I’ll put it bluntly. I am bad at the game. I am level 9 and I play air realistic Italy at 3.0 (I mainly use the C.202 Folgore, but I’ve grinded up to rank 3) and every time i play, i always get my ass handed to me. I’m losing my mind. I can never get ANY hits on anyone. The moment I enter a dogfight, they always find a way to do some trick and get behind me only to destroy my plane with a burst or two. When I start the battle, I climb nonstop with a 15-25 degree angle to gain altitude, but the entire enemy team are thousands of meters above me. Even if the enemy is flying dead straight, i can’ get a single shot on target. I feel I’m losing my mind playing this God-forsaken game.
Does anyone have any advice, or am I just bad at the game?
Nothing wrong with having things to learn, and practice and experience are the main things i’d say will help you, so if you are new to the game then its to be expected. Climbing is good, but climbing straight at the enemy team will mean that the planes that climb better than you are always above you, and you dont really have any room to manouver or setup a fight you want, because they are heading straight for you, and you to them. Side climbing is a bit of a meme for some reason now, but just putting yourself a bit to one side of the map will give you much more choice about what fights to take and when to run to teammates. Knowing the advantages and disadvantages of the plane you are in and also the plane the enemy is in is very important, as there are different ways you can dogfight someone, and different planes will win in different situations, often in spite of pilot skill. Just going through the wiki, looking at the planes you are seeing in matches and learning what their advantages and disadvantages are while you are climbing will help massively. What you are mainly looking for in this is what vehicles are better at turnfighting, and which are better at energy fighting. Turnfighting is the easiest thing to do, and certain planes like the Spitfires and Zeroes(A6M2/3/5) are very strong in that regard, but energy fighting is often a better style, though it is harder to make work. There are a couple of pretty simple concepts to understand with energy-fighting, the energy part of it refers to either energy in terms of speed, or in terms of Altitude that you can turn into speed. Generally this will mean that you are starting above and enemy, and you want to dive down onto them, generally from 2km away, you go for a gun pass, if the enemy manouvers defensively(turning to avoid your guns or diving to run away), you simply pull up and climb back to where you started. What this does, is basically gives you free gun passes, and if the enemy defends, he loses energy either in terms of losing speed when turning, or loses energy in terms of altitude when diving. You want to minimise your own loss of energy, so it is best to basically not turn when going for the gun pass, so setting yourself up before diving is best practice. I can make some diagrams in paint tomorrow to help illustrate but there are also plenty of youtube videos on how to dogfight, and you can practise aiming on the AI or in air arcade. A couple of other things, you want to be using the free look cam and your keyboard for a lot of your manouvering, so W and S for pitch, A and D for roll, and Q and E for rudder. This will allow you to pull harder when turning, and lets you look around while fighing, so you dont get jumped by a 3rd party. Quite a lot of Prop teir fighting is about the setup, and choosing the fights you take. Do not be afraid of waiting for teammates to engage an enemy and 3rd partying yourself and certainly dont listen to anyone trying to tell you that you should leave people to 1v1 and so on. With the aiming, I generally would advise setting your gun convergence to 500-700m, and only ever really shooting at people within those ranges. Also, if you do not have the vehicle spaded yet, (Spaded just means that you have unlocked all the modifications for it) the flight performace is much worse than when it is spaded, and this goes for basically every vehicle in the game, so getting the mods for a vehicle will greatly increase how nice it will feel to fly. Hope all this helps
Well, to be blunt as well, I have 14k battles under my belt, and are not good either.
However, for 1, you started out throwing yourself into RB, which will be worth it later on, but Italy was, not an amazing choice for TT starters, or even late game. However, the G.55 is a monster, and a few others. Just learn how the vehicle plays and strategies to use, and things will start going your way, I personally trial & error with new vehicles, or take historical background and learn about how it was used and it’s intended purpose.
I recommend to fly in custom test flight to practice shooting and understand ballistics.
