Recently started grinding the German air tree because Sweden and USA were too hard and l never got enough rp too make the grind manageable. Probem is that this issue seems to be happening again. l’m only at 2.3 for Germany and only get around 50-200 rp per match (The odd match l’ll get 1000-2000 but not sure how that happens). ls this rp amount normal for others? The game is getting so frustrating because of it. Anyone have any tips on how to increase rp gain (l already play realistic because arcade very useless for rp)? l don’t get many kills even though l play a lot and watch many videos about dogfighting and aerial combat as well as read information about enemy planes, so skill issue might be part of it. l’m honestly a terrible player and feel bad for my team because of it, but there must be another way to get better or increase rp gain. Any tips will help.
The easiest way is to just stay alive longer.
RP rewards are directly tied to the time you spend alive, so longer matches naturally give more RP.
It depends on if we talk ARB/ASB/AAB. I’ll discuss AAB/ARB first as they use the same reward mechanics modified only by coefficients and vehicle modifiers and the presence of respawns.
The TL:DR - Get ~1000 score/10 minutes of gameplay to maximize activity%. So, 15 minute match 1500 score and such. Then try to survive as long as you can in a single aircraft. Longer match = better, provided you maintain a decent score for that match duration.
Optimal play in air RB would be getting 4 kills (gives 100% RP bonus for skill), 2200 score and a roughly 17 minute match (guarantees 90% activity.
This is based on RB values, AB may be different:
The meat:
In Air battles, you earn score the following way. As you can see, being in a full downtier is suboptimal for RP gain as you suffer score penalty for your kills. Full up-tier means your kills give predictable score.:
This score translates to RP using the following formula:
Coefficient is obtained from this table. This table also shows obtaining RP per specific action, but as you can see such RP gains fall far behind playtime. Activity is obtained by the earlier graph:
Air AB may throw a wrench in our calculations as it has **respawns** and activity seems tied to vehicle and not match.
Source:
For air SB:
Air SB uses a very different reward mechanic. Score is calculted the same way but rewards are calculated as follows:
How rewards work:
- Starting with you spawning in, a 15 minute timer begins.
- At the end of this 15 minute timer, your score is evaluated against a logarithmic function. Similarly, dying early is likewise evaluated and the timer resets.
- Based on the function, you gain a reward% which is multiplied with time alive in minutes and your plane’s statcard reward per minute AND 0.8.
- To receive the remaining 0.2 you must land after the cycle flashes “Useful actions” on your screen.
- Score is treated as “0” in event of dying or the cycle ending and must be acquired again for next cycle. Assists after dying are a bit weird and I don’t understand them entirely.
- Dying to the enemy gives you 135 points that counts for the previous cycle, so don’t suicide: fight back! It’s not much, but it’s consolidation.
The exact form of the logarithmic function is uknown, but we know some of its value pairs:
200 points = 54% reward
400 points = 75% reward
600 points = 86% reward
800 points = 90% reward
1050+ points = 92% rewardAs you can see, it plateus at 1050 and does not rise. Furthermore, the difference between 600 and 1050 points is only 6%.
As such, optimal way to gain RB in ASB while accounting for risk is to get 600 score, fly off into the middle of nowhere and afk for the rest of the 15 minutes to then land and repeat. This 600 score is roughly 1 kill and a half assuming no downtier penalty. Bases I dunno off top of my head. Doing just 1 kill/1 base will give 75% reward at minimal risk though (450 score) so might be worth considering.
Source: Community Bug Reporting System
Additional consideration:
The Severe Damage mechanic makes it so that if you destroy an aircraft’s engines OR all flight control surfaces OR more than 50% of wing OR horizontal stabilizer - you gain 80% of kill score before they die.
If a teammate goes and then cuts off that plane’s tail or kills its pilot, they’re credited 40% of kill score and you don’t get anything.
If you finish off a “severely damaged plane” from a friendly, you only receive 40% of the kill reward.
If you finish off a “severely damaged plane” that YOU inflicted, you recieve the remaining 20% of the reward.
