Coming back to playing props after finishing russia/ger TT and 95% of the playtime is just climbing and alt tabbed doing whatever watching tik tok or whatever people do.
Played for like 3 hours and maybe got a dozen gun passes/fights at most? Like if I dont climb im just blood in the water for those that do because of nametags everyone knows where everyone is within 20km so i don’t know what to do but side climb, alt tab, check back in at 5km see if anyone is close/above me and rinse repeat after every single engagement.
I am godawful at props and just want to get better, but when all you do is afk climb I don’t understand how I’m supposed to get any experience dogfighting or doing anything else. half of these matches end up with me just sitting up here looking for the last 2-3 players on the other team, or having 4-5 players on the other team all chasing me when the inverse happens.
I’ve tried just going in mid alt and fighting at the start, but then its just a waiting game to die to someone above me unless they royally fuck up.
sticking to premiums since im not getting rp might as well get some extra SL, but i have everything spaded on both trees at least the notable fighters so I can play whatever without stock grinding it, thought I’d try germany tonight. If you got any suggestions of planes to play that dont require me to spend the entire game climbing I’ll give it a go tomorrow (any RU/GER plane).
I hate prop BR and I always try to skip it with premiums. It is boring and if you aren’t the best clumber or best dogfighter you are cooked. Habing a plan that is well at everything is worst than a plane that is good at climbing and bad at dogfighting. Its always the same your plane has to be extremly good in one playstyle.
Ya my OP is pretty hyperbolic, but ya. I’d like to get better at props, but the amount of time I get to actually practice aiming, or dogfighting, or BnZ whatever other tactics is an extremely small fraction of time actually spent so its very frustrating.
AFK climbing by itself disadvantages you if you want to get to the highest altitude as fast as possible.
Things you can do actively while climbing:
Keep an eye on your IAS. Find out your airframe/engine’s best-performing climb.
Rule of thumb - very light draggy planes climb best ~250-260 km/h, heavy low-drag planes climb best at ~300-320. Basically, you need to generate lift using your wings, not just drag yourself up using only your propeller.
To obtain your best IAS to climb by, your best bet due to outdated charts (but they’re a good starting point: Air RB Performance Guide - Master Thread:) is to use “WTRTI”.
WTRTI: WTRTI
WTRTI is allowed because all it does is take public data on localhost1188 and display it with an overlay. It’s no different than having a second monitor.
In WTRTI, you want to find “Specific Excess Power” and “Climb rate”, “Manifold Pressure” and “propeller efficiency” and display them.
Then while climbing, try to find the proper IAS that maximizes specific excess power
Start using MEC. Using MEC allows you to shift supercharger gears in more ideal cases (the automatic supercharger shifts tend to be delayed some - it seems to change it based on altitude and not manifold pressure).
Shifting your gear at the right time can boost your energy generation significantly.
Your best starting point to discovering gear-shift altitude is to look at your plane’s power-weight chart here: War Thunder Aircraft Performance Calculator Notice those points where it drops and suddenly spikes up? That’s roughly where you want to change gears.
After this starting point, you can keep an eye on your manifold pressure. When in the expected region, swap back to AEC and and observe if your manifold pressure increased after a few seconds. If yes, you should attempt to swap gears at that point manually.
After some time, you develop an intuition for when to swap gears by watching your manifold pressure and SEP directly.
Still using MEC - learn to intuit ideal radiator and propeller pitch configurations.
In a climb, you’re in a low-drag context so you can increase your radiators as high as needed to offset WEP heat generation.
Also, in a climb you’re in a low-drag context so you may increase your prop pitch to 100% (if using constant RPM prop - avoid it in german planes as they got a system that’s harder to learn and requires careful management of engine RPM - also displayable with WTRTI - you want 3000 RPM and constantly adjust to keep it there. Hitting 3200 kills the engine. 3000 generates a lot of heat too, 2600-2800 are the “non-abusive” RPMs.)
However, once you’re in a cruise/dogfight, it becomes a high drag environment.
In such a case you want to reduce prop pitch in a non-german plane to ~90% - 90% prop pitch increases your top speed, energy retention reduces engine wear (heat generation) but also reduces LOW-SPEED thrust.
With our lower heat generation, we can reduce radiators to just enough to maintain WEP without over-heating too quickly (or not even maintain it as we can ease into millitary power and instead go for a configuration that gives us enough WEP time to survive 3-5 minutes before we reduce power). This reduces drag, increasing our energy retention and top speed.
