A Tale of Two Nations: US vs Japanese BR

Machinery of War Discussion Aircraft
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Howdy, Nukemind here a newb who is getting better and in love with Japanese planes. I wanted to do a look at the fighters of the two Pacific War nations. Specifically, their BR. Let’s take a look at the BRs between Japan and America.

USA Rank 2: 2.925, 12 fighters. Starting 3: 2.7, 2.3, 2.7 Highest 4.0

USA Rank 3: 3.975, 12 fighters. Starting 3: 3.7, 3.7, 3.0

USA Rank 4: 5.02, 11 Fighters. Starting 3: 4, 4, 5.7

Japan Rank 2: 2.75, 16 fighters. Starting: 2.7, 2.0, 1.7. Highest: 4.7 Helped by three 1.7s bringing down average.

Japan Rank 3: 4.51 (+.6), 13 fighters. Starting: 4.3, 4.3, 3.0. Highest: 5.3, which is the first fighter in a group with the later one being lower. 3.0 and 3.7 heavies bring average down.

Japan Rank 4: 6.0 (+.98), 10 fighters. Starting 3: 5.3, 6, 5.3. Highest: 7.7. Two heavies are 5.3 and 6.0, not significantly changing average.

What does this tell us? Well, first off, the first time a Japanese pilot hopes in a Rank 3 plane he will be getting a 4.0 minimum BR. That may be his only plane at that level but it’s what he will get (using arcade as an example). His other planes may very well be 2.0s and 2.7s. Personally I did far better facing 4.7s and the like in my Ki-43-II thanks to the double MGs than the Ki-43-III, but that’s also due to the lack of upgrades on the Ki-43-III when I got it.

Secondly, and this is what’s not shown, Rank III and IV American planes are late war and even post war designs. The P-51H was produced near the end of the war but didn’t reach front line units: it’s sitting pretty at 6.0 while the BASE Ki-84 is at the same level. At the same time we have tons of good American planes under the base 4.3 level of Japanese Rank IIIs. Any American pilot- or German, or Italian, or whomever- who uses good ol’ BnZ tactics can easily and routinely smack around Japanese planes, IJN/IJA planes require baiting enemies into attacking. So why 1941 and 1942 planes- even 1940 planes- are thrown against late war planes is beyond me.

Personally, I migrated here from another game. I rather like War Thunder- I started playing it in 2014 but only lasted a few battles. I am not bad at it at all, mainly because I’ve flown every flight sim under the sun before coming here. But I just don’t get, and indeed have never seen, a game that throws these much older, much more fragile, slower, less powerful planes into the jaws of 1945/46 planes. There is, after all, a reason why by the late war the Zeros and Oscars were being torn to shreds by the dozens for fairly few kills.

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Fully agree! See it from another perspective: The German 109 F-4 from 1941 faces turboprops from 1953 - the Wyvern - and both have the same BR of 4.0 in Air RB. And don’t tell me that they are not good at alt. I critted a Wyvern some months ago at 9.800 meters - and then he dove out with more that 880kmph (my TAS ripspeed).

Imho your positive experiences with the BR 3.7 Ki-44 against 4.7 enemies should be over right now as the HE nerf now had hit the Japanse 0.50 cal.

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NGL I am very scared of that. That being said that’s the funny thing… I’m using the 2.7 Premium with only 2 12.7s. Many enemies think it can’t turn… and pay for it. They think if it isn’t a Hayabusa or Reisen that it is easy pickings. Then I proceed to out turn them. The amount of F6Fs, P-39s, P-63s, Spits (can’t outurn but can outplay) and more is frankly astonishing. But I have to play to my max limits- if I am in one of those planes it’s extremely easy to slaughter a Ki-44. It’s easy to slaughter any of the IJN/IJA planes because, well, historically they were slaugthered. They were prewar/early war planes serving until 1945 with no armor at all.

I am going up the German line now that frankly scares me but sounds about right. I noticed there is fairly little good at 1.3/1.7 which is where I like to start to gain SL for the better ones…

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Part of it comes from the fact a lot comes from the Japanese planes being good turnfighters, and the US being a common starting point for newer players means that they will try to turnfight, and things wont go so well, so the stats show up in the assigned BR.

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IMHO that’s a punishment though. BR/Planes should be balanced around the planes themselves, not the players who play them. Otherwise you will get trees where BR is inflated and no new players will want to try them because they will be facing jets while still having a couple of prop planes to research.

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The problem though is how do you go about fairly deciding which stats are more important than others, especially for a universal system that takes the entire scope of WT into account(and can be adjusted on an ongoing basis, automatically), as the Battle Rating of the F2A should value different stats vs the F9F-8 or F-14.

Which is why player stats are used as they effectively account for it all and will show up even minor changes to the aircraft, maps, modes, match maker etc. that get made. I personally don’t have a problem with that, and I think it would be difficult to create a workable system that doesn’t make things worse for any particular vehicle.

