What Else Do You Sim?

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Most of us come to RaceDepartment to discuss and learn about racing simulations and racing games, but we want to know what other simulators you play.

We are experiencing one of the best periods in the history of sim racing. Sim hardware quality is improving while software options are plentiful and growing. But even in this amazing time, we all need breaks from sim racing, and we turn to other avenues of virtual entertainment.

We want to hear from you in the comments below. Let us know what else you enjoy simulating. From flight sims to farming to bus driving, whatever it is that you love to play outside the world of racing, share it with us.

Microsoft’s latest edition of Flight Simulator is a popular option amongst many in the racing community, and even allows us to repurpose our racing rigs as cockpits. Many videos have even been shared on popular sim racing channels featuring fly-overs of major racing circuits from around the world.

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Another widely loved sim that many of you are enjoying is Farm Simulator. On the surface, farming seems like an uneventful pastime, but Farm Sim has managed to make virtual farming fun and engaging. So much so, in fact, that there are Farm Simulator eSports championships.

For those who can’t get enough of driving, there are many choices outside of racing. Euro and American Truck Sims are a great way to relax the mind and pass an afternoon. Taxis and buses are also well represented in the sim world, or you can patrol the streets as an officer of the law. The choices for simulations seem limitless.

Share your personal favourites below. Whether your other sim favourites have you repairing cars, long-haul trucking, boating, mowing grass or anything else, share it below.
About author
Mike Smith
I have been obsessed with sim racing and racing games since the 1980's. My first taste of live auto racing was in 1988, and I couldn't get enough ever since. Lead writer for RaceDepartment, and owner of SimRacing604 and its YouTube channel. Favourite sims include Assetto Corsa Competizione, Assetto Corsa, rFactor 2, Automobilista 2, DiRT Rally 2 - On Twitter as @simracing604

Comments

I tried getting into the No Limits 2 roller coaster simulator. It seems really good but the learning curve for it has just been a bit too much for me relative to how much I actually want to use it. I just thought I’d mention it here in case it might be in the wheelhouse for anyone else. If you like KSP and also like roller coasters then this may be for you.

What I’d like to mess around with would be something that’s just a cannon/artillery simulator but not wrapped inside an entire combat game. Basically something like the old cannon Flash games from decades ago but more sim than arcade. Different guns, propellant loads, shells, weather, etc… Again though, I don’t really want to sim an entire war or battle just to get to that particular gameplay.
 
I tried getting into the No Limits 2 roller coaster simulator. It seems really good but the learning curve for it has just been a bit too much for me relative to how much I actually want to use it. I just thought I’d mention it here in case it might be in the wheelhouse for anyone else. If you like KSP and also like roller coasters then this may be for you.

What I’d like to mess around with would be something that’s just a cannon/artillery simulator but not wrapped inside an entire combat game. Basically something like the old cannon Flash games from decades ago but more sim than arcade. Different guns, propellant loads, shells, weather, etc… Again though, I don’t really want to sim an entire war or battle just to get to that particular gameplay.
Are there any ballistics simulators out there, for artillery or just long range rifle shooting? I feel like there must be...?

I used to be big into Falcon 4 BMS and Allied Force, haven't played those in many years though. I got started on Falcon 3.0 back in the day. I love Star Wars Squadrons, not sure I would call that a sim though. Other than that, I have various other flight sims and KSP sitting on my computer, mostly unplayed (just like my racing sims TBH). I love KSP because you can quickly learn about the basics of space flight and orbital maneuvers after playing it for just a bit.
 
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oh man sims are my second life xD
apart from sim racing i have DCS flaming cliffs 3 with nevada and dubai map and mig-9 plane
though DCS is hard to learn, you must invest so much time in it, to even learn just one plane, so i layed there only in SP to make quick dogfights against bots, or play just to fly on them beatutifull map of nevada or dubai and slalom within those high skyscrappers xD and i never touched multi.
for multi i have IL-2 stirmovik battle of stalingrad, much easier ot learn and realism is good.

i would like to have newest microsoft flying sim but one thing that i dont like there is no crashing physicks, when you over drag the plane suddently black screen appears telling you crashed, that suck so much i will not support this game.. i can imagine when you drag you plane squeaks etc and you see flaps falling apart etc but just black screen??? that suck i dont support such fagggggots..