All this is a lot of work load. Luckily, you can usually set prop pitch to “auto” in german planes (this is historically accurate as they let it run auto except on take offs) and focus on just your rads. German planes also don’t have sueprcharger gears (they use a different supercharger system).
You mostly want to camp the radiator by leaving pp on auto once you finish climb even in non-german planes as a dogfight can bring you to low-speed regimes where you want 100% pp. Think of prop pitch as shift-stick gears in a car. Gear 1 is 100% pp. Faster you go, the less PP you want to a point (higher gears). The point varies by plane.
To simplify learning, you can use MEC to gain max-performance climb, ease into cruise, dump speed with max rad+85% pp(non-german) and then switch gear into AEC when an enemy is within 3 km.
Proper MEC and climb speed makes a massive difference in your time-to-altitude. Achieving them precludes being AFK.
I do concede at least that ARB with the current furball mission design that funnels everyone into the middle and matches end in 25 minutes is not very fun. It used to be more fun before changes (when I last played 10 years ago vs coming back a year ago).
You might find it interesting to try out air simulator battles as they solve most of my issues with air RB (and introduce some annoying new ones - bad economy, lobby-riggers during events, render distance issues). It’s made out to be scarier and harder than it really is. Biggest thing is you need to study some very basic single-engine propeller plane concepts (there’s a few short 10-20 minute videos on youtube that cover these for real life pilots and they apply in warthunder) and light-aircraft/general aviation concepts. If you’d rather only look at game sources, WingalingDragon has good tutorials.
If you got those down, it’s just practicing with a chosen plane and refining controls until it feels right. You can be totally competetive in the average pub lobby with just a mouse and keyboard and no headtracking. It’s a disadvantage, but something you can overcome and have fun.
Another thing is that IME, games are most lively at BRs 3.0-5.7 and in UTC +0 16:00-24:00 (ergo - euro evenings. Most of the community at props seems various forms of european.)
Thanks for the writeup, that climb speed chart is nice. I’ve been using MEC for radiator controls on german props, still learning things like airbrake and the other things you mentioned, need to get some better keybinds for sure for the more complex stuff.
I only play EU servers: Nowadays Russia and Germany are the worst nations to play at prop BRs (3.0-6.0). You get way too often Japan AND Britain against you and there is a horde of japanese. Unplayable with a team that has no clue how to fight them. And most of the time you have such a team.
Maybe this will become better in May the R2Y2s are out of the game.
If you want a better matchmaker I recommend french Yak 3.
In my opinion prop battles are not about dogfighting or BnZ in first place. It’s about positioning and guessing enemy’s energy state. This needs a lot of practice and patience. Good example is DEFYN’s last video about the Hornet Mk III. But he has many more of these videos.
For Russia you can try the Yak 2 KABB, for Germany you can do it with Ta 152 H-1.
Both have airspawn, so climbing above the enemy team is no thing with both planes. The second you above all, you dictate the battle. Let them pitch up to you and play energy. If you do it correctly, you will have the easiest kills in the world.
You can also use MEC on most of the planes except german ones to “airbrake” somewhat. 100% pp while reducing throttle. Especially on russian props with low ripspeed it’s very useful. Also to avoid high speeds where your specific plane compresses or in downward scissors. It helps a lot at landing to reduce speed quicker.
All of that micromanagement and all of that relentless min-maxing but how much more efficiency do you actually get?
Based on pure feeling alone, I’d say a player that does everything to squeeze as much climb rate out of the aircraft as humanly possible will only end up a couple hundred meters higher than the guy who pointed his nose up and alt tabbed to watch YouTube. I’d love to see a comparison.
It probably depends heavily on the plane. Instructor for AEC is better for some planes so less impact, while other planes have fewer levers to play with.
If I’m bored, I might test some of my planes. Been a while I used the bearcat, but I recall it making a big difference for it.
Change up your vehicles regularly and employ different engagement strategies - you dont always have to be above the enemy.
I find that 50% of the time I have to just make as much of an impact in the initial merge/engagement so as to reduce the enemy numbers and making those enemies high above less dangerous and outnumbered.
Play with a friend if possible or make some…
Climbing to high alt and being above the enemy is not pheasible every time nor always required (i know certain aircraft prefer it though).
Climbing is 1 method but not always the best choice. Asess your team and what they are doing, where they are going and try to base your strategy on that, You can climb to 5k but the chances are that you are going to be alone up there unfortunately.
Just diversify your method, thats all and remember 50% of the time reducing enemy numbers is more worthwhile than being solo at alt and starting from the top.