You can also find YouTube guides for each exact plane as it can be easier to get the information.
PS you will get 20 mm equipped Italian planes soon, I think you should find them much easier to play.
Well at least you haven’t rage quit. Yet.
WT has a very steep learning curve and there are lots of hidden/undocumented tricks and techniques that aren’t apparent if you “just play the game”. Oh also the game actively abuses new players by serving you up to highly experienced players who know all of the above already.
If you can put up with it, you’ll eventually learn all that and be competitive. A common mistake is going too far up too fast. This puts you right in the sights of those high level players who will grind you for the events.
If you can’t finish consistently in the top half of the score board, you are playing at too high a BR for your experience and crew skill level. You need to drop back and play more of the tier I or early tier II planes. Spade them and then work on learning what works in the game. Watch/read the lots of tutorials and tips videos and articles that are around.
Kids probably hear worst at school, or wear headphones! The point is, these are detailed and gives out some good advice, specifically on handling, aiming, and more important, knowing who the threat is and where they are in relation to you.
I prefer Ground RB, where I don’t have markers, I can’t see my enemy type, distance or name, so you do have to account for much more. The advantage there also is, pilots in ground RB tend to be more “revenge bombing” focused so they are easier to pick off.
Well firstly, you only have 289 battles. This isn’t WoT or WoW, even arcade is hard compared to other games. Also to newbies, the learning curve is very steep. At least you have stuck with it this long. My advice would be to join a squadron that welcomes new players and learn from those with more experience.
Imho you received a lot of very valuable information (especially post #2) so i reduce my feedback just to 2 things:
Gaining altitude is always good, but you should forget this nonsense about “climbing angles”. Efficient climbing requires to use the optimal climb speed for your selected aircraft. These optimal climb speeds varies roughly from 230 to 280 kmph IAS (=Indicated air speed) for most props fighters in the BR range - with some forum search you will find aircraft performance sheets (like from @MOBB) which will help you.
Imho Italy is the worst “starter nation” available in wt.
Basically all props are overtiered like hell and get outperformed by almost every other aircraft at the same or even lower BRs. The root cause for this is that Italian mains usually gained their experience with playing some of the big 3 nations first and are able to use this experience to their advantage when playing then Italy. Italian prop players are usually just way more experienced.
So in order to make overtiered planes work and to use them successfully you have to be more experienced than your average opponent - which is imho your main problem.
On top of that - Italian props are prone to overheat like hell - in order to compensate this you need to use Manual Engine Controls (MEC) as you can control the overheating with adjustments of prop pitch and radiators/coolers.
Last but not least - around BR 3.7 / 4.0 you will be often assigned to pure US or German teams. The US boys usually die like flies and the Germans suffer from a similar effect as their aircraft get outperformed too, but not as severe as Italian planes. In other words - the pressure on you increases as your average teams makes your life even harder.
Flying propeller planes in warthunder is pretty realistic (mission design and situations not withstanding) in an 1 vs 1 duel. 1 vs many, well - let’s focus on 1 vs 1.
A guide was already posted, but I find it does not really explain the whys and hows of propeller plane behaviour. Physics play a pretty crucial role after all!
Take a look at these playlists: It will explain weird situations where your yak or ki-XX gets “outturned” by a mustang or corsair, how a plane below you can seemingly pull energy out of nowhere and the like. Implementing it is not going to be easy: they’re optimized for either 1v1 or 2v2 situations and won’t really help if you’re surrounded by a furball - for that, Defyn has good advice.
Basic Fighter Maneuvering: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLnyigzFtHeNr9zTkpxyD0ksFD3CwLa2UE (There, I’d pay special attention to techniques like the Yoyo, Lag roll, lead turn, pitch/sliceback and the scissors. Lag roll and high yoyo are specially useful for keeping your target in your gunsights without having to lose speed or making energy-costly turns. Pitchback/slicebacks are handy for head-ons. Scissors will keep you alive.)
