Please help i cannot progress in air rb

I’m currently at br 3.0 in air rb germany and I cannot for the life of me understand how one is meant to actually do well. I am stuck climbing for like 3 minutes bored out of my mind, then attempt to boom and zoom, miss the boom and then get shot and when i try to fly away (e.g. turnfight or fly up), i just get easily strafed and I die. It a boring cycle leading to maybe a score of 100-200 depending on if i hit any shots. I’ve searched a ton of guides and have not really found anything too helpful. I have turned on vertical targeting and my wing gun crossover point (sry idk what the actual setting is called) is set to 800m. I rarely get any kills, and most that could be kills become assists. I mainly play ground rb and am trying to get the br of my planes up so that they work well in 5.0. Please help me make the grind less painful.

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Buy premium time and top-tier premium, or if you don’t want to spend money, stop playing the game for grind. Just play the game for fun and to learn. Stop focusing on rewards after the game. Don’t try to become a pro. Just play however you play. Slowly change things. Experience comes from experience itself.

Sadly, we can’t really help you. Maybe you can try to find some squadron or friends you can play with.

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the problem with playing for fun is that the game isn’t always fun

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Welcome to Air RB!

I watched the replays of your two last Air RB battles. Frankly spoken: I saw lots of room for improvement. Imho your pain level won’t go down if you are not willing to do some research - No pain, no gain…

Upfront:

  1. I play Air RB for Germany just with a few planes - compared to US or USSR aircraft they are from my pov overtiered (=BR too high) and i don’t like the handling / flight model (FM) of most of them.

  2. But a few planes have a good and stable FM (i use a HOTAS) and fit to my play style . Out of my 1.800 Air RB matches for GER more than 1,000 are just with 2 aircraft: The Swiss C-3604 (Rank II, BR 2.7) and the Me 410 A-1 (Rank III, BR 3.3). I scored with these two together 2.381 kills vs 113 deaths.

Germany prop Air RB:

For a rookie with a few hundred matches in total (incl your tanks) the BR range 2.7 - 5.0 flying for Germany in Air RB is from my pov rather difficult - stiff competition & usually overtiered aircraft (whilst fighting undertiered aircraft) combined with a rather poor quality of players (no offense, mainly tankers) makes this a challenge - especially as those tankers tend to use CAS planes and are not used to play Air RB.

What i recommend:

  1. Work on your situational awareness. Most people get killed by the guy they did not saw. The main benefit of Air RB are the markers, they allow you to assess threats and the energy states of them. Stay out of furballs - as a rookie you lose track of multiple enemies and you die.

  2. Altitude is potential energy - if you fly 109s you fly an energy fighter, everything above 109 E models is not suited for turn fights. You need altitude and speed in order to survive. Look up the optimal climb speed for 109 modells - you were stall climbing in both replays. That means you wasted altitude as as your AoA was too large.

  3. Watch your replays in order to find out who killed you and ask yourself how you can avoid this in the future. If you played a match and you see a teammate playing great - watch the replay to learn from him.

  4. Don’t fly towards multiple enemies - in order to get kills you need to be alive. In your match on the Uranus map you flew below 4 enemies…

  5. Do some reasearch about what your plane can do (or not) AND what potential enemies can do or not. You got killed by a Ki-43 - you can’t turn with them and you don’t want them above you.

There are a lot of good content creators on yt. Watch tutorials and game play / plane reviews of planes you would like to use. If you are bored after 3 minutes climbing you won’t get happy at prop BRs - Air RB is basically just a positioning contest, usually the plane with the higher energy state can dictate the fight and wins.

In case you want to see what:

  1. Situational awareness
  2. Correct climbing
  3. Informed decision making
  4. Knowledge about enemy aircraft

can do - watch this replay (use option 2 = player view):

Gaijin Entertainment - Single Sign On

Content:

  • My team decided to go low and played “turn & burn” leaving me in a 1 vs 4 after 7 minutes.
  • 2 of the 4 turn better than me, 3 climb better and 2 are faster - i have 3 x 20 mm cannons and an altitude advantage.
  • The main threat (2.7 P-36 turns better, climbs better, played had > 6,000 kills) gave up and thx to my altitude advantage i could set up an energy trap for a French VG 33 and a US Buffalo. The P-36 and the Wildcat (which turns nice with energy) farmed ai planes, i did the same.
  • The P-36 got damaged by an ai plane and crashed - so there was just the Wildcat left. A walk in the park.
  • I farmed some aaa near enemy bases in order to get a ticket lead before i wanted to kill the Wildcat. And, ofc, a random aaa hit gave me an oil leak (~16:40) and my engine started to overheat immediately. I made it back and repaired, took off and chased the Wildcat. Kill after 23 minutes, game won.

