Working together, community members Enigma and Ad Astra have come together to present a new multiplayer PvPvE (player versus player versus AI) experience for Korea IL-2 Series. The intro video and design documents detail what the community hopes to achieve with the server. Let’s have a look!

Fight for supply and morale on the way to the Yalu

The Yalu River, bordering North Korea and China, was a metaphorical finish line that UN forces lead by the United States attempted to reach but ultimately failed to achieve during the Korean War. Its more complex than that but you get the idea and on Enigma’s new Korea IL-2 Series server it also serves as the end-goal across a series of dynamically influenced missions.

If you’ve been online recently, you’ll know that the series has seen a drop in multiplayer activity. When it was active the teams tended to be balanced towards the Blue team with fewer on the Red team. Enigma and Ad Astra’s design plans for that from the start:

We will lean into the asymmetrical nature of the IL-2 Korea planeset and host a server that puts the emphasis on blue to push, while red has to fight a war of attrition to slow down blue’s advance. The server is designed to be played at all hours with any playerbase count and is expecting blue to be overpop, as the community grows, we will scale the play area and enlarge it. The hope is to have a play area that feels too busy and then we will scale it. We will eventually add a planeset that follows the exact dates of the war so players can experience the full war from start to finish. The victory or stalemate is determined where the frontline is at the end of the war or when blue runs out of morale.

With a mix of AI and human players, dynamic targets, and an assumption of asymmetry in the mission design, the server is setup factoring in that as an expectation. The Red team has supply (destroyed or defended successfully) while Blue team has morale (which is lost or gained as progress is made).

Objectives include frontline targets, strategic targets, and even B-29 raids.

Mission length is also design feature with plans for frontline bases with short travel times (about 5 minutes), standard bases (with travel times of 5-10 minutes) and rear bases with 10-15 minute travel times. In each case, the idea is to get you into action fairly quickly.

Enigma is no stranger to multiplayer server communities and lead the launch of what would become Enigma’s Cold War server (later taken over by Heatblur) for DCS World. For a time it was the server to be on and it still is highly popular in the community.

You can read the presentation file here or check out Enigma’s community here. Hopefully it helps gain some traction for multiplayer community members.