With the introduction of new strike aircraft and new air to ground munitions the discussion of what to dp woth strike aircraft has come up quite a bit, whether its here in the forums or through other channels.
Two points of discussion are important here. First is what is the role of a strike aircraft, and second is the purpose of the air to air weaponry on a strike aircraft. Both are answered simply.
The role of a strike aircraft is to hit ground targets. In air sim these would be targets at ground battles, convoys, or naval forces and port defenses.
The purpose of the air to air weaponry is for self defense of the aircraft. This is why most dedicated strike aircraft only have short range IR missles. Thier purpose is to get the aircraft to the target and back.
Now people are not using A10s, Su25s, Buccaneers, A7s, or MiG27s to dogfight with. The subsonic aircraft especially are almost never the ones to initiate a dogfight and usually only use their air to air weapons when they have to.
Now that we have more advanced missles and other equipment at lower BRs fighter pilots have to think before they engage a strike aircraft. If its armed with IRCCM all aspect missles, dont engage from the front. If it has an advanced RWR and high countermeasure supply, don’t use radar missles that dont track well. If they have a MAW or IR dazzler, don’t use IR missles from the rear.
You may have to engage with guns and you may have to think about your approach beforehand. This is for balance. If you put an aircraft in a situation where it cannot defend itself then there’s no point in using the aircraft.
The issue is that certain BRs, especially around 10.0 to 11.3 suffer from having way too many people in them only farming ground targets. These are very interesting BRs where you could enjoy PvP jet combat without the top tier fox 3 spam, and instead they are being completely taken over by the PvE grinders. I spaded the Mirage IIIE in the last two days, and regardless of whether I was playing red of blue side all I could do was go after people bombing.
It would be nice for the strike aircraft to have a place, but I am very much not OK with them completely taking over certain BRs of AIR sim, not when there are dedicated ground modes that don’t turn this multiplayer game into a PvE experience.
First the reason why they’re all compressed between 10.0 and 11.7 is because they simply cannot operate with the BVR combat that 12.0 and above requires. You need standoff guided munitions to take out gound SPAA before you can get close and in order to use guided munitions you need altitude. Sitting at altitude going 700kph with AIM7Es and R24Rs around is suicide.
Second there is no gamemode thats PVE that you can use strike aircraft in or use to grind them out. The best place for strike aircraft to do strike aircraft stuff in is air sim because larger maps and no enemy player tages means you can more easily make it to the combat zone and actually hit ground targets.
The game created the problem when they decided to add aircraft that were designed to operate it total air superiority in a game thats built around air to air combat.