other sims i like most after simracing is military sims i mean ARMA 3 and Hell Let Loose those are my favorites after sim racing.
i played ARMA 3 so much i think i know tactics so much i can go to afganistan fight taliban LOL
 
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Besides race sims, i use to go sim flying on DCS, MS Flight Simulator as well as X-Plane and Wings of Prey. No one here mentioned Ship Simulator 2006 and Ship Simulator Extremes, wich i played a lot a couple years ago; here's the link in case you guys wanna check it out:https://www.shipsim.com/
Other sim i liked a lot was Steel Beasts, a very realistic Main Battle Tank simulation.
oh i remember playing silent hunter as kid
and t-34 vs tiger tank simlator xD
and now i remember my first military sim ,it was "conflict desert storm", so much nostalgia, i finished it couple of times. even wanted to go to military after school, but they didnt want me xD
 
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and i forgot about KINGDOM COME DELIVERANCE - medieval life simulator, almost time-travel software, i played it a lot too xD
 
In the old days I brought most every game on 5 1/4" and 720k floppies starting with doom , captain keens etc etc
Later I got indy 500 then GPL , I stopped playing most games around first tomb raider

Got BF5 and Anthem with GTX2080 still have not bothered to look at them lol

Ones I keep around for prosperity are Blockout ( 3D Tetris), 3DPool, 1001 jigsaws,
pacman, pacman championship edition, scrabble, solsuite, chessmaster and 5 or 6 Angry Birds
 
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I tried getting into the No Limits 2 roller coaster simulator. It seems really good but the learning curve for it has just been a bit too much for me relative to how much I actually want to use it. I just thought I’d mention it here in case it might be in the wheelhouse for anyone else. If you like KSP and also like roller coasters then this may be for you.

What I’d like to mess around with would be something that’s just a cannon/artillery simulator but not wrapped inside an entire combat game. Basically something like the old cannon Flash games from decades ago but more sim than arcade. Different guns, propellant loads, shells, weather, etc… Again though, I don’t really want to sim an entire war or battle just to get to that particular gameplay.
Are there any ballistics simulators out there, for artillery or just long range rifle shooting? I feel like there must be...?

I used to be big into Falcon 4 BMS and Allied Force, haven't played those in many years though. I got started on Falcon 3.0 back in the day. I love Star Wars Squadrons, not sure I would call that a sim though. Other than that, I have various other flight sims and KSP sitting on my computer, mostly unplayed (just like my racing sims TBH). I love KSP because you can quickly learn about the basics of space flight and orbital maneuvers after playing it for just a bit.
ARMA 3 has advance ballistic but it is so - called "entire combat game"
i dont know how realistic but for sure i can tell you need knowledge to shoot a man from 1-2 clicks away xD
i had recently so much time in warlords mode when our team took over whole map and enemys was forced to stay in them base and i was shooting them from 800 meters with BIG 12,7 mm cal sniper rifle xD you must use rangefinder to know distance, then measure your scope to that distance, and i dont know if its wind simulation or is it random (i guess random) but shooting at such distance i could tell my bullets not fall in straight line xD i had so much fun when i missed and guy wanted to hide in tower, he then opened door and was looking for me but didnt exposed his whole body to me, was looking and i saw he looking at close range, he didnt even supposing i was sitting 800 meters aways from him. each time i shoot for bullet it took 1-1,5 sec to travel to him so i must be patient wait for him to stand steady. he finally exposed his whole body as was looking for me with binoculars and i shoot him straight in chest with 12,7 cal rifle using 20x magnification scope xDD i killed 4 men camping 800 meters outside them base and each time i trash talking to them in chat that i sitting 800 meters away, i killed one guy 3 times and he rage quit game xD
 
elite dangerous is an amazing space sim, especially in vr. you dont necessarily need a flight stick for it, its just fine with a gamepad. of course the latest big update has....compromised the playability of it a bit. its a bit broken at the moment is what im trying to say.
eurotruck is fun. i love settling into the long drives and just eating up the miles. especially good with a dd wheel that i can set the degrees of rotation to about 1800.
ms flight sim is good but i havent found myself playing it much. i guess im still waiting for vr outside the g2. has that happened yet and i didnt hear about it?
 
