Planes should not be rated according to downtiers. That just doesn’t make sense…
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If you want to turn the f104a and 104c into a 104s and move it to 11.0, okay i guess?
Yeah, you will have to play more carefully when fighting a plane 1.0 higher than you. You can generally get them in headons. Or you can play more support. Mig 21s seems to like getting into turn fights for some reason. Watch for them getting into one with your ally and zip through and gun them
I’ve found that Hit n Run is the best strategy when it comes to the F-104A/C. (Again, the C should get it’s fuselage AIM-9Bs, but alas).
MiG-21s generally tend to bleed their speed away trying to turn for you, and by the time they get swung around you’re already 1-2km away at your top speed if they’re trying to accelerate to go after you.
I can get them in headons? that plane has R60’s which is an all aspect missile. That hit and run tactic is effective when the enemy doesn’t pay any attention, if they are paying attention you will have nothing to do but fly by. Assuming that you usually get players that are experienced in the enemy team (because america has so many players that are new (just like me but i do watch guides/tutorials) your team is pretty much getting destroyed by the enemy team) it is most likely that you will have to pass, well if you don’t die to an R60 when trying to gain distance…
R-60s aren’t all-aspect missiles. You’re referring to the R-60M.
If you use rockets on the F-104C you can easily confuse them as the R-60s will happily eat flares.
As the other guy said, the 10.3 mig 21 has the regular r60 which is rear aspect only. The r60 is also rather short range missile so you shouldnt have issues out running them.
You can also get them to bleed extra speed and tapping into opposite directions. The missile will try to lead so it will pull more Gs than what you are pulling.
All-aspect slingers are the only planes that can shut out a 104, and there are two ways for the F-104 to counter them.
- Go headon with an Aim-9B warmed up, then lock the enemy missile and fire. The 9B will decoy the enemy’s R60M / Aim-9L and waste the enemy’s missile.
- Sneak around the back of the map and shoot them while they’re on their way to the battlefield.
Otherwise, avoid Su-25s - and the F-104 is the best plane at its BR for this. It does mach 1.18 on the deck. Not even the MiG-21SMT can come close, which is the fastest thing you’ll be facing other than other F-104s. If you play 9.3 air you’ll notice that the last people alive on the US team are F-104s. It’s the most hand-holdy 9.3 other than the Ayit, because it’s so easy to avoid dying.
My tips for playing F104: don’t climb above 10,000 feet or so. Switch targets constantly. If you can’t kill aware enemies with high energy, be a vulture and switch sides of the map. People don’t expect the plane 15km away to be an immediate threat, but it is one. Be aware that missile range increases with altitude.
An R60 that I can easily outrun on the deck becomes a much bigger threat up at 15,000 feet.
The best way to dodge rear-aspect missiles is to bait the launch at a distance over 1.5km, then wiggle side to side to make the missile lead one way and the other, without letting it cut off your flight path. Once the missile’s burner goes out, you can turn a bit harder and start rolling around. As long as you’re over mach and at a low enough altitude, this is almost foolproof.
Maintain situational awareness to make sure you don’t get people dropping onto your six that close. Either avoid Ayits or kill them first, since their Aim-9Ds have much more range than normal missiles.
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- How am i going to lock a missile that is coming head on to me with Aim-9B’s? Aim-9B is an rear-aspect missile.
- I do sneak around the back but it’s not that effective over all and why are we even arguing how to defeat planes that shouldn’t have been in that match? It seems like you are just accepting that it is never going to get fixed when we want it to be fixed.
You can lock another aircraft’s missile headon with the AIM-9B as the missile produces a lot of heat while the motor is still burning.
If you’re having trouble with the F-104A/C it’s likely an issue of positioning yourself incorrectly. I suggest flying off to the side a little bit and avoiding climbing super high. Su-25s aren’t much of a threat as the R-60Ms they carry are very short range and as long as you come in from the side or from the rear of them you’ll be able to hit them with your M61 Vulcan and run before they can get a good launch angle. Rear-Aspect the R-60Ms only have about 1.2 km of range.
I would also suggest avoiding taking full-commit headons with MiG-21s as they have powerful cannons and R-3Rs which can be fired point blank with good success.
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I go against Mig’s that have R60 not R-3R’s.
All of the MiG-21s with R-60s you see also can carry R-3Rs.
Locking missiles would be a waste, I only have 2 missiles and it is hard to hit people with guns if they are aware. They can just turn a little bit and i will have to fly by.
The Vulcan is a bit difficult to learn on the Starfighter if you’re new to the aircraft. As for AIM-9Bs, they’re very situational and I suggest not relying on them too much.
Locking and firing on a missile heading into your face isn’t a waste either, it’s either launch or die lol.
