Question: Notching vs Missile Trade

The Academy - Players helping Players
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Question
If you are at high altitude and a missile is coming towards you, should you notch it or should you shoot a missile back at it?

Context
This only pertains to top tier planes with a good enough radar that can reliably find and lock onto missiles and which can carry enough missiles to afford such trading.

My experience
I’ll admit, despite having grinded out a couple top tier planes, I’m still pretty much a beginner at top tier air. Please forgive me if the question is not valid …
I was a firm believer of multi-pathing. This probably has to do with my first top tier plane being Su-27 SM with its short-ranged R-77 being sub-optimal at BVR.
I’m also skeptical about BVR/notch at high altitude. This mostly came from my experience with Su-27’s R-27 ER. With SARH, you can just re-lock the missile unless the opponent stays in the notch, in which case you can force a dogfight.
Now that you can shoot down a missile with your own missile, why notch and be vulnerable when you can just trade the missile and force your opponent into defending? This reduces the situation back to my R-27 ER example. I tried this with Su-30 SM2 and not notching worked quite well. Not sure if this works for any other planes. I also haven’t seen many other people doing this, not even other Su-30s.
What do you guys think about this?

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2

Try to avoid MCM (Missile Counter Missile) gameplay, it is completely skill-less and can just be a waste of missiles.

Notching is the best way to avoid missiles in almost every scenario.

But yeah, your post is the exact problem with MCM. That tactic is way too easy to do and people will just not bother notching anymore.

For your sake you’re best off trying to avoid MCM, you get better as a player and it improves how many kills you can get in a match as you’re not wasting them on iron doming

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Consider the following senario:
A and B go head to head at say 20km. Both launch at each other. A then shoots another missile at B’s missile to intercept it. B goes into a notch to defend. In this situation, A can repeatedly launch at B and intercept any missiles B manage launch back. Meanwhile, B needs to stay in the notch as the distance between them closes and try to off-bore launch against A.

I would say this seems like a rather disgusting tactive and I feel bad for doing the above to other people in real match. But what can you realistically do about it?

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Not too much sadly, besides managing to launch a couple missiles off in different directions at the same target which makes them harder to MCM.
If you’re good enough you can also just keep notching till merge.

Ignore my AIM-120 launch pls

Luckily MCM isn’t common until 14.3+ where people have AESA radars and more missiles.
It’s not that common either last I played the br, still extremely frustrating to encounter

5

lol this made me smile. This is really just missile spam. Good job with the notch.

The problem is, this kinda supports my skeptism of notching (skillful, yes; useful? I’m less sure). If I’m not at high altitude, I would just multipath, which completely negates ARH spam while I would also have the opportunity to launch against the opponent.

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Not really, multipath really only works reliably when both launch vehicle and target are at low altitude.
Even then it’s a bit of a gamble.

If you notch, you’re leaving more missiles to spare for use against enemies, notching also works at every range from every direction, you can’t MCM a missile coming from behind can you?

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People do say that, but from my experience this only happened to me sometimes with fakour. For reference I just stay 10-20m off the ground and it worked really well …

I get your idea though. Thanks for you posts!

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Looking at the whole issue through resource managment optic, both MCM and multipath are extremely inferior to notching.

Because in either case youre giving up much more valuable resource to take out the enemy missile - in case of MCM youre giving up your own missiles, and in case of multipath, you give up positioning (or to much larger degree than you do with notch).

With notch you just give up what, ever so slightly of your energy/positioning by entering notch for the first time and some chaff.

Suppose youre flying EFT with 8x ARHs and 2x IRs and you get drop on enemy GE. You start your attack. GE turns in and starts MCMing your missiles. Lets assume he doesnt attack and focuses on shooting down your missiles first. Lets assume 100% interception rate.

What inevitably happens is that youre down to your IRs while GE still has 4 ARHs left.

Allright lets suppose he now starts to attack. And lets assume through sheer size of your manhood and skill you intercept two of his ARHs with your IRs.

He still has two ARHs coming your way, and you, tarnished, appear to be missileless. And unless youre just that good to intercept mach 1 missile with your guns, you still have to enter notch or die.

Compare that to notching in the first place where you can sit however long you like and expend only few bursts of your chaff. GE can only hopelessly sit in his cuck throne since he has no means of engaging you.

