It’s a lot worse in SB than it is in RB because the radar is the primary method for finding targets and maintaining situational awareness and engaging with missiles.
Planes like the Mirage 2000 and Bripen perform better than the Su-27 because their radars will acquire and populate targets faster and more reliably. They are also visually smaller and have more countermeasures. Even the Israeli planes with Derbys still have good radar sets which makes a huge difference in target acquisition time.
If there was a tier list for general gameplay, the F-15C and F-15J are S-tier for most players because you can simply fly high and sling AMRAAMs with a predictable outcome. F-16C and Swipen also found out S tier because they have better missiles, radar, and flight performance than basically anything they can face.
A-tier would basically be all of the NATO planes that don’t have AMRAAM. So basically Bripen, Mirage 2000, and Derby F-16s and probably in that order. They still have some combination of flight performance, radar, and countermeasures.
B-Tier is basically everything else that still has an RWR and acceptable flight performance or some kind of gimmick. So basically MiG-29SMT and Su-27.
C-Tier is going to be planes like the J-11A, F4F ICE, and Tornado F.3. The J-11A is just a straight worse Su-27SM because of the RWR. The Tornado F.3 and F4F ICE are planes that are carried by the fact they have AMRAAM and good radars.
Now if you pay attention to national presets in sim…pretty much the bulk of a red side team will be made up of planes that are below average and they are mostly fighting at a huge numerical disadvantage as well.
I have my own sim community and I know a lot of players who’s were basically brand new to top tier and were able to post positive kill to death ratios in planes like the F-15C or F-16C almost immediately. I have played a lot of USA and RUS planes myself and the difference in difficulty in how hard you have to play in one vs the other is a night and day difference.
USA only players completely lack this perspective which is a huge issue when it comes to discussing it. For instance there is another thread where a USA player was complaining about the MiG-29 being in the same BR as the F-16A because it has the R-27ER…and the R-27ER is OP and the MiG-29 does everything better than planes like the F-14A/B…including dogfighting. I challenged him to a duel and I won 3-0 in F-14A against MiG-29…he didn’t even want to go to the BVR portion at that point.
And I’ve played the F-16A recently in order to spade it. I don’t even have the full load of Aim-9L unlocked and I’m sitting at 60-6 KD…with only 3 of those deaths in the new bracket…and 1 of those was friendly fire. And I also have a 100 percent win rate in it. It really is the biggest possible hand holding experience imaginable.