Can someone give me any advice on how to play this thing, I have it spaded from years back when it was actually good and I’ve recently started trying to grind out the Eurofighter but it’s just been a pain.
It’s a dogfighting plane in a meta that is all about shooting missiles from 30km away. R-Darters are close range missiles so you rarely get into a position to even fire them. Despite my best efforts to notch and multipath I always get shot out of the sky by an AMRAAM or R77, rarely even getting a kill.
And before you tell me, yes I fly low at tree height…
Is it even worth playing?
yet the best plane for top tier ARB for several consecutive months was Rafale, a plane without long range ARHs ;)
Thats might geniunely be the issue lol.
Just to demonstrate, Ive been spading F-16C in the past two weeks, the 13.7 matchmaker is extremely forgiving currently.
Cant imagine ever so slightly slower but more manueverable Gripen with more CMs doing that much worse than F-16C.
You didn’t really give me any advice… If I fly above tree height i’m getting shot out of the sky, so I resort to flying low. What works for you with the F-16?
you underestimate how handicapping the rdarters are compared to the 120.
any long or medium range shots will not hit because of the terrible missile behavior, forcing you to wait and get closer while your teammates fire away, not to mention it only has 4 of these missiles.
Yeah, its a defensive beast, but with only 4 fox 3’s theres not much impact you can have, not in 16v16 when everyone else has 6 - 8 fox 3’s
fly high to the left with your team at an offset, use your radar to scan early game and see what your enemies are doing to plan ahead.
R-darters are shotgun missiles so any 20km under is your ideal range, and dont go spamming them all at once, fire at ideal targets pointing at you
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Flying high. Sideclimb to 8.5km-9km alt, or just below the contrail, keeping speed around mach 1.20.
If I dont have to waste AMRAAM to scare off a attacker, I only fire them at 20km to keep the time to target low.
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are Derby/Darters really that handicaped at 20km and less ranges ?
so does F-16C if you take two sidewinders.
They loft too aggressively + they dont keep their speed well so any sort of zig-zagging will bleed its speed (not as bad as the R77 though)
Still within certain distance they cant be worse than AMRAAM seeing as theres not enough time for attacked aircraft to zig zag enough to bleed the speed enough, no?
I would take an AMRAAM over R-Darter any day of the week. You need to try the Darter yourself to see how unbelievably bad it is
Is the JAS39C basically a F2 but with 2 less ir missles and way more CM? I’m about to get the Thai version.
It’s the best Gripen C, play as a mid alt support fighter, look for people that are near the center of the map and sling your Dater at close range to medium range where their turn performance is better than the AIM-120
MiGan has a good video on how to play it and he’s in general a solid YouTuber for learning imo
I think fly low at tree height is already ur wrong move. U want to keep your alt as high like (5-9km) all the time to make yourself as conceal as possible and make surprise attacks.(top down) You have enough CM to easily notch every missile coming your way. Position yourself to make sure all enemy missiles come from one direction allow you to notch easily.
This actually applies to every fox 3 plane (unless you hv less than 60CM), I am sure it will work on your gripen as well.
I never play the r-darter but I hv play with the derby, aim120b, aim120c, r77,r77-1, aam4. Derby or r-darter have really good acceleration. (derby slighly better than mica, r darter is 1m/s^2 slower). Both have twice the acceleration of aim120c5 actually gives you a big advantage at range <15km as it give enemy less time to react and notch. Personally I just hate amraams, its way too unreliable to hit anything above 30km anyways.
Since they moved the height where you enter contrails to 30,000 ft., I fly up to that altitude and notch any missiles fired at me. I then stay around 23,000-25,000 ft and look for targets roughly 12 miles and closer and it’s almost a kill every time. You need to climb and stay high. Just my humble opinion…and I use the exact plane with the exact missile.
