On Friday of last week, I noticed a few people reporting that IL-2 Great Battles was crashing on start-up. I even tried to troubleshoot the problem with a few people without success. Since then the number of posts that I’ve seen has shot up dramatically with the only common denominator being that they access IL-2 via Steam. Here’s what we know about the problem with a possible workaround that may help some.
Crash on start
Updated: It appears that the issue has been fixed. See this note from 1CGS about the issue.
IL-2 Great Battles, among flight simulators, has a pretty solid reputation for being a stable piece of software. Most sims have the occasional issue and IL-2 is not immune and given the complexity of the software involved its never really a surprise to me.
Most problems can be solved with a driver update, a tweak to a setting somewhere, or identifying a piece of faulty hardware. On occasion, however, they seem to happen at a far larger scale and I think we’re seeing that today with several threads on the IL-2 forum, over on the Reddit group, and scattered across various Discord communities.
So far, this specific problem seems to be for Steam users only. The crash happens during start-up and many have speculated that it must be something happening at the point where Steam and the IL-2 software talk to each other.
There is a workaround but it comes with a big caveat. Steam store owners can still go to the IL-2 directory and start the il2.exe file from there. That seems to bypass the issue and you can get into the sim from there. The problem? Only content that you’ve paid for on the official il2sturmovik.com website will appear there and none of your Steam DLC content will. For some this means that most content will remain available while others may not be able to play.
Stay tuned for more
At this point, we haven’t heard from the devs, however, with a problem that’s growing in size like this one it’s likely that they are aware of the problem and working on a fix. As soon as we hear anything I’ll be sure to update this article.
In the meantime, I wanted to spread the word so people don’t get too frustrated trying to troubleshoot what appears to be a widescale problem that is out of their control.
Stormbirds 
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