Oh and 1 more thing - being low doesnt mean ground level, just allow ENOUGH ALT for 1 or a few defensive manoeuvres or the ability to dive a lil bit.
ALOT of guys will be 5k, see the most insignificant target at low alt, dive hard, full commit, get dragged into a downward split-s, lock up and plough into the ground.
Alternatively just fly the most OP prop ingame and fly those bs Yaks and do quite literally whatever the F you want.
Props have gotten REALLY stale though I must admit, in fact - flying in general has.
Yeah I literally grind an early jet or even an 11.3 one way faster than a prop plane because how incredibly long it takes to get into actual combat.
It must be especially frustrating for new players because to keep getting to actually play the game and getting better/know what you did wrong/improve your aim you have to spend forever doing the climb phase each match. Arcade planes perform way better and it’s total chaos and not the experience of realistic battles.
I wish the spawns were quite closer to each other but I bet there’s a good amount of people out there that like the slow methodical gameplay so I don’t know the solution. That’s why I skipped them in germany, britain, italy, france, and china with early jet premiums.
Indeed, many players such as myself do not like the immediate, chaotic, jumbled up mess that occurs in the first minute or 2 of high tier jets.
Making smaller maps would ultimately destroy certain aircrafts ability of achieving anything - such as climbers.
Alot of people like to flank and navigate into a good position to begin an attack from rather than fly in a str8 line and engage frontally which naturally favours certain aircraft over others.
I like to think of it as a boxing match, some people want or have to brawl, others like or have to stay at range and pick their moments/counter attack etc.
One of the reasons that I and many others prefer props.
I just think ARB needs more things to do in-match to break the staleness.
Imho your D-13 with a BR of 5.0 is not suited to increase your fighting skills as the plane is mainly a support fighter, rather one dimensional to fly and very limited in his abilities.
So without a plane which offers multiple ways to fight you won’t get better.
I do agree (to a certain extent) that climbing at the start of matches seems very boring, but you can use the time to analyze the enemy team (stat card / squad check) and watch how the game develops (who is heading where) and what plane/ pilot combo might be the biggest threat for you or your team as a whole.
So if you claim you have researched 95% of the GER & RU TT it boils down that you have no pressure to grind and can play just for fun.
From my perspective the fun flying both nations is rather limited - for German planes because they are usually (with very few exceptions) outperformed and for USSR props because they are outperforming most of other nations with very good low alt performance whilst they benefit (imho) extremely from the 20 mm ShVak buff.
I do agree with @Mordillo66 that your are in both nations usually surrounded by rookies without any clue what they are doing. So in order to improve your dog-fighting skills i would try it around 3.0 /3.3 - the 109 F-2 and the Yak-1B are offering way more possibilities to have multiple fights in a match.
Yeah objectives or more ai I don’t know but the devs should do something about it. My friends only play ground battles cause they gave up trying props and going vs cracked level 100 players using usa planes….
Quite a few matches I noticed being only 500m-1km higher would have netted me a free pass on a bomber or been in a favorable posistion against a figter or 2 where in my case being 500-1km lower meant i had to nose away and continue climbing to avoid being dinner for them.
It does req you to pay attention in that boring climb phase though.
For MEC stuff I haven’t tried too much of it but I imagine it can help to squeeze every possible advantage in a dogfight.
Ya when spading all of these a while bsck I remeber the german stuff was pretty suffering at my skill level, the russian planes where a lot better but the severe lsck of ammo combined with poor aim also made for suffering on my part.
Ill try the ta 152 h1 later, maybe some yak 9/3 again now that my aim is a bit better.
honestly prop BR’s are functionally dead, i no longer give a shit about my performance in them because any moron can get 3 kills flying with one hand and one side steamrolls the other, most players are garbage and try to rush past props to get to jets, which is understandable because, again, flying props is boring as fuck.
And thats without mentioning the god awful teams that melt away leaving you 1v6, the subhumans abusing the insta kill box around their airfield because they dont know how to play the game, and the horde of premium japanese paper planes that third party you if you even dare dogfight one of their teammate. No wonder no good player plays props these days, theyre all at 8.0-10.3 now, because those BR’s are actually fun.
can confirm that the french yak3 benefits from the matchmaker a good bit, you avoid playing against Britain and Japan (for some reason people flying those two trees tend to be the most annoying human beings you will ever have the displeasure of interacting with.), and you have a very strong and nimble little fighter to collect kills with.
Meanwhile USSR yaks get paired with GER and US, aka the worst players the game has atm, its a horrible shitsandwich of force carry and sweating buckets clutching game after game, not fun.