Greetings fellow sufferers under the tyranny of the snail!
I am a fool who plays the Japanese air tech tree in this exquisitely painful game. I just finished researching all the planes in the tech tree after several years of work, and decided to go back and spade some of the vehicles I was unable to early in my experience due to a lack of skill. Last night, I stumbled upon the Ki-200. I remember initially getting and playing this one, as it was the second jet (technically rocket) fighter I ever got after the R2Y2 V1. I also remember at the time how unbelievably horrendous it was to play, so I thought I’d give it a shot now.
So, I played 20 matches with it last night, and wanted to put some of my thoughts here and see how everyone else feels about it.
To start off with, the statistics.
Out of the 20 matches I played, I got a total of one kill, two assists, 10 total shots that connected, and spent about 85k SL on repair costs. Out of these matches, 8 were full uptiers to 9.3, 6 were partial uptiers, 4 were at tier, and 2 were downtiers.
For flight performance, it’s not awful. It can turn well enough at higher speeds, and its near inability to stall is very nice. Its climb performance is also quite admirable for the tier. Overall, I could typically match a F-86 or MiG-15 for the first turn or two of a dogfight, but the energy bleed is quite noticeable, and it became increasingly harder to win in a rate fight after a few seconds. Turning it into a vertical scissors battle was much more effective overall, and allowed me to control the battle for a little bit longer.
The speed and fuel are where it really lacks though. It is not wise to ever use more than 70-80% throttle unless absolutely necessary in dogfights. I never ran out of fuel, but that is more so that I was being incredibly conservative with it than anything else. I could never really use the plane to its maximum potential simply because it would take half my fuel if I tried to. You can never climb as high as you want to, you can never commit to as many fights as you want to, you can never go as fast as you want to, all simply because of that pathetic fuel load. While I think that this plane would deserve to be at this BR if it could be used at a higher throttle % continuously, there were just so many times that I couldn’t lest I run out of fuel. As such, everything can outrun you if they want. Even with full throttle, most, if not all planes at this rank can simply run away if they don’t like how the dogfight is going.
My biggest issue with the Ki-200 is the guns. Out of the 10 shots I got to connect, 8 of them were “hits” and did no damage. 2 were “critical hits”, one of which did nothing, the other of which dinged up their wingtip a bit, which they simply flew back to their airfield to repair. The only kill I managed to get was from using this plane for its proper use, and just ramming an enemy. For being 30mm cannons, their damage is terrible at the moment. The cyclic rate is bad enough, but the biggest issue is the bullet spread. Occasionally, I’d fire a few shots at an enemy, some would go left, some right, some above, and some below them. It was miserable to say the least. I was forced to get within 100m or so of the enemy to get consistent hits, and no gun convergence would save me. Further more, this might just be an issue I have as a PS4 player, but any time I tried to adjust my aim, the entire plane bucked around like crazy. Trying to slightly activate your rudder to line up a shot? How does pulling an instant 15 degrees of AoA off your target sound? Trying to activate just your elevator to pull the circle a little tighter? -15 degrees of AoA this time (aren’t we having fun?).
There were other issues I had, especially with takeoffs. For whatever reason, the plane frequently was stuck in the ground on takeoff, even if you respawned. You could eventually takeoff, but it required sitting on full throttle for nearly a minute and a half to do so, leaving you with not speed, fuel, or altitude by the time you finally got to the battlefield.
Overall, this was one of the single most painful experiences I’ve ever had playing a jet of this rank. I am tired of fighting MiG-19s, Su-7s, and F-106s, so Ima go back to playing the R2Y2s for a while. Interested to hear what the rest of y’all think of this plane at its current state. I personally think it should go down to 8.0 and that Gaijin should fix the matchmaker to be ±0.7 or ±0.3 BR, but that’s a pipe dream that we all know won’t happen. Happy flying!
