Why do ARB players engage their after burning engines as soon as they spawn?

Game Discussion Realistic Battle
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Essentially title but an observation I’ve been thinking about this for years but the aviators of Air Realistic Battles as soon as they spawn on a runway with any aircraft with an afterburner they just put the throttle to above max an scream down the runways at the start of every match.

While sure this means you’re in the air faster & closer to ever a position of combat or the first to a bombing point yet with some aircraft by the time you’ve gotten up to speed from spawn you’ve wasted nearly four minutes fuel.

Now AB’ing as soon as you spawn has imo merit when in say ASB with contested airspace above a runway or late match ARB in which you need to get airborne quickly yet at the very start of an ARB match it does seem a bit pointless imo.

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At least in my case, that amount of fuel being lost helps. I usually use after burner to take off and get up to speed then cut back to 100%. Only jets i keep afterburner on for most of a match are the f4s when i want to do high alt aim7s.

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Get to speed fast, after which you can reduce AB to 1st/2nd stage to maintain speed and not guzzle down your fuel and using full AB only when you need it … fuel management is fundamental in jets, their performance on high or low fuel is very far apart. People should manage their fuel in a way that you always have barely enough each match… if you have too much, then its a waste of performance. If you, as a person, have most success taking 45 minutes/max fuel and stand on max burner most of the game - that’s fine. Others take less fuel and are more conservative in using it so they have an edge over the opponents at the match start who will be higher on fuel (maneuverability, acceleration) … with a trade off that they may not have enough staying power if they need that

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Get to field fast, get a kill or 2. Die.

Repeat.

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Average WT mindset, how does one improve from that?

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Why even try?

Most people do it.
If you take it slow, your team will be one player less in the first confrontation. Lanchesters law suggests that this will lead to a massive disadvantage later on.

You taking it slow is likely toncause your team problems.
So as long as not everybody is taking it slow this is not a good tactic at all.

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This isn’t a math exercise where every person is of equal strength. If you’re somewhat decent and using your brain you can kill several enemies without getting in any danger… Rushing in quickly and killing 1-2 and already knowing you will get swarmed and die isn’t a good strategy. Most of those people who play like that die with 0 or 1 kill. The only time rushing in works in WT is when you are either;

  1. In a squad of competent players so you can cover each other
  2. In a plane which happens to be much faster than anyone else in the lobby so you can take some shots and gtfo
  3. Coming in early from an unexpected angle (may work, sometimes)

When you come in a little (and really, I’m not talking about flying to the edge of the map or anything) later than your team, you can often easily pick off several people.

Rushing in, while can be fun, is rarely a good idea.

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Actually the model works even if not everyone is at equal strength. If there is a normal distribution in skill the result remains the same.

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Community firstly needs to figure out how to improve in order to not crash immediately after a takeoff.

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  1. Burning fuel on purpose to lighten the plane.

ARB matches usually go around 10 min, and ~2 min of fuel is enough to RTB and rearm if needed, so if you’re carrying 43 min of fuel or something, it’s helpful to cut it down and save weight. Weight makes a big difference for some planes.

  1. To get into position early.

If you plan on doing something other than charging at the furball, you need to be somewhere that the enemy isn’t looking for you, especially when you get into BRs where PD radar will detect you 30km away if it’s pointed in your direaction. It’s often possible to rush out to the flank or above where the radar is pointed, but you have to do it ASAP so th enemy doesn’t have time to get close and see you taking off.

  1. To build speed.

Many planes rely on speed as a defense, but accelerate slowly. The F-111 and F-105 are good example as they both rely on staying supersonic to keep fighters off them, but take minutes to reach that speed. Even if a fighter has an altitude advantage, it will have difficulty diving, turning to follow, and then holding it’s speed over Mach 1, so if a bomber can exceed that spped before reaching enemy fighters it’s significantly more survivable. If you don’t use afterburners you won’t be going anything close to a safe speed.

  1. To reach bases before anyone else on your team.

I’m not saying I like this reason, but Gaijin doesn’t put enough bases into the game, and if you are ½ second behind your teammates you run a good risk of eating a repair bill with no income at all to balance it. Many planes in the game are either designed as bombers, or they fit poorly in the meta (like the F-4C and F-4E) so they need to bomb bases to grind (and you need to grind through them to reach top tier).The maps are too small for hitting ground targets to be an alternative, because that puts you low an slow right under the furball in a plane which already didn’t fit the meta.