I do think though it should be changed from using the or statistical mean, to either the median or some value of standard deviation (likely slightly above 1) to account for the width of the interquartile range since I think it should be based around a slightly better than average pilot.

Additionally to stop things from stagnating, I think that a ~5% or so reduction to repair cost should be applied for all aircraft that retained their BR from the previous two adjustment passes (bar aircraft within 2 rings of the highest rating available ) to encourage people to go back to disused aircraft to help get data for a potential BR adjustment preventing aircraft from potential being unusable due to Repair cost.

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You have that issue in the Italian tech tree, at least for single engine prop fighters. I exclude the event 109 F-4 from this - imho a failed approach to revive the Italian prop tech tree as they forgot to lower the massively overtiered fighters. I mean setting the Re 2005 at BR 5.7 or G 55 Series 0 at 4.3 is just a bad joke…

The problem of minor nations was always that they attracted “better than average” players as it is not really a challenge for them to get good results in obviously undertiered US fighters like the 3.7 P-51 or the F4U-4 at 4.7 (the same plane like the 5.7 F4U-4b)…

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The problem of this BR setting nonsense is imho this “equality” madness based on stupid statistics covering also irl developments.

If you just accept than 10% of US citizens have an IQ of 80 or lower (you can google this) you might assume that we have this ratio in the player base too.

From my point of view gaijn uses the standard average method without any sophisticated apprach. So if i would be broke and my neighbor is a millionaire, i would be rich with a fortune of $500k from their pov.

Coming back to BR setting:
The WT meta supports props with fast climb, good turn and high speed. In addition you need patience and experience to make the P-51s and P-47s work - and for the P-47 you need MEC to use the full potential. So if you then have highly motivated but also highly newer players happy to fly the iconic P-51 or P-47 you will end up with artificially lowered BRs.

So with a pure average approach (as done by gaijin) you have the situation that if two equally skilled pilots meet each other the US player has usually the better plane due to these artificially lowered BRs…

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Additionally the fact that is that there is no in game requirement to know or resource that teaches players how to fight in various styles, how to set up for success, and how to notice and what to do when things are going poorly, and rules of thumb for rough performance of various archetypes of airframe and their exceptions. let alone the matchmaker making functional teams.

Also to some degree these changes are very much needed.

The thing is that there needs to be some sort of limit to what vehicles can see each other and any system will put some at a disadvantage in comparison to others. I can’t really think of any systems that are objectively better. But I can many that would be far, far worse for various reasons.

The thing is that to some degrees they care about the average player since good pilots are going to do well regardless and there is no real mechanism to save the worse ones, and to some degree should be handled by constraining their progression on the meta side of things outside matches to keep them honest, So within the Match, the Matchmakes obviously tries to achieve a specific outcome (global win rate approaching 50%) by stacking one team from the selected population for the given round.

and since they are equally skilled as outlined things aren’t going to end well for the US aircraft.

Take for example a P-51D-5 vs a BF-109F-4 at 3km in a co-altitude 1v1.

The optimal thing for the P-51 to do is to drag the BF-109 into friendlies or back to the Airfield otherwise it would just get outclimbed and dived on or energy trapped if it attempts to maneuver for guns and the wing mounted armament vs centerline is another disadvantage making a desperate head-on a losing proposition.

The thing is that the P-51 was put a massive disadvantage since it didn’t have an energy advantage going into the fight that it could bank on(and turning to RTB / drag to friendlies may be energy intensive meaning that speed an acceleration means that closure remains the limiting factor, on top of giving preferential aspect to the BF-109). And even if things were for example completely in the P-51’s favor (e.g. P-51 6km altitude with a ~2km altitude advantage over the BF-109F-4) to get the victory it still requires energy awareness and management to avoid compressing, dumping energy maneuvering, or getting snap shot after overshooting / going to reset for another gun run.

and a quick resolution would only occur if the BF-109 decided to take the bait and deliberately stall themselves out, this again requires careful timing to ensure that it can also be taken advantage of anyway. And even after all of that there is nothing stopping them from diving / spiraling to a lower altitude and forcing the P-51 to either disengage or waste its advantage and then proceeding to energy trap them or out climb and reset the engagement on their terms.

So realistically because one is much easier to fly for the average pilot it is effectively overtired, means that a good pilot in a commensurately undertiered aircraft can easily take advantage of the higher skill ceiling to occasionally absolutely dumpster people / teams on occasion, though to some degree this becomes difficult as things progress into a 1 vs X situation as things tend to snowball (as not everyone in ARB is in it for the TDM aspect and may chose to go after Ai targets or bases for various reasons) and the time provided to reset between engagements reduces limiting the ability to recover the advantage and stay aware of all threats.

