Ah, speaking of the VVS P-40 campaign...
...I had access to Il-2 in the "air science lab" at Embry, which was a simulator room where they'd teach pilot students. I started that campaign as a LaGG pilot, got owned by Bf-109E's, and then after recovery was transferred to the P-40. Aww yeah... Hands down, the '40 is my favorite Allied fighter of the war, and I was doing incredibly well... until I had to leave.
The P-40... well, it tends to be somewhat underpowered in the game. The late P-40M and Soviet Field Mod version are decent enough, but contemporary axis fighters (both German and Japanese) still own them in an equal advantage starting position.
The P-40 does turn good and dive good, though, so if you fly it right and don't allow the enemy to gain energy advantage, then you can do very well with it.
I, however, have attuned my gunnery reflexes for snapshots with 20mm cannons, and using wing-mounted .50-cals is rather hard for me. They feel so frustrating because even if they hit, they need much more hits than in real life to produce good damage. It's widely accepted that the .50-cal Brownings are nerfed in IL-2 - both in accuracy and damage - compared to most other weapons.
As a result, I tend to avoid flying most western allied planes, such as P-51, P-47, P-40 and what have you. The P-51 flies pretty nicely, P-47 is a brick under 5000 metres compared to other planes but absolute monster at higher altitudes, and P-40 is somewhat fragile and slow.
P-39 on the other hand tends to be a somewhat overmodeled aircraft. Especially the earlier versions and specifically the P-39 D-2. The cannon makes it more dangerous than the other American fighters that stick to MG's only for armament, but what I mean by overmodeling is that it can actually outrun the Bf-109 F-4 and Bf-109 G-2 models up to fairly high altitude.
This makes really no sense when you consider the powerplants of the respective airplanes. The P-39 had an Allison V-1710 V12 engine with a single-stage low performance supercharger, rated at 1,475 hp (1,100 kW) at 3,000 rpm at sea level and, due to the lack of multi-stage supercharger, the performance dropped off sharply at altitude.
My contrast, the Bf-109 F-4 had a Daimler-Benz DB-601E rated at "up to 1,350 PS (993 kW) at sea-level with 2,700 rpm" which is indeed less than the Allison engine's low altitude performance, but also "up to 1,320 PS (970 kW) with 2.700 rpm at 4.8 km altitude" which is
significantly higher than the power produced by the Allison engine at similar altitude.
Then again, the AI planes have so much difficulty matching the tactical performance, flying and gunnery skills of real human player that they are forced to cheat atrociously. What I usually do offline is set myself against 16 AI planes of variable make and skill, then give myself unlimited ammo and fuel, and fight them.
Trying to use energy tactics against the AI is futile, and almost unaffected by what planes you choose to give the AI. I have experimented with giving them damned I-16's and myself a FW-190 D-9, and they can bloody keep up with it due to their unnatural speed and climb rate. I can run away from them in straight line, but I can't really gain a meaningful energy advantage for performing well set up attack runs against them.
Another example would be using an YP-80 jet against '42-'43 Spitfire models. It's just hilariously frustrating how little it seems to matter what plane matchups you use, the AI planes just have such a huge advantage, and it's not just the fact that they never overheat or blackout... they are using a different flight model for same plane, and that's one of the primary reasons I usually just use them for gunnery practice and elect to fly online rather than dynamic or static campaigns.
Again, I hope the Cliffs of Dover doesn't do the same mistake with AI planes. It's super-annoying when you know your plane should have superior speed and superior climb rate but you don't, not enough to make it matter anyway. The only real way to defeat a horde of AI is to get yourself a plane with superior turning performance, such as the La-7, Yak-3, Ki-84 or Bf-109G-2; with these planes, it's actually fairly easy to manage the AI planes, even at high numbers.
The AI is also woefully incapable of taking terrain formations into account. So, if you are trailed by a large number of aircraft, you can fly low towards a near-vertical cliff face, pull up near it and pass the top closely, and confused by your
complex maneuver, the AI planes usually smash into the cliff en masse; you can do the same thing with a mountain that allows you to fly around its peak. If you do it right and position the peak of the mountain between you and AI planes, it's fairly high odds that the AI, tracking you, will ignore the mountain and fly right into it.
I could maybe make a video showing this, it's fairly amusing to watch.