What will he do? Go for gun kill? In F-15 vs EFT? Yeah good luck. Go full defensive and sit in notch on his own? Cool, since he has no means to threaten you you eventually park your plane directly on his six and perform colonoscopy with 9M. If he doesnt run out of fuel first. Run towards base to land and repair? He just gave up all of his positioning, for which reward is death.

“Oh he will just multipath!”

Excelent transition to the other half of the issue I say.

By multipathing, he effectively limits his manuevering to 2D plane (since he would have to leave the multipath to utilize the y axis. He also limits his speed greatly because I doubt anyone is that good to fly nap of the earth at mach 1.6 (i doubt that any plane is even capable of doing it without folding like badly put together ikea furniture). Lower speed combined with thicker air means less range, since his missiles now have to burn most of their energy to climb to you.

“But my missiles wont hit him due to multipath”

Astute observation, except since you have all of the positioning advantage over him you can eat, whats stopping you from just dunking on him with IR which doesnt care about MP? Even if you were limited to ARHs only, they can still hit multipathing targets if coming from steep enough angle. Remember how youre still sitting at alt when the enemy is crawling along the multipath alt? Yeah.

I dont have clip at hand of this being out into practise since i never figured out id need it but i can provide one tommorow as i will be grinding the star, since this happens all the time.

To conclude, notch is the superior tactic, and by not doing it youre just limiting yourself.

2 Likes
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always MCM

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Was about to post a TIGER_TANK_1 meme with how bad that take was until I saw your name.

You should rename yourself to TIGER_TANK_2 so it is more fitting

3 Likes
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Thank you for your post and your view on this matter. I would like to present some counter-arguments.

Concerning your F-15 vs EFT example:
If both planes do MCM, then I agree that in general the plane with more ARH will have the advantage, and therefore its a bad idea to do this when you know your enemy had more missiles than you. This does assume 100% interception rate, which can be tricky for both parties if both are MCMing and the range is short.
If one plane does MCM and the other plane notches, you are right that the notching plane can evade all the missiles. However, the MCMing plane can launch ARHs periodically and force you to stay in the notch. Another thing I like to do in my Su-30 is to sneak in the occasional R-27ET between R-77-1s, which is another problem the notching plane has to face. If the notching plane stay at alt and stays in the notch, he would likely not be able to retaliate very well and therefore the missile attritioning from MCM is not too significant compare to the missile comsumption from the periodic launch to force the notch. While the plane is notching, the MCMing plane will be closing in the entire time to launch ARH/IR missiles at increasingly short range and would be able to force a dogfight if the notching plane is still alive at that point. To summarise, I argue that, in the long-range phase, the MCMing plane has essentially zero risk while the notching plane is forced to notch all the missiles; in the short-range phase, the MCMing plane can choose to slow down and maintain some range to keep shooting ARH or it can force a dogfight. I’m not saying forcing a dogfight is necessarily desirable for the MCM plane, but it does have that choice.

Concerning your argument against multipathing:
I agree that if you’re right on top of me, then you might kill me even if I’m multipathing. In my experience (I have always multipathed so far), I had this happen to me less than five times discounting fakours which just has a big TNT load and discounting times when I was flying a bit too high. However, I’d argue getting into this kind of situation is the multi-pathing plane’s problem as it should have been able to see on radar a high flying plane before it got right on top. Personally, I count way more times when I yeet a missile upwards while multipathing to a kill a distracted high flying plane compared to times when I got dunked on in real matches. (Though I agree in 1v1s this will not be viable). I would say the risk of getting killed by as steep ARH is a reasonable risk one would just have to accept for being immune to ARH in most senarios.
As for getting dunked on by IR, I don’t think it would work well because flares exist and because the multipathing plance can launch IR missiles back to you equally.
To conclude, I agree that if a plane flying right above me and decides to target me and only me while I’m multipathing then yes I would probably die, but I really don’t think this happens enoughs in real matches for this to outweigh the benefit of being able to ignore BVR. Using your own argument, this allows me to conserve my missiles while the attacking planes waste theirs. Again, I would like to stress that this is a probabilistic argument and that I agree it wouldn’t work in 1v1, somewhat like if one get struck by lightning he would die, but it just doesn’t happen enough to warrent special protection against such cases.

As a final note, I would like to point out that the concept of “positional advantage” is not very well defined. I argue you lose positional advantage when you notch against a MCM plane, while you argue I lose positional advantage when I multipath against a high flying plane. The similarity is that the attacker would be launching ARH at the defender, the defender is at risk of dying and has difficulty to retaliate.

