In Ground Arcade Battles,the Strela-10M2 is objectively the best SPAA in the game for its ability to instantly lock and kill any jet or helicopter flying into the air.
It has the second highest KD of every top tier SPAA (not factoring rarely played SPAA like the SAMP or the HQ11),just behind the newly added Pantsir SM-SV. Here are the proof:
Note that the only non-USSR SPAA that comes close is the Type 81(C) which is also extremely strong but it’s somewhat manageable. In short,an 11.0 SPAA is more effective at killing air vehicles than a 12.0 SPAA which in GRB simply wreaks havoc.
What are the reasons of the Strela being so powerful?
Its IRCCM,coupled with the photocontrast mode is literally the strongest in the game,to the point of it being able to front aspect lock an aircraft going cold,spamming heavy flares and spamming rockets in front of it and still being able to connect. You can do all of that and even hard maneuver to make the missile lose some of its energy and you’ll defeat it less than 10% of the time.
Despite having the same visibility as vehicles like the Pantsir S1/SM-SV (250%),or having a higher visibility than stuff like the BUK (214%),it is always harder to spot it in time before it launches a missile, meaning that the player using it will always have the upper hand
There is no standoff option for planes nor helicopters to deal with the Strela in Ground Air Events: with jets you typically spawn 5-6 km away and have either unguided rockets or unguided bombs,while helicopter spawn at 4km max and have ATGMs,but they’re still in close proximity to the Strela. This also creates the problem that the missile has simply too much energy in order to be defeated properly.
It can shoot on the move,which is a thing every IR missile carrier can do,but coupled with all the points above this mechanic makes the Strela able to evade the few munitions that are able to land near it.
It is able to ignore the LDIRCM mounted on the Mi-28NM and the Ka-52 for some obscure reason, which is something that no other IR missile can do either in GAB or in GRB
All these reasons create the result of people playing this vehicle and then ignoring all the other SPAA present after it, which makes sense logically: why do i need to even research the 2S6 and the Pantsir if they’re worse than the Strela in Arcade? It defeats the purpose of grind entirely.
The efficiency discrepancy between GAB and GRB is a bottomless pit in this case: in GRB the Strela sits at 10.3 and it’s not that good simply because it doesn’t have a radar so it can’t properly see incoming aircraft,and at that BR you start facing guided munitions that could make your missiles useless. This is translated to its poor KD which is several times lower that its GAB counterpart
What are the solution to this problem?
You can’t raise its BR because it is already brought into top tier super regularly,and you can’t remove the possibility to shoot on the move because it’s not the problem.
You can’t remove its IRCCM in Arcade because as far as I know,no munitions are gimped in Arcade compared to Realistic.
The only solutions are to either add stand-off weapons to events aircraft,or rework the missile entirely and thus making the Strela more ineffective at GRB as a countereffect.
The only way to solve this problem is adding another russian SPAA which is even better so that strela is not in the top 2 anymore but it becomes top 3 instead
problem with this thing is that missile is too fast and goes in a straight line, im not sure if its actually 700m/s it seems faster like 1000/ms bcoz HQ17 which is 885 m/s falls behind everytime even with direct fire mode, the missile cant also be tracked to be destroyed with AHEAD and is simply way too fast to be intercepted by other missile as it’ll simply outperform and ignore it, i also noticed that it always gets the first shot as it didnt had any target lock problem as many other SPAA do even at the same tier or above
if you compare it to the Antelope which is not even 1 whole br below the difference is abysmal, its odd
Yeah i noticed that too,sometimes it’s even faster than the ADATS. And yes it can’t be intercepted by anything on the ground
That’s because Gaijin messed up the code for this vehicle in order to super gimp it. The seeker head has a 1° FOV with a 40° gimbal limit and 20°/s scan rate,which already is something ludicrously unrealistical considering it is better at maneuvering as the R-73 which has Thrust Vectoring. Moreover,has a form of IRCCM it has FOV,meaning it simply uses its small FOV to ignore flares that are typically seen from behind or laterally of an aircraft.
