that are more than capable of exceeding that and performing well at those altitudes. Thus, they have to compromise some low level detail in order to squish it into the limitations they have to work with.
Further, what do we expect in terms of map detail from a simulation? I don’t think the vast majority of us have a system capable of rendering map detail like ArmA3 does in a flight simulation environment. For reference, the main ArmA3 map is on an area of a 40x40km square… And doesn’t even use the whole square as it’s kind of a narrow strip island carved through it. From my perspective, DCS maps are adequate for the intended purpose and for the most part I’ve been pleased with the overall appearance. Keeping in mind I also play on low-medium details.
I much prefer DCS terrain to BoX. I heard similar claims last year that BoX is so much better than DCS so downloaded a copy to try it out. I actually ended up returning it since I wasn’t terribly impressed and I’m not a huge WWII fan anyway.
I agree with the assumption that the new Syria and Afghan maps are intended for the Russian audience. I’m really surprised we don’t have a European or Pacific theater on the radar. I’d really love to see a Korea or Taiwan Strait map.
If and when the Afghanistan map gets released, I want it to be named DCS: The Graveyard of Empires.
Bear in mind that my map making experience is limited from the dark ages of terraformer.exe, to FP’s Visitor, ArmA’s Visitor2, ArmA2’s Visitor… To whatever they call it now. Anyways, same general rules tend to apply, whether it’s Unreal, BoX, or DCS:
There’s typically a scale set by the engine. In the case of Unreal, your maps have a limited size/resolution, so if you want a certain level of detail, your scaling has to take that into account. What that means is if you want to have a high detailed map, with fine terrain tiles, your overall play area is highly restricted. If you bring the scales down, you can get a larger play area, but you sacrifice terrain detail to get it.
Ergo, for an engine like what powers FP/ArmA, your max resolution is a height map of 4096x4096. Your satellite image can be several times this size, so you can make up for some height map limitations by painting features on your sat map. Depending on the engine, there’s also a low/close in map which is used to place higher detailed texture tiles when within a certain view distance. I don’t know if DCS or BoX use this kind of system or not as it’d be wasteful for a flight sim, so if I had to guess they stick with a pure sat map for detail, likely cutting out chunks of it and displaying chunks as required from what I’ve observed.
In theory, if one was willing to accept a bit less detail, you could make a map twice the size, but half the resolution. That would mean less defined terrain features, more angular/blocky looking mountains, and so on. IMO I’d be willing to accept this if we had a bit more in the way of strategic aircraft as well as gameplay, but thus far we’re pretty much in the camp of tactical. We also have limitations with regards to how objects would be interacting over such large distances, which is troublesome for an engine like Unreal. FP/ArmA handled it by reducing how often units outside of the player(s) view were updated, but a flight sim is a bit more prickly about that, especially when you have assets like AWACS that can see a lot. This also places a lot of demands on servers as they have to keep track of objects interacting with all the players.
Basically, you end up with a kind of distributed computing problem as your map size grows. You have a detail limit that’s based on overall computing power (which is also used for complex stuff like fluid dynamics on your flight models and those are highly intensive), then you have further monkey wrenches that all vie for that same power. So you have to balance an acceptable level of detail to fit what the goal is; a flight sim has to compromise a lot here in order to be, y’know, a sim. Fortnite? PUBG? CS:GO? They don’t have nearly the same demands or problems. Basic physics, handled at the client level, uniform for everyone. 100 players? Please. Thousands of AI controlled units are a much bigger problem.