F4F KWS ICE tactics and performance (Please help me, I am losing my sanity)

Game Discussion Realistic Battle
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1

Please help me to KWS. I don’t know what I am supposed to do other than get lucky with an AMRAAM now and then. People tell me: “Yeah the airframe is bad but you can still get kills”. I am so bad, I don’t find that to be the case. I either go too far to one side and then arrive when the game is over, or I go in with the team and die without doing anything.
My stats are horrible with it. Hell, my stats with the ASSTA1 are better apparently………………
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Modifications:
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Loadout:
4x AMRAAMS, 4x AIM-9L/I
24 minutes of fuel.
Airbelts (not that I use the gun on this but yeah)
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Problems:
The radar seems subpar when it is supposed to be good. It appears to have a really hard time locking close in cold aspect targets (in any mode). That’s a problem because every jet I face is faster save for harriers. I am already at an energy disadvantage, so I want to use my AMRAAMS as much as I can, even in this situation, instead of the 9LI which has too short of a range.

Tactics:
So here’s the thing. I have tried quite a few tactics and none of them work or give me consistent results.

0° low:
Well this isn’t much of a tactic. I tried this knowing it was suicide. Maybe I could get AMRAAMS shots up? But I invariably get a missile in my cockpit. Either a top down shot from the guys in Low earth orbit. Or an F15 pops up 3km from me, I cant turn in time/ manoeuvre and it blasts me.

0° high: (BVR)
This one worked okay when the ARH got added since people didn’t know much about these missiles. I went high, shot low and it got some kills. Now the enemy team also goes high. This Jet doesn’t have the comparative high altitude performance to do F-Pole, or to shoot, notch/crank/ turn back, shoot etc. Doing this leaves me dead at the hands of F15s mostly.

45° low
The thinking is to stay low to attempt to use multipath and terrain whilst not directly charging the enemy team and invariably running into low altitude F15s doing mach jezus. But this thing handles like a bus, and I lose a lot of fuel, and speed doing this. I also tend to encounter enemy jets at close range. Everything is faster, and this thing is dead in a dogfight.

45° high:
Leaves a 45 degree turn out to be made when missiles get shot my way but this takes a lot of energy out of my jet when I have to turn another 90 degrees back in afterwards. Besides, they hardly ever shoot 1 ARH at me. I can also go cold but that leaves me going the wrong way in a match, never having any impact.

90° low:
Pretty much the same as 45 low but I am already notching most of the enemy teams radars. The hope is that they expend all their missiles on my teammates and not me. But then I end up in a 1/2/3 vs a whole team. This abeam flying also gives enemy jets a massive positional advantage.

90° high:
Its pretty much the same as 0 degree and 45 degree high.
Given most lobbies are still 16v16 you will always be found by at least a few players on the enemy team. Most likely the ones going to high altitude to do BVR. Most likely these are F15J, SPM or Baz players. At this high altitude the Eagles have far superior performance. The KWS doesn’t have the energy to do BVR etc etc etc.

Back of the map, high altitude AMRAAM slinging:
Apparantly that’s how Defyn gets most of his kills as he mentions in his video on the KWS.
Maybe you just hope to get lucky with the AMRAAMS I guess? This doesn’t really work well for me since, well. I get shot down by the aforementioned BVR guys.

2

Im by no means good air rb player, but KWS is fine imo.

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I disagree. The radar is miles ahead of MiG-29s.

I actually take full internal fuel and if its map like large afghanistan i even take drop tank. 30x large calibre flares and 60x chaff. 4x amraams and 4x aim9s.

Keeping distance from enemies is name of the game.

If theres a straight line between my and enemy spawn, I usually climb 45° to the left of it, if that makes sense, and I climb to 5.2km altitude or just below the altitude where you get the condensation lines.

Once i reach roughly the middle, I turn towards it, sorta like pic related:
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My impact on game is highly team dependent - sometimes they are bots and die first minute to high alt BVR joust, sometimes they go absolute goblin mode onto enemy team and I end up with no kills.

Then i just keep TWS pernamently up and search for targets.

If they are flying directly at me and not manuevering at all, im confident with 30km shots.

If they are manuevering, i fire at 15km or less.

I always guide them in TWS and once they go pitbull, i try to hardlock the target to help amraams connect.

if i have ARHcoming at me, i fire back at the enemy if i can, and then i go cold while chaffing and descending, fly for 30 secs to be sure the missile runs out of booster, then i turn back and start climbing.

Sub 10km launches usually result in my death, so i avoid them at all cost if i can and if not, i pre-notch the enemy plane and go cold immidiately when the missile warning appears while chaffing like crazy.

3

Hit and run tactics

You have to play like a rat and fire missiles at pre occupied people or play BVR. You cant sustain a dogfight hardly at all but you do pull massive AoA so you can catch some ppl off guard

4

Mmmm, a dogfighter new to the furball management and BVR meta.

So, with the idea of being part of wolfpacks; you are always with others no matter what aircraft you’re in. When I’m in an F-16 I’m following an F-4S and some others into the battlefield as an example.
Being part of a wolfpack increases your survivability substantially, of course you will need to break but be within aid range of the team mates you chose when you get near enemies.
With that in mind, I’ll get to the tactics I’ve been using.