The problem is compounded by the Air and Ground BRs being the same — many planes have their BR because of the air-to-ground capability while they really should be lower if they were acting as a fighter, so getting some income from bombing is required.

It would be great if my whole team could play meta fighters, but you can’t play a meta fighter and grind for the F-15 — you need to bring an F-4E and that means the only way to reliably grind is to bomb. Anything else is a bit random on whether you get engaged before you have a chance to do anything.

There aren’t enough bombing targets, so it’s a race vs your team.

———

Mostly it’s just not a big issue burning fuel. Most people playing jets have figured out their limits, and performance improves the closer you get to empty.

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Because I acutely manage my fuel and in fact often use afterburner liberally at the start to specifically BURN MORE to lighten the aircraft.

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While you shouldn’t “rush in”, you DO have to be a PART of that initial furball including killing the enemy or you are putting your team at a disadvantage by being AFK and AWOL in the meantime loitering somewhere useless. The other user had it exactly right regarding aggression.

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Because most ppl die before running out of gas.

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Because its how the Air RB is set up. The main and only goal is to kill the other team asap.
You are mostly, like 19 out of 20 times long dead even before you spent half of your minimum load of 15 minutes fuel.

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You nailed the gist of the game…
…Because that’s how the Air RB is set up. The main and only goal is to kill the other team as soon as possible…

  • the fuel load is used by Gaijin as a machine balancer, that’s why you play a map that lasts 25 minutes, but there are machines in the game that have fuel for 1.5 hours and are heavy because of the fuel and barely last 10 minutes in the game…
  • because most players can’t do anything other than fly to the center of the map near the ground and either shoot someone down or they are shut down and … press the next game button…
  • WEP is modeled very generally and also serves as a balance…
  • you compete not only with the other team, but also with your own team, who will bomb the enemy base first…

… there’s more to write about, but it won’t help…
So far I see some sense in the game of propellers and early jets … I watch the logs of the game with Top tiers … and somehow this level does not make sense to me …

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Prop planes are about climbing as high as possible and use Boom and Zoom to take out the enemy team. But again with minimum fuel, using WEP as much as possible. It’s a bit more complicated if you lose the energy of the plane, but at the end of the line its again the same gameplay. All the players will be in the center of the map.

At least the Attacker airplanes stand a chance here to bomb a few bases and maybe get the odd NPC tank or Light Bunker kill before beign taken out by a faster fighter aircraft. Most of the time one team completely dominates the other. Still it matters not, as the NPC vehicles have the same damage model as real player controlled vehicles and tanks but reward way less.

I prefer to grind planes in Ground RB, the rewards are way more and you don’t need to worry too much about other aircraft, also you are basically invisible to them as there are no markers. SPAA is also very much useless as players stand on the spawn and look at the sky. Easy kills.

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I think that the additional burning option aka WEP power should be reconfigured to be a researchable mod… preferably as one of the last ones to research…
In every game you can see how players use it without any thought…
This is how players would learn how to work with throttle settings,
climb angle and trading altitude for speed…
It might not be a bad idea to rework the check engine management, the destruction of the engine during overheating, etc…
But I understand that players prefer the simplest possible system and why Gaijin would go against the mainstream…

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You are honestly here suggesting that not only should players with a stock top tier jet start with barely any weaponry and flight performance compared to spaded aircraft, but they should also lose an additional 25-35% of their engine thrust by having no afterburner until they reach some T4 mod to unlock?

Lol.

As an experiment, go fly your top tier jet without ANY mods and do not use afterburner either. See how that goes ;D

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Considering the range of the battle rating, you come into the game with an unexplored machine and against you are premium machines, or fully researched machines of the upper limit of the battle rating, do you think it would be such a change?
Gaijin make no secret of promoting imbalance …
I thought of that as an option because nowadays it basically doesn’t matter if you try to follow the engine management and keep the temps within optimal limits or you play the whole afterburner game and the temps flash red and nothing happens at all…

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That’s such a bad idea. On some planes you lose out on 25% or more engine power, and you also wouldn’t be able to go supersonic in almost any plane.

What throttle settings? For jets there is nothing you can do to increase power. For props theres MEC, but that only does so much.

You’re advocating for making the stock grind 5x harder than it already is,.

Yes? Facing planes that outperform you suck, and making WEP researchable would make it so so much worse. It would cause almost all jets to not be supersonic when stock, and many props would be made worse.

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