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?
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
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?
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
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.
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?
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!
