I’m finally sick of seeing teams, almost fully stacked of F-5 derivatives, winning almost every match. This jet is simply too good at its br for curent air rb meta. I don’t know why, but somehow every air rb match ends up to just be a low alt turn fight furball in the mapcenter. It doesn’t matter what you do, at the end its always a furball fight, usually where the ground NPCs were located.
In this situation F-5 jets are impossible to beat. You can’t run from them, you can’t outturn them, you can’t get your guns on them, they have enough CMs to flare away most missiles and you usually need to get very close to get a IR lock on them…and when you finally connect, they somehow take just little damage. Just had one which shrugged of a R-60M hit.
They also seem to be inert to G-Forces. Despite their wings look paperthin, F-5’s are able to pull insanely high G-turns. Something doesn’t add up.
Its just too good. Give it some limitations…I mean its a super lightweight fighter, why isn’t it more fragile vs. G overloads and enemy fire? And why is it so fast at relevant air RB low alt gameplay? It statcard tells rather low max speed, but in a typical ingame situation, they’re faster than most Mach 2 jets…
Sounds similar as japanese WW2 fighters. As consequence they got much higher BRs than their historical opponents, just because they excel within War Thunder Air RB meta. While other, much more modern fighters, don’t do well in these team deathmatch arena fights.
The BRs are compressed still, I’ll give you that, even though I smell both skill issue and copium mixed in ( yes I’m a dirty little F-5E enjoyer, cope). It usually comes down to which team gets the harrier plus Su-25K combo that loses, so guess that’s one good reason for low winrates of those.
And that is basically where it comes down to minute details and differences between planes that come into the foreground. Without knowing exactly what to use against an F-5E or F-5C ( ew, premium bots lol) you’re just straight up boned.
So I guess it’s that. I’d abuse it if I were you, it’s damn good fun, otherwise give it a wait, the devs are probably hard at work and an MM decompression will surely come.
Well, that and stop gimping radar missiles so much. The fact you can defeat any radar missile with a minor amount of ground hugging is getting pretty old, and puts a MASSIVE advantage in favor of groundhuggers as they can make themselves immune to radar missiles, and the energy and range downside of hugging the deck is almost irrelevant in WT top tier because the maps are so small and the radar missiles so high performance at this point
Radar is suppose to work like that, ground clutter does still affect these older crude PD radars. They had no access to modern integrated circuits and processing power to effectively get rid of ALL the “bad” radar signals.
As for F5 spam, most jets are a lot faster than them at that BR bracket. But if one is just going to toss themselves into a swarm of F5’s without regard, then yea, sure. It’s strong when flown right, sure, but too good? When there’s SMTs and MFs sitting at the same BR? Bit of a stretch. I get where you’re coming from though, it gets very tiring that there’s a complete lack of variance at those BRs… It’s called “premium ville” for a reason
Really? It’s a middle of the road 10.3.
Mirage 3E, Mig-21MF & SMT, and AJ-37 are superior jets that all out-rate F-5Cs.
Every 10.7 is vastly superior to it.
And on top of all that, Su-25 with minimum fuel can out-dogfight them. :)
If you just want to dogfight with F5, yes it is strong, but at least you are playing jet in 10.3-10.7, pls don’t make mistakes as WW2 players dogfight with IJN zeros, dogfight is not the only way in an air battle.
None of these out rate F5’s and you really shouldn’t go rate fight an F5 unless there’s a substantial energy/positional advantage in your favor. Yes, sure, if you can make them turn in the vertical a few times and have them drop their speed below 400 while you work your energy, that only means you can fight them because their 2 braincells haven’t met since birth and just stand on the elevator or were at a low energy state to start with. But, equal energy and position straight up rate fight an F5 taking pilot skill out, in a Mirage 3E or SMT?))))
You can stand on your engine in a MF or AJ on low fuel, but that’s sketchy, it may take a few turns before you actually get the advantage here and the first 2, maybe 3 merges, the F5 may very well be able to pull lead on you. If the F5 pilot is good, you’re dead pretty much, he’s not going to over commit to an energy fight, he’ll get his 1-2 shots off and if misses, disengages. Also, considering it’s not just some isolated 1v1, there’s never just 1 enemy.
People rate fighting/over committing to F5s is exactly how they die to them. Also, how often do you actually meet an F5 pilot that’s actually not some goober that doesn’t understand how that plane works…
Since I sit at exactly zero deaths in my 3E or AJ37 to any F-5C, must be doing something right.
Can’t say for Mig-21s since those are older than 2023 for my collection.
There’s one main issue: whoever rules the low altitude area above the npc cluster, rules the match somehow.
That’s exactly why furballing there always seems to happen. When I fly my Phantom or Mig at medium to high alt, where this kind of Mach2 jets might have certain advantages, there simply isn’t much to do. Few to no enemies to shot. Nothing to get the ticket game going in your favor. Just empty sky.
Most F-5 players go in just low and stay at low alt. So what to do? They won’t come up, they just start to furball low and kill NPC planes and ground units with their guns. Means killing your tickets quickly, modern jets can kill most things just with their guns. Especially without NPC jets, the clock extremly goes in favor of the enemy team.
When you dip down to shot some R60’s/9J’s from an elevated position, you won’t get a lock on F-5 airframes, for some reason you have to be rather close to get IR locks. So they notice you and just press their flare “I win button”. It always ends with Migs/F-4 dive down to engage with their guns and thus are dead 2 minutes later, since they can’t compete with F-5 FM / DM.
IRL defeating SARHs purely via altitude / multipath (it’s much more effective if used in combination with specific DECM techniques) tends to have much more stringent altitude limitations than it does in WT, especially with more modem missiles being able to reliably kill targets below 100 meters AGL, and with later fuse designs ground return disabling the proximity fuse isn’t an issue, and even then they still would have their impact fuse to detonate the warhead so without maneuvering the shot isn’t likely to be lost immediately.
Considering that it currently works regardless of Aspect angle, though I could see it as a placeholder mechanic until ECM / DECM are introduced, since otherwise you would be relying on poor shooting on the part of the attacker to even have a chance of dodging the current meta designs, let alone the more advanced ones that will likely appear sometime soon.
F-5’s are strong because they dodge top tier mm and aren’t ordinance reliant.
Can’t be helped because with the current meta, carried ordinance is a minimal factor once most things have countermeasures, turn performance and sustained dogfighting capabilities, and most importantly energy retention are going to be the main factors at 10.x, and arguably at top tier too. F-5c is just the best at these things in it’s matchmaker so it’s going to be dominant unless it’a uptiered to near-uselessness.
None of the planes u mentioned out-rate the F-5C lmao. Honestly curious how u got to that conclusion. And if anyone manages to loose to an su-25 in a 1v1 no matter the fuel load then they are wildly incompetent.
Agreed, the F-5C tends to out-rate those aircraft at all speeds. Instant turn rate is worse, but this doesn’t mean anything because the ones that have improved instant turn rate can’t recover from the energy loss.
We’re not talking about the botting, we’re talking about the F-5 issue.
If someone sits on your six in a delta and you don’t waste all his energy / kill him you’re having a skill issue. Rate fighting doesn’t take long if you bleed their energy first and maintain yours.
Around 11.0 ± IR Missiles are not really important. Doesn’t matter which one, all get spoofed if you press the flare hotkey once or twice. Even supposedly good ones like Aim-9L almost never hit, clause there’s always a flare or another heat source which messes up the shot. IR missiles only work vs planes without flares, so sub BR 10 BR bracket.