I conceed that multi-pathing can be a bad idea, but I still do believe in MCM. I welcome any points you would like to raise against this. Thank you again for you time to write the post.

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You do, that’s precisely the reason why this stupid mechanic needs severe nerfs

You do, for the exact reasons he stated earlier.

The difference is that for MCM, the defender literally cannot do anything about the scenario he’s put into, it’s blatantly unfair.

While for multipath it’s the multipather’s fault for being in that scenario at least 80% of the time if not more

13

I understand what you mean and I read your replies in the other guy’s post who died to MCM.

I’m not sure this must be nerfed. I would hazard to say your argument is similar to “R-77 is bad at BVR compared to AIM-120 and thus AIM-120 should be removed”. I don’t know if MCM is a thing IRL. If it is, then it is what it is and should be added. Potential problems would then just attribute to 16v16 fights with every plane launching its full load of missiles not being realistic.

A possible solution against MCM in a plane with less missile counts I can think of is to dive and multipath to negate any point of ARH exchange at long range, then start launching when the MCM plane gets close. I don’t think it possible to, say, reliably intercept 3 or 4 missiles fired at rapid succession at sub 10 km range. Also, I would imagine planes with less missiles tend to be more maneuverable and hence be better at shorter range?

Edit: Reliability of MCM depends on the time available to intercept each missile. Perhaps it doesn’t matter that a plane has less missiles in total if one fire them within a short timeframe at a suitably short range such that intercepting them is no longer reliable even if the MCM plane has a lot more missiles, while being able to avoid incoming missiles (either by notching or multipathing). What I’ve seen so far is people refusing to go low, notching my missiles and only occasionally shoot missiles back, and only then just one at a time. In such a hypothetical meta, skill would go from “who can notch more missiles” to “who can intercept missiles fast enough (not intercept more)”. Even with notching, with your own argument, if both planes can always notch each other’s missiles, then it will just come down to who has more missiles.

14

MCM is dependent on range imho. Notching at high altitude is perfectly viable and often easier since generally the missile has to overcome an altitude disadvantage. Notch, chaff, crank. Now if head on and there is obviously zero time to notch then yes MCM but I generally only MCM when someone gets the jump climbing up and well within 10km usually within 5km. Anything else is just stunting your own defensive ability imho

15

I agree for the occasional BVR missile MCM is a waste, but the really funny thing for me is that I usually die with half of my missiles left. Then, one day I thought, what’s the point of being a missile bus if I can’t even use all of them, so I just started intercepting everything coming my way lol.

16

I either get an EASA on a 4 ARH carrier and can’t afford MCM or I get 6 ARH with a wonderful N001 radar so MCM is…dodgy at best lmao but I also don’t have the hate for MCM that others do. I shoot down one missile and get called slurs for it lmao. It’s crazy out there

17

Yes, it absolutely does. There’s literally 0 skill involved in MCM-ing, none, nada.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/PskY_Z25vcs
It’s straight up bad for gameplay, the moment a single player in an engagements starts to MCM it devolves from a relatively equal matchup to “hurr durr hurr I hafff moa flying rocket lightposts” with 0 skill involved from either party.

absolutely should not.

Literally does not, see the short I sent above.

Fighting someone who’s MCM-ing is like fighting someone in CS2 who has a immunity on and can shoot at you just fine.

image
Here’s the results from a poll regarding MCM in air sim.
I guarantee you these results won’t differ drastically from what you’d get if you asked air RB players

18

Imagine shooting a missile at someone and then heading into a notch like normal for their missile only to find out they shot yours down and how can do literally anything to you without you having any choice in the matter.

MCM is completely skill-less and forces the victim into a near-unwinnable situation.
It’s unfair, bad for gameplay and not fun to fight.

You spent hours learning how to joust and notch? Nope, screw that. The other guy has more missiles than you. tf you gonna do about it?

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19

Improvise, adapt, and overcome. Blaming others for poor defensive positioning isn’t it. With proper altitude, notch, and crank; a pilot can enforce energy dominance over the lower and inevitably slower aircraft.

20

I got a few experiences where I notched and the other dude started iron dome’in all I threw at him and eventually won by maintaining superior positioning by getting too close to me and keep spamming fox3/fox2s while I try to notch again and again.

After that I started using it more and more in some circumstances. Sometimes people get salty and start insulting me, but hey… I’m just adjusting to the gameplay loop…

Personally, I don’t like the iron dome meta but it’s very effective, unless you have a very limited loadout

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