Carrier Command 2 was just released, and based on the stormworks engine - it's by the same developer. It's still early days and has a few rough edges, but it's shaping up to be good.

Im very aware of it :) its just that while i loved the open beta and i plan to buy it and it seems like its got a few extra details, i love that i can download from stormworks an hypercomplex nearly 1:1 startup procedure helicopter, or an SR71, or a car, or a submarine, or a giant carrier, and get to deal with the controls.
 
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I am trying to get into DCS World at the moment - I bought flaming cliffs 3 and am trying to learn the Mig 29 at the moment.

I also do a bit of ETS2 and Train sim when I need to chill out from racing.

Perhaps we need a flight sim thread on RD in the other sims section? Failing that, can anyone recommend a good DCS community?

EDIT: Forgot about Elite Dangerous - must fire that up again.
 
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1983 was the year I got in to simulators with sublogic flight sim on the c64. Since then I have had every msfs released and also spent more than a decade in combat sims like il2, lomac, dcs. I never got the bug for flying heavy metal and preferred lighter single and twin engine.

It wasn't until more recently that I got in to sim racing, with the release of rf1, gtr,gtr2. Although recent appears to be 15/16 years ago :) That got me on to the basic controllers and then the upgrade path to all we have available to us now as sim racers, DD's, motion, wind, nice rims, dedicated rims.. $$ spent that would have been unfathomable in the early days.

The good thing about nice flight sim controllers is that they have become cheaper and cheaper over the years. Oh wait, they havent, thats just because sim racing has made them seem so cheap :)
I played a lot of Solo Flight, Gunship, and F-15 Strike Eagle. I remember dreaming of more realistic sims. Then, once the technology existed and I could afford them, I found that I didn't have the time to properly learn them. I played some Falcon 4.0 and some Jane's F/A-18 as well as Jane's F-15, but doing them properly is almost a job!
 
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Yeah, it's great to see the name back again. To be honest I think Microprose always published mostly niche titles albeit high quality titles, it's just that back in the day there wasn't that much competition in the video game market so the titles went big.

They've got a couple of interesting games coming up, the first of which I'm particularly interested in.


Thank you for sharing this. Seeing the MicroProse logo fills my heart with warm happy feelings. I remember every day as the bus passed my house on the way to the stop I'd look at the porch to see if my copy of F-15 Strike Eagle had arrived yet. Oh, what joy when it did!

Now Tiny Combat Arena is on my wishlist. I'm not sure if I should thank you or curse you as it's not like I have the time for it...
 
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elite dangerous is an amazing space sim, especially in vr. you dont necessarily need a flight stick for it, its just fine with a gamepad. of course the latest big update has....compromised the playability of it a bit. its a bit broken at the moment is what im trying to say.
eurotruck is fun. i love settling into the long drives and just eating up the miles. especially good with a dd wheel that i can set the degrees of rotation to about 1800.
ms flight sim is good but i havent found myself playing it much. i guess im still waiting for vr outside the g2. has that happened yet and i didnt hear about it?
I was wondering if anyone would mention Elite: Dangerous. I have gone through the tutorial a couple of times and enjoyed it just with my Rift controllers. However, in a dogfight the look controls can be a bit problematic. I just haven't taken the time to really get into it. I played a ton of Elite! on my C64 as well as the "modern" port of Elite - The New Kind. My problem is that in a completely open-world (open-universe?) I have a hard time deciding what to do next.

Frankly, I find it entertaining to fly and dock in the various Coriolis Stations. If the game was just that I could enjoy it on its own. My problem is deciding what to do with my limited time and, frankly, I just need to work on my pace in the racing sims.
 
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Not sure if it counts as a "sim," but Star Wars Squadrons in VR is pretty amazing. I picked it up on a sale and enjoyed it a lot more in VR than I did on my XBox.
 
I played this for a while in VR.. Pretty good fun but haven't touched it in years.



How does this perform in VR these days. I always had it on my wish list but there were always complaints about performance in VR and whilst I bought it after the first big "Overhaul" patch, I quickly refunded because its performance near the major town was appalling.

