Not just Dual-Plane. It needs much more.
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No, hes right, if it gets a downtier (12.0-13.0 for the IRIAF or F-14B or 11.7-12.7 for the F-14A) it holds a meaningful advantage against anything below it and should do quite well.
But when they are forced into the uptiers, they are at a disadvantage / lack any meaningful advantage
Also, F-14s came 2 years before ARH was added and controlled the high alt completely. MP was originally added to mitigate Aim-54s though Id argue the low alt hugging meta didnt set into stone until the R-27ER
Danger Zone was June 2022. Other ARH weapons werent added until June 2024
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So like every other plane in the game? It’s a plane centered around a BR where there’s a unique shift in weaponry. It’s a bridge from fox 1 to fox 3. Of course it’s going to be strong in a downtier. Everything is.
The Phoenix is ARH. I think you mean modern ARHs like the AMRAAM. Also, sure, it dominated high altitude. That’s because it’s a specialized interceptor with specialized missiles for intercepting in those conditions. The ER came next update. That cut off any advantage the F-14s had anyway.
R-27ER countered it just fine. Remember, the Phoenix only started getting minor buffs AFTER the Modern ARHs were added.
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Yes and no.
ARH forces aircraft into a higher BR than what they perhaps should be. For example the FA2 would barely be 12.0 if it only had 9Ms and SARH, and even now, perhaps should be 12.7 with AMRAAM, but cant move down. 13.7/14.0s could do with moving higher as any 13.0, even one with ARH, is at a meaningful disadvantage to any 14.0.
So aircraft like the F-14A IRIAF and F-14B, and a few others like FA2 should really be a lower BR but cannot go down, but suffer notably in any form of uptier.
This is compression in a nut shell.
It still came 2 years before true equivalents. Yes R-27ER was and still is a nightmare, but its not ARH.
Congratulations, 2 nations got R-27ER, the other 7 (8 if you also include anyone playing the US but in the F-14) were screwed. Trying to fight F-14s in the Phantom FGR2 with Skyflash DFs sucked.
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IMHO, decompression is the only way to fix F-14 properly without making them become way too OP again.
Too good for getting further buff down if we consider downtier
but Too awful for getting further nerf up if we consider uptier
Maybe some tweak on IR missiles can be juicy, though.
F-14 shouldn’t see F-15C at all, but at the same time, 11br jets like JA37C, Su-24 or Tornado IDS shouldn’t face and forced to fight a2a against F-14.
If, even though we completely ignore Phoenix in the discussion at all for argueing’s sake
F-14A with 6 AIM-7F can easily punish enemy 3rd-gen planes in downtier. right?
I still have nightmares about the fight against F-14A in my F-4J(UK) while half of the team was just wasted by Phoenix, and they came back with AIM-7F to finish me off.
Yeah pretty much, though there is a point of diminishing retursn imo when it comes to decompression, there comes a point where everything is spread so thin that you jsut end up fighting the same half dozen aircraft. So I think F-14s being 1.0 BR different from the F-15C for example, wouldnt be the end of the world
Id place it 12.3. About what the Tornado F3 would be if they ever fix BOL. (F3 trading dogfight performance for more CMs, better radar and better RWR)
Thankfully I was transitioning from some ARB and some ASB to almost exclusively playing ASB about the time of its intro. I barely play(ed) things like the Harrier Gr7 in ARB when it was released. So I missed the worst of it just out of virtue of playing ASB, though I never recall seeing the F-14s actually doing all that much in SB, especially with Aim-54s. I still argue that half the issues around ARB + ARH are entirely down to bad map design. Being both too small and a narrow valley of death
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maybe but that isnt what tiger was talking about
Depends on what he means by “Mutlipath resistant” that is one way to describe anything with an inverse monopulse seeker
No it didn’t. The 27ER was not good for BVR duels when it was added. The longer ranged attacks with BVR combat are all about pressuring the opponent with attacks that force them to respect the missile and jockeying for position to either merge with the opponent or fire follow up attacks that are more likely to kill. The 27ER outright SUCKED at BVR duels when it was introduced because it only existed on platforms that got a whopping two (2!) missiles. So even F-4 phantoms with AIM-7Fs far eclipsed the 27ER carriers at BVR combat because they actually had the ammo supply to pressure people at range. This changed for about a week or two with the Yak-141 before people cried to have its wings clipped down to 2 ERs, and then it wasn’t until the Su-27 that the 27ER was finally able to be fielded in sufficient quantity for BVR combat tactics to be employed. But by that point we were solidly in the “100m multipath and IRCCM spam meta” where the AIM-9M was by far the best missile in the game.