Air Combat Maneuvering: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLnyigzFtHeNo8h6EJLrer4zIDfCHCo8XY (this playlist is unfortunately less applicable in air RB as it involves a lot of formation and teamwork oriented techniques. Still, watch them once or twice to get an estimation of concepts and how things would work out.)
If you manage to master the maneuvers, you should be able to defeat players who do not know them in inferior planes as plane performance (assuming similar enough technologies) falls secondary to actually being able to use it in propeller planes.
Some personal advice from my own experiences:
Hitting targets: As others have mentioned, italy is a bit of a hard starter nation. Uptiering is definitely an issue - but there’s something else: Italian guns tend to be on the weaker side. As such, you need to maintain your shots for longer and hit more of your bullets. I found dogfighting much easier with planes that have powerful weapons because even a stray burst can win you an engagement (while it’s sim and not RB - I feel this is reinforced by me finally managing to get fighter kills on aware and resisting opponents in the cannon corsair in sim versus the MG corsair or MG mustangs. My aim is very bad, but only having to hit a few shells compensates a lot).
Hitting targets: In addition to using faster TTK weapons, it’s a good idea to “walk” your shots slowly. If you missed by undershooting, gently increase your lead and you’ll get the kill. Big guns pay off big time here. If you’re using something like an early bf109 with only 120 cannon rounds - you can bind machine gun and cannon separately and walk your shots with MG and then pull the cannon trigger once you see “Hit!”
Hitting targets: While you can snipe from far farther away in RB than in sim, bullet drop, velocity and time to evade means it’s a better idea to shoot from up close. I have far more success getting kills by waiting until I’m 300-600 meters away before opening up rather than taking pot shots from a kilometer away.
Hitting targets: Bullet drop is a thing. Due to jank, your entire ammo belt’s velocity is decided by the first bullet. Picking ammo belts whose first shot has high velocity (AP shells/bullets) can help with this.
I’ve had the energy advantage, how did I die?: Something I used to mess up a lot early on is forgetting that total energy = kinetic (massvelocity^2) + potential energy (massaltitude). A fast, heavy plane at a lower altitude may have a greater energy than a slow and light plane above you. Don’t get overconfident just because you’re flying above the enemy. Also remember different planes retain energy differently with vertical and horizontal maneuvers.
you can also fly low, attack bots, stay away from enemy and attack bots or surprise them, first go to sides then come to battlefield, you dont need to climb, press and hold C + move your mouse to check sides and above, and other things, watch gameplays of the planes, on youtube for more tips
You should watch all of DEFYN’s guides on youtube. And it will take time I am around level 50 and still lose a lot or make dumb mistakes dont be too hard on yourself
As ithers also said the first thing you should learn are basic dogfight menouvers. And IMO for the second thing you should learn is how to differentiate when your own mistake got you killed (and learn from it) or opponent plane is simply being better (full uptier).
I still die a lot to my own mistakes due to lots of different reasons. But in time I also learned how to expliot mistakes of others which put me in advantageous position.
Play some dynamic campaigns against the computer,They are fun but more importantly I found they really sharpened me up. I needed that refresher course.
I am surprised how much better I was after doing a few dynamic missions.
I did them because I couldn’t get onto the main game due to a bug.
Arcade in general is damn good training for realistic battles as you get the marker to fire at and its actually ahead of the plane not directly at it as you will see.
I found getting as much height as I could then picking one target below me to swoop on worked and often one kill led to another. Really get as close as you can before firing as you alert the enemy of you fire too early.
Also make sure you have anti aircraft ammo ,don’t use ground attack AP Ammo ,easy mistake to slip into.
I give advice as a bad flyer who tries tries to squeeze a few kills out of a game and some times I get nothing ,occasionally I get two or three.
I only fly to grind CAS for GRB and Im on X Box which is terrible for flying.