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In a case of uptiers yeah it wouldn’t but the main point is i shouldn’t be playing with upper tiers.
Why not?
The F-104 is the best equipped fighter to face enemies of higher BRs, because you always have an advantage. Your gameplay in an uptier is the same as in a downtier, except that uptiers require more awareness and cautious play.
Its competitors have it far worse.
The F-100D, F-100A, french F-100 (that only gets Aim-9Bs), F-100F, F3H, MiG-21F-13, Su-7, G.91 Y, CL-13B and Lightning F.6 are all BR 9.3 without flares. Soon, that list will include the Sagittario 2. These planes are slower. Some are subsonic. None of them deserve to be the same BR as the starfighter, but all of them outclass 9.0s. The starfighter is not even close to the worst 9.3 plane.
There are only 4 good 9.3s: they are the MiG-19, Ayit, Ariete, and F-104.
Nothing needs to be done for the F-104. It should go to at least 9.7 BR in current meta. BR decompression to a higher tier like 14 or 15.0 is the real answer, but gaijin refuses to give that to us because it would decrease frustration and premium sales.
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And yet you get to stomp everyone playing between 8.3 and 9.0. Good to see F-104s getting a taste of their own medicine for a change.
And this would hold true if the F-104 was the only plane on your team. But for most of the game, it’s isn’t. The F-104 is nearly unmatched at third partying, since it can quite consistently join in a fight that was half way across the map when it started before it’s over. That’s where it’s strengths lie, in showing up where it isn’t expected (by virtue of being so much faster than everything else at the BR) and ganking someone who’s distracted by someone else.
Even if you’re in a 1v1, you can outplay slower, more agile planes. The F-104 pulls surprisingly hard at high speed, I’ve seen 12-13G, which is more than enough against planes too slow to pull out of the way. If you manage to bleed the energy of what you’re fighting (Which isn’t hard to due given your absurd thrust advantage over everything you fight), it’s a pretty easy kill. Not to mention, the Vulcan is an exceptionally good gun at the tier for headons, meaning you can fire your shot and give yourself enough time to dodge their headon in return.
Firstly, it doesn’t struggle with MiG-21s at all. As long as you dodge any R-3Rs in the headon, you’re effectively immune to them if you play well. They burn so much speed in manuevers that if they try to merge with you and do a 180 to get a missile shot, you’re so far out of range that nothing they have can touch you.
They only become threatening when you misposition and allow a high energy MiG-21 to slot in on you when you’re low energy, which again you can simply prevent from happening with good positioning and awareness.
I guess there’s also the risk of running into a MiG-21 SMT/MF in a full uptier, whose acceleration is close enough to yours to be somewhat dangerous at equal energy states, but you would naturally expect to suffer against a plane a full BR higher than you, and even then they cannot catch you at max speed. Against the earlier MiG-21s (S or F-13, the ones actually around your BR), they don’t stand a chance.
The same is mostly true for Su-25s, with the added advantage that you can simply avoid them. They’re way too slow to catch you, you have all the cards when it comes to positioning yourself to prevent them getting a shot at you. And even if they do, the short ranged R-60MKs from a slow platform have very little chance of hitting you they aren’t fired at point blank range. And again, this is a plane 0.7 BR higher than the early F-104s, while also being massively more oppressive to the slower 9.3s who cannot outposition them nearly as effortlessly.
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Skill issue. Seriously. You can outrun MiG-21s. You can outclimb them. You can easily pull into them at high speed, you can drain them of energy by sticking it into a constant 8G turn and holding that above mach 0.9 - they will dump all their speed following you if they don’t go into sim controls and even then they’ll struggle. If you don’t give them your juicy starfighter rump then they aren’t getting it. The starfighter even pulls cracked Gs at high speed, its FM really needs nerfing because it should NOT be doing easy 13-16Gs.
Except for the MiG-21SMT, they’re a pain to fight but even still there’s things you can do against them, and that’s in a full uptier. Uptiers suck for everything, so eh. Doesn’t matter. Launch a missile at that R-60M or Aim 9L launched your way in an uptier and it’ll decoy, easy.
F-13s, PFMs, SPS-Ks and Ss are all fairly easy to deal with. Send it up to 9.7 minimum, 10.0 the moment we get some decompression.
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When you have 6-7 all aspect missiles headed at you that quickly becomes impossible. Everyone else is just slamming them out. I can get away with dodging everything coming at me from behind but it’s usually while I’m focused on that I get hit from a mig way above me that I cannot see. It’s fairly routine at this point. I’ll be doing freaking awesome in a match and boom all aspect from somewhere I didn’t even see.
Then, your positioning is wrong in somewhere.
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