The problem resides in the fact that,according to all of these info,the easiest way to avoid the missile is to go towards it,spam rockets and then hard evade: the missile considers the rockets as your IR fingerprint and follows that,and it will not go for you because the 1° FOV will prevent that. But no,even if you do that the missile will catch you instead of the missiles
It also has an alternative TV tracker,but the problem persists: Optical Detection uses the cross section to ignore stuff like flares,but if i create a cloud of fire between me and the missile,the contrast seeker is blinded. In the game this does not happen and you’ll end up with more advanced missiles (like the Stinger or the Antelope or even the FB10) to eat flares or rockets
yea this thing is odd, when you play tanks its not as noticeable but when you play another anti air besides a teammate who’s playing it theres something that feels off, and i have a similar feeling with the pantsir SM-SV in the other hand the regular pantsir seems to be decent and reliable but not in an overpowered way, its just strong, dunno maybe with the last example of the two pantsir its my idea but thats what i think
arcade is poorly balanced in my opinion for the aircraft/coopter/spaa, specially the spawns.
May be caused because airplanes in ground arcade battles works like kill streaks so everyone has access to one? Maybe that’s because anti-air vehicles in ground arcade battles has absurd numbers in comparison to ground realistic battles.
Strela-10M and Strela-10M2 doesn’t have datalink and 9M37M doesn’t have infra-red counter-countermeasure, an aircraft can still evade the missile pre-flaring, it’s not a 100% hit rate but I can’t ignore the fact that it’s a extremely good missile. I which you could provide data to that percentage you’re sharing considering that neither you have the vehicle unlocked.
Visibility stops being a matter of concern in higher tier battles in exchange for mobility, I can’t tell why but it doesn’t stop them from having higher numbers (the unmentioned anti-air vehicles) than the Strela-10M2 that is the subject of discussion and which you purposely is not willing to add to the discussion which is the respectively the italian/hungarian Strela-10M, italian FSAF SAMP/T, british/indian Strela-10M, french Mamba FSAF SAMP/T and then soviet Strela-10M2 as of April 2026.
I doubt Gaijin would expand the spawn areas for air vehicles in ground arcade battles because that’s how is working and I haven’t seen much backlash regarding air planes spawning too close of the battlefield in ground arcade battles. Helicopters are naturally closer to any anti-air vehicles, not the Strela-10M2 exclusively.
Again, that’s on every other anti-air vehicle with IR-guided missile as you mentioned, which also it’s not a problem (if it’s is even a problem) that the 9M37M brought to the game. This mechanic makes able every other IR-guided anti-air platform launcher to evade the few ordinances that are able to land near it.
Regarding that, as LDIRCM is still a very early feature in War Thunder (either way it doesn’t work/is missing from a vehicle or in other way works like a bubble and you can’t saturate it), if 9M37M can go past it and effectively hit the target I’m not aware, considering that specifically LDIRCM should be able to disrupt most if not all IR-guided missiles in War Thunder unless it has IIR which I doubt 9M37M has.
Currently there are no other solution generally to positively improve airplanes in ground arcade battles except by putting their spawn zone even further away from the battlefield to proper planning routes of attack if it’s a striker or evading and focusing on air targets if a figher. 9K35 Strela-10M2, the 9K35 Strela is part of the later soviet air space and anti-air doctrine to instead make independent vehicles, they can compose a bigger group whereas part are active launchers and part are radar designators, 9K35 Strela-10M2 is able to recieve data from allied radar and quickly engage said target, this feature is not in-game.
Ops,you should erase that bit then. 9M37M has IRCCM and it’s a “FOV” type of IRCCM
Nope
This sentence has absolutely no grammatical sense. I was referring to visibility from the air,which is the matter of concern in this discussion. Strelas are harder to see from the air and will pop up later than compared to vehicles with the same visibility
I called the Strela in general,but if you want i’m going to show you the 4+ KD of those as well (they go from 3.68 to 4.41 which is even higher than the SM-SV). As i wrote,i didn’t include those because if you combine all their games,they have been played 6 times less than the Russian Strela so they’ll pollute the statistics. Same thing applies for the SAMP/T: they have been played for a total of 30k games,which is over 13 times lower than the Soviet Strela and around the same amount for the Pantsir SM-SV alone.
You mainly play GRB,so how can you possibly know what are the discussions inside GAB?
Strela is not the problem in Arcade the problem is Idiotic CAS respawn behind Team Respawn point the time you fight you get Missile in @ss or Bomb whatever.
2 day’s ago i had game with moste idiotic Score because of the Hellis shouting Maverics fire and forget 21 kills in 10.7 BR only 3 of them was with the tank rest was pure Hellicopter Bias .