If you inflict critical damage to a severely damaged plane (say, cut off less than 50% of the wing) and they crash, you’ll only get an assist.
If you inflict critical damage on a plane that is NOT severely damaged and they crash, you receive 100% kill credit. Theoretically, this seems ideal as you get 150 score for critical and 450 for a kill.
Source: [Development] Testing out the Severe Damage mechanic - News - War Thunder
Imho you describe your two main problems quite accurate:
- You felt that the US and SWE air tree is too hard
- You play decided to play Germany which is way harder
I appreciate your willingness to learn by watching vids / tutorials - if you follow the recommendations of the fellow players above you might be on the right path, but frankly spoken your grinding mission is about to fail if your self-assessment comes to the conclusion that you are a terrible player.
-
And this is rather sad as you obviously invest way more time in thinking about the right things than the majority of players active in prop Air RB.
-
Have in mind that the game is designed to allow rather fast progress up to Rank III in order to keep you attached - and your current frustration is fully intended by gaijin as their goal is to encourage you to buy premium time / vehicles.
WT Air RB is no rocket science, with some adjustments you might be able to get better without losing the fun and become way more successful.
Recommendations:
-
Crew experience is one of the most underrated things in wt - seeing enemy markers first is often decisive regarding positioning whilst being able to send your enemy in a g-lock wins you 1 vs 1 fight.
Bundle all of your aircraft per nation in a single crew slot in order to gain maximum crew XP for all your aircraft, former Air AB players tend to have multiple slots which is actually hampering your progress to get as fast as possible a level 75 crew.
- Depending on your played nation and your playstyle it makes sense to focus on tree specific traits - like if you would start to play JP you would focus on g-force resistance and endurance as your fighters excel in turnfights, whilst playing US with rather fast aircraft stuff like keen vision might be way more important.
-
If you have already watched some vids & tutorials - invest some time to watch premium sale recommendations (for props) by guys like defyn (yt channel) - he often refers to rather good tech tree vehicles which shall give you a hint what planes are worth to play - and which not.
It boils down that not every plane is worth to play and some are very good / too low in BR / op and focusing on them makes your life way easier.
-
Learn to identify patterns regarding nation allocation within the MM - depending on your time zone and your selected servers these pattern vary even during the day.
Why? Gaijin tries to steer progress/ success of certain nations with bundling them with others. Basically they try to compensate rather low skill levels of the top 3 nations (on average, just because they are popular) with allocating rather strong nations into their teams - and this steering influences your individual success too, as the quality of your opponents varies too.
Example: If you play in the late evening in Europe on the US server you will face mostly US kids, late night this changes to way more experienced adults, whilst early morning in Europe mean that you face mostly a mix of Asian rookies and sweatlords.
-
Have in mind that the US air tree is widely considered as strongest nation. The high popularity of US as nation leads to a hell of rookies playing it with rather limited success which drags the BRs of those aircraft way lower than they should be. The same rule applies to the USSR tree; basic rule: Large market = easy to grind.
So if you struggle in the US tree it gets not better. And Germany has in deviation to the US/USSR no op / under BRd fighters, the He 100, the captured Yak-1B and the 109 F-2 are good for their BR, but need an experienced pilot to make them work.
The Swedish prop air tree is nothing to write home about regarding domestic fighter aircraft, the Finish premium PM-1 is imho the sole exception. The imported B-239 is a real menace, turns like hell and has good guns. I see them frequently in full downtiers racking up rather easy kills.
- Try to get some premium aircraft via war bonds - the current US Ki-43 is imho worth to play as their HMGs hits very hard and your only real threat are “real” JP fighters.
As a summary:
You might agree that being or becoming a good or better pilot is also connected to other factors like pure pilot skills, so the decision making process start even before you enter a battle.
If you follow the previous recommendations of the fellow players above you might get a better pilot, if you add some brain power in the “right” strategies your progress might be pushed too.
Have a good one!
Wow thanks for all the info! Greatly appreciated!
Thanks, I’ll definetly look into those tips.