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Yeah, if F-14A gets their ‘most famous and iconic weaponry’ removed.
Maybe it might be considered as a perfect 12.3BR jet and a sidegrade version of F-4EJ Kai or Tornado F.3.
But I am sure that nobody who likes F-14(Including myself) wants to see that. :/
I was tried and barely managed to spade Harrier GR.7 in ARB when F-14A IRIAF was soaring high and ashaming norm F-14A with their infamous Fakour-90 on 12.3BR as ‘free kill death-laser’ (with some hyperbole) in their downtier match.
(Maybe I have a knack for choosing the worst time to do something I want to)
I really just can’t understand why my subsonic attacker, which doesn’t have any kind of SARH/ARH and having trouble flaring an IR missile due to the strange heat signature of the engine.
needed to be the same BR with F-14A IRIAF at that moment.
And maybe quite disappointed about those who claimed either Phoenix or Fakour as ‘skill-check missile’ because all I see was ‘whole team were collapsing by them while I was halfway to combat zone’ :|
Yeah, If map was lot much larger than now…
I agree that current map are way too small for fight with ARH.
no matter phoenix or modern one.
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and that was before the dark days of BOL nerf and 9Ls were really good.
I loved destroying people who had no idea how to deal with an All-aspect IR,
when the IRIAF event was going most if not all of my fakour/aim54 kills were against other IRIAFs. there was only “F-14 killed F-14” in the kill credit all the time. the IRAF basically only dominated other IRIAFs
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People have a really hard time understanding that you can get value of missiles that miss the target. Fire a bunch of phoenixes down range and a lot of players are going to take action to defend against them. Others won’t and will instead take their chance that they’re not the player who’s actually targeted. The people who call the phoenix a skill check missile are only looking at the players who fly into the phoenix. The real power is forcing a sizable percentage of the enemy team to respect the missile and evade. The enemy team is now split up and consequently their teammates will be outnumbered and disadvantaged when the teams merge. This causes a snowball effect and is the reason why phoenix spam was META for winning matches even if it was a bit mid for scoring kills. The only thing that really kept the phoenixes in line is that tomcats were so oppressively dominant that they were frequently on both teams in approximately equal numbers, so both teams were being dispersed by phoenix spam.
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Name checks out. You don’t have a clue.
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Yup. Killing clueless F-14 players was how I grinded the event on my main.
Just tell me you didn’t fly the mig-29s and 141 back then without telling me that you didn’t fly the 29’s and 141 back then.
the 27ER was the superior SARH missile but it was mounted on inferior platforms in inadequate quantities. What the 27ER was during that time was a mechanism for punishing anyone that dared climbed above the multipath height within the, at the time, 10km ACM range of a russian bird. They simply did not have the ammo supply to properly play the BVR dance of planes cranking and notching as they approached the merge. If you could snap your fingers and teleport the ER onto american birds with american #s of fox1 hardpoints and american radars, then it would have been the BVR king. But it didn’t appear in such quantities until the Su-27 was added, and it was still bad at BVR on the Su-27 due to the Su-27’s atrocious radar that had an 8 second delay between updating TWS contacts. It was still largely a mechanism for punishing people that dared to climb above the mulitpath height, and it wasn’t until much later that russia would even reach parity with NATO with 20km HMD ACM ranges.
And back in those days, sometimes when the matchmaker didn’t have enough F-14 for ‘Both sides’ and made USA vs World match instead…
The large warhead helps but it hardly makes it multipath resistant, and every missile benefits from top down shots
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Sure, but the missile reaching at all is already a tough proposition right now
The MiG-29 was the better FM on launch. The F-16ADF they added with it had only 2 Sparrows. You could say, “Well, the F-14 has the capability for 6 Sparrows!” Yeah, but it also had worse radar than the Phantoms at the time and for the longest time, it was bugged. The MiG-29 and F-16A both have MPRF radars with solid tracks. This dynamic didn’t change with the F-16C and F-14B.
You know you can defend too, right? The sparrows can be rolled with ease, and the Phoenixes can be outpulled with ease. You can’t do the same with the ER. So many times have Mig-29s (with my friends in a closed 1v1 BVR fight) simply outrolled all my missiles in the F-14 and then proceeded to ER me. It was the simplest stuff in the world, coming from someone who later grinded the MiG-29 to try it out. In AirRB, it was almost easier for the MiG-29. You stay just below contrail height, send one ERout at 30km, force it into IOG, go into the crank, roll and chaff, and reacquire the lock. All the F-14s were worried about killing zombers. The F-16A compressed horribly and had worse SARHs than you.
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