So there are two things you do with all aircraft at the PD radar missile BRs:
1- BVR.
This is done at 10,000 sometimes, also doable from below from low altitude.
In air RB I use narrow search almost exclusively because of the fast refresh rate.
37km minimum scope size, 74km maximum scope size.
I keep radar off until I’m ready to search to avoid pinging the enemies I am not prepared to give my position to.
Engagement ranges… I like <30km more times than not and I prefer lower altitudes, tho I have and others have done well with longer launches from higher altitudes.

2- Furball management. You can call this boom & zoom, or in & out.

The goal of this is to pick your entrances, you go in and retain speed. Your goal is to pick a target before entering, and engaging that target, then leaving to prep for the next engagement you noted threats of earlier.
Never dogfight, this is a more universal rule as well.

My general method to go into the battlefield is start by going straight in then cruise around the side I think is opposite the enemy went, which is usually meeting up with the allies I’ve chosen to be a pack with.
These are my tactics, they’re not overtly aggressive cause I’m not an aggressive person; they’re efficient for what’s going on in matches and I’m content with the results I get from using them.

And most importantly:
DO NOT just listen to me, especially not blindly.
There are great videos on fighter tactics using AIM-120s and IR missiles available by a host of content creators.
Jaek, Defyn for War Thunder are good.

And these tactics I’ve listed aren’t just for the AIM-120 era, obviously I don’t have many battles in the 120 era yet. I developed these tactics from my DCS knowledge and the start of the PD era with F-4J as my biggest threat.
Universal tactics.

5

I find the one on the ICE about half as effective as the one on the MiG. The ICE loses track constantly. Locks on to every single piece of chaff ever launched. I find it can hardly find things that are flying direcly at me (I know radar ranges, its well within range because I set it at 97km at the start to look for targets)

How do you deal with the 4 seemingly always present F15s that are higher and faster than you with a better radar? I inevitably cant get a good launch solution so I just have to turn and run, waiting to get run down and killed like a dog in the street.

Where do you find these guys?

I cannot get within 15km of anything without having 4 missiles shot my way

6

I am currently level 100. Maxed German Tree. I can handle dogfights and furballs. I am pretty damn good in my Mirage 2000CS4 . 1.85 kd or something? Its just that the Mirage has actual flight performance.

I can do BVR too, back when the Mig29G was king I would always comfortably go to do BVR. But the 29G was king of BVR back then. The Phantom in question is king of nothing except king of dying to a stiff breeze

I could do that. But everything is faster than I am. I literally cannot keep up with any of the jets at my tier especially on the deck.
How do you you handle a rader missile thats shot at you when you are on the deck? The Phantom cannot maneuvre to dodge at low alt. Trying to do so loses all your energy so you die to the second missile (if the first doesnt outright kill you like it does almost always)

7

I guess it is up to personal prefference then. Still i would pick ICE radar over 29G any time.

Complete opposite in my case

Server side issues maybe?

Depends on distance - above 20km i just go cold for 10 seconds, then notch them and once im certain the missiles are out of energy, i turn into them and launch my attack.

If they are bellow, well, i start praying that they are not aware that i am there. And if they know i am there, not much you can do lol. Best i can hope off is that i get my AIM-120 of the rails before i catch the enemy one in the face.

As i said in the either thread ICE is fine in BVR but thats it.

Like half of these games I get few of those players. I can usually tell them apart by looking at TWS (i fly with 74km range) and them not manuevering at all the entire time. Aware players usually adjust their course once or twice.

I suprisingly end up within 15km as much as id end up with MiG-29G, but that comes down to positioning at the start of the game and certain degree of luck, seeing as you have to rely to certain extend on team mates not getting mogged 2 minutes into the match.

8

I don’t think it’s personal preference. I think you are correct in that the radar in the ICE is better than the one on the 29G. Its just that I despise the ICE so much that it doesnt feel that way for me. I am extremely negatively biased towards this thing.

I meant in TWS mode. It locks onto anything and everything except what I want to shoot at. I hate when I want to shoot something and then 4 milliseconds before I pull the trigger it just swaps to some dudes cellphone back at the enemy base.

Agreed. The airframe, or lack thereof, is completely irrelevant. If they strapped an APG65Y, a jet engine, some wings and 4 AMRAAMS to a schoolbus it would be exactly as effective in game as the ICE is currently.

Well atleast I am having a decent time on the other side of the spectrum completely dumpstering people in the Mirage 2000 Cs4 whilst i’m griding the IRIAF tomcat. I’ll go back to Germany if and when they add the Eurofighter.

9

shame, but what can one do.

do you hace “cycle targets bound” to a button? i usually just cycle it one or two times and it starts tracking the correct target. also just because radar sometimes higlights some sort of ghost return it doesnt meant it isnt tracking the original aircraft too.

well it is relevant whenver you want to dodge a sub-20km ARH launch, but for BVR it matters little if its launched from F-16 or KWS IF they are both flying at the same speed, so maximum speeds matters too i guess.

man i envy you. couldnt get both Vilkas and mirage during the event as i was finishing uni and had only so much time to put into the event. tried it over at friend and it convinced me to buy the F-1CT200 to grind the french TT.

hopefully soon™