Generally, the only way to do good in A8 is to have good aim and head-on dodging game + have a ton of experience to get the positioning right. This thing only works if you stay fast, use your teammates as distraction and perform one-and-done kind of attacks.
Entire Fw 190 line is currently not worth the effort.
Playing Japanese or soviet or US or British planes is way more fun and you can try a lot of different tricks and tactics thanks to better maneuvrability and armanent.
I think the biggest problem with this Fw is that you rely almost entirely on having teammates who know what they’re doing. That’s why, if your team plays well and fights intelligently, you can support them with the A-8 by making passes—taking out the enemy chasing a teammate or at least forcing them to break off the pursuit. The trouble is, people often just gang up on the first plane they see, losing all their altitude in the process and leaving themselves open to attack from enemies above; then they try to turn-fight a Yak-3 in an Fw 190 D-9 (though, in one match, a D-9 actually beat a Yak—I have no idea how). Ultimately, if you’re left alone in the A-8 against any fighter and the enemy knows what they’re doing, you’re almost certainly a goner—even with an altitude advantage—because the A-8’s controls lock up after even a slight turn, making it nearly impossible to maneuver (even a B-17 turns better).
In fact, in the last match today, a player wrote something that made some sense: that German planes were meant to be played in coordination with teammates.
Just letting you guys know incase you aren’t aware, the German 20mm FI-T was updated to realshatter so it now does as much damage as the rest of the rounds, perhaps even better than Mineshells in terms of spread. It wasn’t mentioned in the changelogs but it’s live.
You also have a way better range with them over Mineshells due to it’s drag values, you can check it out in protection analysis if you wanna make sure.
It affects the MG/FF, MG/FF M and MG 151/20.
I’ve been running Tracers for the 151 belts and it’s been working like a better Air Targets belt (cuz atleast you get to see your “good rounds” ).
Sadly it also has a poor belt composition cuz you get 2 mediocre incendiary rounds that act like ball ammo, but it’s worth checking out if you are not a fan of aiming these guns.
New 151 Tracer:
It would be great if the devs reviewed the bullet damage model, slightly readjusted bomber durability, and improved fighter durability—at least enough so they don’t all die from a single shot (from that currently overpowered bullet). Each fighter should be able to withstand the damage it’s supposed to.
Oh, that’s pretty nice and I will definitely check it out.
So now the worst shells in game in 20-30mm caliber range are:
20mm IT, 30mm I, 30mm Minenpanzergranate.
Funny as all 3 are German and all 3 were designed to down bombers and all 3 absolutely fail at this task, or any task actually.
These are followed by 20mm SAPI, which also sucks, but less. Funnily enough, that’s yet another “real life effective anti bomber shell”.
Of course while introducing new issues, Gaijin has not fixed anything, so I was able to rip apart Me-262 with a single hit from G8N1s guns from 1530m away.
I honestly lost any kind of hope of this happening after we migrated to the realshatter system. Cuz it’s either all or nothing every single time.
Probably safe to assume that none of you guys are surprised by the bomber dms being released as they are, right?
Oh hey, MG FF FI-T does damage now! Last update you might as well be firing Practice shells.
No, actually, exactly what I thought would happen did happen. If they boost bomber protection that much without adjusting bullet damage or improving fighter durability, it’s no surprise that you need every single round to take down a bomber (and sometimes even that isn’t enough), whereas a single hit from the bomber kills you—even the ones armed only with 12.7mm machine guns. I find it funny that a B-17G and a Tu-2 can take the same amount of punishment, haha.
When I saw the absolute clownshow dev servwr was, I already knew that’s what we’ll get.
Gaijin used dev server to find bugs, if they wanted bomber damage models to be reasonable, they wouldn’t start the test with “astronomically busted”, as it makes 0 sense to test something that will clearly be rejected.
Dev server bombers were busted, because that’s exactly what Gaijin wanted.
And despite B-17 crowd rejoicing, the biggest winners are owners of:
TIS MA, Tu-1, Su-8, Be-6, BV-238, Quing-6, G8N1, Tu-2 and to a lesser extent - Ju-288.
All of these are either fast and maneuvrable and have tons of armanent or have very strong defensive weaponry or some combination of the above, that lets them perform air superiority role or “just” bomb/ground pound (in Ground RB too) with impunity.
Out of these, only G8N1 and Tu-2 are not premium.
Yup significant damage buff. They updated the 15mm 151 too, we take it.
I haven’t checked. Although 15mm did great damage before the update.
They have… negatively.
That’s a shame, is it like this vs all aircraft? In dev it was doing mostly black damage.
If that’s the case we do not take it, rip
I didn’t check, but 109s have pretty tame DMs. So it’s useless now.
!!! fun is cancelled
So now German planes have terrible flight models, the worst HE shell damage (when in reality they were the best), and on top of that, they’re the most fragile. I don’t think the devs know what they’re doing; they just change things randomly and senselessly.
So now 15mm is same as Berezin damage wise. GJ Gaijoob. Stupid Germans did not understand 50% more bullet weight translates into absolutely nothing.
I mean, they are all as fragile as real life biplanes vs 20mm, German planes are just as bad as the rest the only exceptions being Soviet plywood aircraft that don’t fuse HE shells due to plywood bug 2.0 (plywood bug is absolute miracle of Gaijin coding, present in game for at least a decade).
I really don’t understand the devs’ negligence regarding the game’s issues. It seems like they want to avoid fixing problems that take a bit of time to resolve—problems they created themselves.
Fun fact - plywood bug would take like 10m to resolve, because Gaijin was perfectly able to make it a bigger problem with 0 effort.
The issue:
once upon a time, plywood skin counted as 0,1-0,15mm of steel, and while all 20mm cannons had 0,1mm fuses, MG151/20 HE shell had like 0,25mm, anyway, the point is, it did not fuse on most WW2 Soviet fighters’ skin at all.
Of course some higher caliber cannons were affected too with their less sensitive fuses./
Like 2 years ago, Gaijin fixed the problem partially by simply making MG151/20 and MG131 HE bullet fuse on 0,001mm steel.
Partially, because some higher caliber shells were still affected.
Early in 2026 Gaijin decided that Soviet aircraft not having a hidden, unrealistic advantage was too much to bear, so they adjusted the plywood skin thickness to somewhere in the 0,001mm range.
Result?
Right now the only weapons that fuse semi-reliably are MG151/20 and Mk108 as they both have the “improved” 0,001mm fuses, while everything else failt to work more often than not, but it’s not 100% reliable, as there is clearly some RANDOM factor involved, because WHY THE HELL NOT.