And as BR’s get higher more advanced and complicated mechanics are introduced which mean that there is a lot more management and proper procure to follow to make things workable (Radar, Countermeasures, BFM maneuvers, RWR, missiles, etc.) and keep track of to ensure that you come out of on top which obviously leads to people opting out entirely (Ai & bases) or only using the basic mechanization which severely limits their performance making problems worse for their teammates.

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I really appreciate you efforts and share many (literally all) of your thoughts, but this is imho the worst example for the underlying issue.

Actually the D-5 at 4.3 is imho one of the few US aircraft which is objectively overtiered - imho the 3.7 P-51 C-10 is the much better plane.

Your theoretical scenario changes if you have real experienced pilots - the 3.7 Mustang can extend in a very shallow and very fast climb - and has with 75% prop pitch and both radiators at 50% infinite WEP without overheating. Even if the 109 climbs at optimal speed and would dive later on the P-51 - the additional drag during the dive of the 109 would kill the altitude advantage and the P-51 would gain energy.

I fully agree and i wrote it im my previous post - US planes at this BR range are not beginner friendly - but there has to be some kind of common sense in this overall process. It is a video game, yes - but to which degree you want to alter realism in a war game just to make a “one size fits all” solution?

Just look at the havoc of 2 decent flown XP-50s can create in a full downtier - or the 6.0 F2G - they outclass their enemies.

Anyway, i have also no perfect solution for this mess, but the situation as of today is not really suited to create “exciting game play”.

It was very nice to see that experienced players with reasonable opinions (and actually able to express those in a very polite and professional manner) are still active in this forum.

Have a good one!

Edit - i have to wait 3 hours before i can add a “like” to your post…

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I’m trying to go up the tree right now. The radial engined G.50, Re2000, etc being 2.0, then 2.7 with the addition of a couple of 7.7s, is the biggest joke I’ve ever seen.

At the end of the day good players are going to try new and unique trees and stick with it- worse players will go back to their comfy place. I HATE flying American planes. BNZ is just boring to me. But I can’t deny it’s damn effective. Not to mention how much damage they can take- I remember reading a war memoir from the coral Sea where a Japanese pilot complained the USN pilot had absorbed every single 7.7 shell and kept flying. I feel that so much.

Some planes are just objectively worse than others- at current 99% of the Japanese props are over tiered.

Another great example of the Ki-100 and ski-61 Premiums. The Ki-100 turns faster, has a higher top speed, same exact weapons. Yet it’s a lower BR I’d assume due to the players who use it… despite historically being an evolution of the Ki-61…

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If you want to continue your journey via the Italian air TT: Try the easy way.

All you have to do is to grind the SM 91 and with the SM 91 the SM 92. Best way is to use the BR 1.7 SM 79 bomber and learn to fly detours; the bomber is quite ok and fast enough to outrun most at its BR.
The SM 91 turns quite decent and has a good armament - check DEFYYN’s vid on yt how to use it.

The SM 92 is a beast if you know how to use it, i research the F-16 with it (despite i will never fly it) - and it can outrun what it can’t outturn - including XP-50s . But you need MEC to have WEP the whole match and you need high crew skills to avoid getting hit in the first few turns. You beat the **** out of enemies in prolonged turnfights…

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I appreciate it I will definitely go that route then because while I like the Re2000 (despite it being a bit overtiered) I really can’t justify playing it when there are so many better planes at that BR. Like I can get a fragile plane with 2x12.7s and 2x7.7s at BR 3.0… or I can use a Corsair/Hellcat with 6x12.7s, much more “tank”, better divings, better BnZ, and more planes at the same BR letting me have respawns in arcade.

It’s… not a tough choice.

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I find japanese aircraft specifically a6m3(first 2 variants) somewhat overtiered to the underwhelming 20mm type 99 model 1 short cannons while being not as decent as the a6m2 even from stock, the most painful part like every tech tree is bomber(which genuinely should be lower by 0.3 to 1.0 sometimes), take for example especially in air ab, the sm 79 early at 2.0-2.3 would perform better than the ki-49 series by carrying 12x100kg bombs(best base bombing bombs on ki 49 is the 12x50kg) while cruising well above most combat area(mainly due to low tier gameplay doesn’t involve all enemy fighter space climbing right off the bat). Defense-wise, late sm 79 such the sm 79 bis T/M at br2.3 has the equivalent to the middle of japanese ki-49II-b and II-a version(both japanese bomber being 3.3 and 3.7). Speed-wise, the sm 79 would also win easily due to the lack of high speed aircraft at its br while the ki-49 have to deal with p-63 and p-39(very good space climbers by that br). To say the honest truth, removing bombers overall from normal air battle wouldn’t even affect how gameplay is normally played, since most fighter and strike aircraft can perform the same thing bombers can do except better.