Obviously it depends on your hardware and settings, but for my own part I just say I cannot share most complaints people voiced over VR performance in this and that game over the past four years. Whenever I tried VR for a game with inbuild VR options, I may or may not have loiked it - but VR never was the reason why I may refused a title. Now, if I buy a newer headset with much higher resolution while keeping my current graphcis card, it might be a different story. But I do not do an d do not plan that currently.

So, with regard to Derail Valley, for me it works great in VR.

My specs in my profile under "About".

Edit. BTW, other simulations I play beside racing titles, are ETS2, Steel Beasts Pro still, occasionally, The Hunter 1+2, Eleven Table Tennis, Flight Simulator 20, Virtual Pool 4, Tennis Elbow 4, Firts Person Tennis VR, a bit of VTOL VR. As subsim.com member I was deep into submarines once upon a time, but moved out of that more and more over the years. Falcon 4 also was a great love of mine. Only listing what qualifies as a simulator. I prefer VR were available, also play Wreckfest and TT Isle of Man 2 in 2D in virtual relaity on a big stereoscopic cinema screen. If somebody has not trried that, I can onyl urge him to do so. It still is 2D - and still makes a sensaitonal difference. Just image to paly your game not oin a monitopr or triple screen, but on a big movie screen. Then you can imagine the difference. A very big movie creen. You need Virtual Desktop and a cinema mod with a big screen, the High Max Cinema Dark for example. You launch Voirtual Desktop, launch that cinema theme, and then laucnh the game. Itworks with some games extremely well, with other snot, especialyl if these are FPS format games with simulated head movment: you get nausea quite quickly then. But it should be tried with any 2D game that has no VR option inbuild.
 
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I'm currently rather addicted to Train Sim World 2020 (not got the sequel yet as I'm acheivement hunting and by god the amount of time to get them is HUGE, 100's of hours!! I'm plodding along should get the last in 2067!).

I play American Truck sim and European truck sim 2 loads too. In the past I played the flight sims mainly Microprose and Jane's stuff loads. Apache Longbow 2 was prolly my fave along with M1 tank Platoon 2 (hated the enemy artillery!!).

I love the space "sim" stuff too, mainly the Star Wars games (old ones)....hundreds and hundreds of hours in those games. Squadrons was very dissapointing for me (apart from graphics). Over 1000 hours in Elite Dangerous until it all started to go to **** really badly.

Too many games not enough time!!
 
Not sure if it counts as a "sim," but Star Wars Squadrons in VR is pretty amazing. I picked it up on a sale and enjoyed it a lot more in VR than I did on my XBox.

You should try House of the Dying Sun if you're into space combat in VR - You can play as both pilot and tactical commander, and switch between the two at will.


Other notable VR space combat games are the original Everspace, End Space, and EVE Valkyrie.

Bonus freebee is Project Stardust - it'll fit right in after SW Squadrons, just make sure you grab it before Disney shuts it down - http://saltyhash.org/project-stardust/

Now Tiny Combat Arena is on my wishlist. I'm not sure if I should thank you or curse you as it's not like I have the time for it...
I think curse after I've now robbed you of any available time for work, family, friends etc, just make sure you keep some free time for beer though. ;)
 
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Wow Microprose again, that is something. Sims I love all sorts, started ages ago. Just retired a few months ago, and am still finishing up a complete PC rebuild. My old PC still had a purple round keyboard connection.
Glad to see a few like Virtual Pool 4, I swear I'd give anything to have a real Pool table. GPL was always a favorite,
My biggest discovery a few years ago was Steam, Crash Dive 2, Golf Club 2019,Men of War 2 ,Silent Hunter,IL-2 Cliffs of Dover,Steel Fury... List goes on and on.
Never tried VR, not sure If my sight with glasses would even work. I should be able to play some better flight sims now I almost have a new PC(still need a better video card, man there expensive!) right now have a Nvidia Geforce GTX 1050 Ti.
I want to try some better WW1 Flight sims, last one I played with my last PC Was First Eagles, which is old, but not as old as Blue Max in 1983.
Blue Max.jpg

Like I said, I go back quite a ways !
 

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