Have a good one!

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tysm for such a detailed reply

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If they are struggling with the basics, throwing them into top tier where they will have all the existing issues along with having to also deal with learning the radars and how to deal with the missile spam is unlikely to improve their enjoyment.
@FullName25 not much to add beyond what @Real_K_Soze said, just that the old wiki has a “usage in battle” section that can be quiet useful, both for getting a rough idea how to play your plane and how enemies will preform:
https://old-wiki.warthunder.com/Category:Germany_aircraft
also here is a youtube series on basic fighter maneuvers that will give you a solid understanding of the basics to build on:

Good luck! 07

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Try some Air Arcade, possibly less RP and SL rewards, but since you can better aim and can do more things with your aircraft, the added kills, assists, and destruction of ground targets, assuming you bring a couple of bombs with you should make up for it. :D

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Germany is not a very good nation to start out for air (for me at least).
Their aircraft are very bad with mobility, and are on par with acceleration against other aircraft. The only benefit I see with early BF-109s and such are their wing rip speed and are not as prone to over compression with ailerons and elevators.
I might suggest trying out other nations to see which one’s you may like.

I might suggest playing Japan. I love Japan’s Zeros as their turn rate and light air frame enable them to have similar (yet slightly slower) performance over other aircraft. Zeros and such are nice, but I might recommend getting the A7M2. It is a heavy fighter and something you should work for if you were to play Japan. It can outturn many aircraft, except for the Spitfire, and even then, you both would have to play extremely well to get the better of each other. Playing Japan might turn you life around when playing with aircraft.

Fly at a medium altitude, around 1000m to 2000m. This way, you can bait aircraft up above to try and dive, hopefully getting into a turn fight, which you will excel at, or have the altitude advantage over aircraft below. Japanese fighters tend to lock up over speeds of 575 km/h, which is why you don’t climb too high.

You also can play Britain. Britain gets access to spitfires and a lot of 7.7mm machine guns at lower BRs. With Spitfires, they compress at a slightly high speed (in my opinion) and turn slightly slower than the Zeros. However, they trade that slight turn time for a better engine. At earlier BRs, aircraft will overheat at 100% throttle. Your carburetor will also fail a -G or high G maneuvers. This can cause your engine to fail.

Pick one of these two nations if you want to play air. Maybe you’ll pick up some skills while playing these aircraft that you can apply for other nations

Gun convergence/Vertical targeting should be set slightly below where you typically fire at. If you fire at 700m away, set vertical aim to 600m and test it out. What vertical targeting does is that it sets your guns up a certain height, so that whn you fire, you guns will aim slightly above to hit a target at a distance. Everyone has a preference. Ex/ If an enemy is 800m away, and your vertical targeting is set to 800m, then all you have to do (assuming you and them are flying perfectly forward) is aim directly at their plane (no adjusting up or down) and when you fire, your rounds should go slightly above and drop down to hit the target.

I am not a fan of guides as they feel specific to the person writing them. I feel like trial and error works best (even though im literally stating my opinion). Even though im not a fan of guides, one that has helped with my boom n zoom is this one “Dive, Attack, Run, Repeat! — A Guide to Boom and Zoom | War Thunder Wiki” I dont know if you have already seen this guide, but it offers pretty good advice.

Oh yeah, something I might add. If climbing gets boring (like it always is), occupy your time with something else while you’re at it. For me, I run War Thunder, Umamusume, and Limbus Company at the same time. I play them all at the same time. Yeah, it causes stutters, but I’d rather sacrifice a stutter or two than my mind :3 (this might be my biggest yap)

image

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I suppose. But I’m playing Germany in ground rb and am trying to play air rb to get my plane’s brs up to where i am in ground.

idk. i bought top tier prems at lv 1. ofc i had frends who told me ebaut game. and they explained basics.and helpes me to abjust settings. + some videos. first 20-30 game is kinda hard. cuz evryting is new. but after it. not a big deal.

yeah .most times XD.