Some people take adventage of idiotic Arcade mechanic that they implement
STRELA and most AAA are not the problem i will tell you they should adress the Respawns and Fire and Forget missiles it’s just idiotic.
I am sorry if my english which is not my language didn’t pleased you but regardless—It’s pointless to the discussion, if it’s ChatGPT-like then it’s readable. I do main Russia in this case Soviet Union it is my first nation, naturally I’ll have a good chunk of play-time in the Soviet Union tech tree. Fine, whatever, you can’t always have people to agree with you, some times people that have the vehicle may bring worth opinion to the discussion.
Yes, the Strela-10M and Strela-10M2 doesn’t have datalink, at least something we can agree upon, I mentioned briefly the datalink because you expressed that it does have because quote:
to the point of it being able to front aspect lock an aircraft going cold,spamming heavy flares and spamming rockets in front of it and still being able to connect
For this scenario to be true, naturally, the missile (9M37M) should have data-link (since, according to you—you can’t evade the missile) because these scenarios require different methods of tracking the target, Strela-10M and Strela-10M2 is uncapable of interchanging the missile tracking method after it’s launched, because? It doesn’t have datalink.
I’m not ashamed to declare that I’m wrong about a specific part in my post, I acknowledge that I haven’t looked through more carefuly to notice that the 9M37M has IRCCM; FIM-92K and Minstral also has IRRCM, so whats make this aspect on the 9M37M special? Maybe the caliber, range performance but none of that has something to do with IRCCM because airplanes are still able to evade even by pre-flaring.
If the visibility values are the same how it can possibly render later on compared to other vehicles with the same percentage? I play mainly ground realistic battles and how I may possibly know the discussions inside ground arcade battles player maybe because I can read the Forum post titles? I’m assuming that airplanes spawn zones are indeed a problem because they do spawn close but people don’t bother bringing this up, if I’m not wrong there were at least one hot topic about that issue but quickly in a few weeks people forgot about and moved on.
I didn’t express anything about datalink,stop putting words inside my mouth or you get blocked
Insaid that bit because that’s how it works,period. What,if a projectile has a rocket booster it means it’s obviously an ATGM because every ATGM has a rocket booster? The Strela ignores flares and it’s a fact,go play any GAB match from 11.0 onwards and you’ll see what i am talking about
The fact its IRCCM does not work how it is supposed to. A “FOV” only type of IRCCM means that the seeker head only looks at the locked target ignoring anything it had laterally thanks to a super-narrow FOV . It’s a good system when you’re locking in rear aspect or on the side of am aircraft because flares are usually not seen at all. But if the missile gets a front aspect lock and the enemy jet start spamming hot stuff like rockets or even guided missiles,the seeker head is blinded by a hotter and denser heat source and thus it will go for that source instead of the aircraft.
The FIM-92K and the Mistral have a FOV+seeker shut-off type of IRCCM meaning once it detects a flare,the seeker shuts off and reopens when flares are not sensed anymore.
In real life,the Stinger and with it any SAM with the same type of IRCCM are very strong,but in War Thunder they are flare-hungry while the Strela rejects anything that is not an aircraft. It should be the opposite: the Strela should be blinded by LDIRCM and hotter heat sources in front of the aircraft, meanwhile stuff like the Stinger,Igla and Mistral should be extremely resistant to flares.
Pre-flaring does not work for the Strela literally because,as i told,it has a 1° FOV head that is centered perfectly,meaning the seeker literally ignores pre-flaring to an extreme degree
Ask Gaijin,if i knew that i wouldn’t be here discussing the problem and pointing it out. But again,you rarely play GAB and your experience solely comes from “reading the posts here” so go play GAB for weeks and then come here again when you got some experience on this matter,okay?
Type 93 can also fire them on the move, so it’s specific to Type 81. Just something I noticed while reading your post. Even from just that one game, I noticed being able to fire them on the move is a huge advantage, since in Arcade the enemy aircraft spawn at very short range and can rocket you right away.
Yup,but the thing is that take the LAV-AD for example: it can shoot on the move,but if the enemy aircraft can defeat your missile by flaring it’s sort of a counterbalance to it
The Strela’s missile cannot be defeated and it can shoot on the move,this makes it basically invulnerable.
