TAW_Blaze

Because it's paradox. It would be ludicrous to tell him how well he did if the opponent has the fighter pilot skills of a cat. Not that I'm very good when it comes to comforting people. :D I didn't word my first post the way I did because I wanted to make him feel bad, I did it because I wanted to highlight how ridiculous the AI behaviour is. They get taken out by shots that would not even bother a player, and they forget to fire from winning positions against recomitting bandit around 6-8 miles and just turn around trying to defend. And that's just the ones that stick out the most. I also can't really understand how anyone, especially fighters, would want to stay offline. I can accept it, but I'll probably never understand it. Regardless though, my advice would help him against AI just as much. That is if he can see it, because behind those "unfriendly" bunch of letters, it is very good advice after all. So far it seems he doesn't want to.

Nothing stopped you from cranking to the side and creating a bigger time window for yourself. You could have taken the time to explain what the bigger picture was, but instead you took the stance of "I know it better anyway". I don't need a 3D perspective to understand what's going on, I can tell it just fine from the one available. I highly doubt you placed another airforce or a dense SAM zone on either side of their flanks just to cockblock yourself from making the fight better for yourself. FYI constructive criticism is a form of advice. Showing what you did wrong helps to understand what you need to work on, even if the solution isn't immediately given. It can point you towards asking the right questions and focusing on the right things. Don't worry though, with this attitude you'll never become a better fighter pilot.

Nothing was offered as advice? Ooooooooooooooooooookay then. /thread I shared a whole gameplan of what to do, went into the trouble to even explain why it's better and detailed how much of an edge it'll give you and in what manner. I also pointed out a dozen of things you did wrong and I even explained how it could've been done better in some cases. Fun fact, I've been on this forum for a while, and I've read a lot of threads, especially the ones about tactics, and not once I have ever seen one that went into as much detail about offseting as I gave you. Lots of guys tell you to split the enemy flights by cranking away from both, what they never talk about is how much time you're exactly buying. But I guess all I can get is a "screw you" for trying to help. Fantastic.

Actually not only they don't fight as a team, but they don't even really fight as individuals. Their fighting logic compared to a good player is so horrible they might aswell be target dummies. If you measure the success of your tactics by the wrong standards it'll develop a fighting style that'll result in a disaster once you go online. Fighting the AI is only good to learn your own systems, and even for that it's quite limited. Better go online straight up. I'm glad that he feels accomplished by killing 4 AI. I thought the point of this forum was to share knowledge and that's what I've been doing the vast majority of my posts. Only reason I'm a bit harsh is because I want him to snap out of this illusion that his tactics are good because they worked against AI. He might've done some things right but I'd much rather focus on showing him where he could have made much better decisions to create a much more favorable fight for himself. You need to be open-minded if you want to learn, even if that includes your "feel good" moments being crushed ever so often. I know it's tough, but that's how it works.

I think ED are secretly flying all AI planes. They have programmed the game so if anyone fires at them they will cause lag. :megalol:

Cool, and then what? These missiles will never kill them, they won't even bother them much. Since you're screaming at them so fast they might launch at long ranges and because you're flying straight into the missile until you reach your launch point those missiles might even arrive there and shoot your ass down. You can't just simply fly straight at enemy flights when they see you, it doesn't work. Forcing them to be defensive isn't enough, you have to pose as a sufficient threat to force them defensive enough. This equates to them giving up angles, turning cold, running away etc. If all they need to do is a couple of S turns to throw off your missile then you haven't really done shit.

Might've been at the start, but it was 3-5 km mostly later on. Regardless, 12-14 nm shots won't kill players whether you're at 8 km or 4. Oh but you were. It's hard to tell azimuth based on this view but it looks like about 20-40 deg. You flew straight into a spot where you basically bracket yourself to some extent whether you accept this or not. The point is you won't have enough space or time to turn and run and then fight again because by the time you'd by trying to recommit some elements of the flights will be close enough to deny you the opportunity. Btw. flying M1.8 straight into 2 groups of bandits with virtually no crank is a real good way to get yourself killed. They could afford a missile or two from long range from either side that might reach you before you arrive at your engagement point. I did a bit of basic trigonometry on a paper to see how things behave when u have 2 groups with 60 deg separation aprroaching both at ~ 40 miles, assumed 600 kts speed for everyone. If you crank properly you can possibly create more than 10 minutes of a time window before the other group can even come near you. Obviously fighting back will reduce the effect but people seriously underestimate the power of picking your fights properly. Right now the numbers on the sheet say I have nearly 20 minutes before second flight will be closing in on me (counted from the point I can already fight the first group!) because the closure of the flight in the back is about one third or a quarter of the one I'm planning to fight first. Fighting the first group would probably reduce this to ~ 15 or 10 but even that is a hell of a lot of time. Quite enough to beat the first group if you ask me. Also not a negligible circumstance is that doing what I described will severely drain their fuel and also consume a lot of time so any help on the way towards you will probably have a higher chance of being useful. Considering a 1v4 the situation can't really get much worse than it already is so the enemies getting help (provided from predictable directions, if they suddenly surround you out of nowhere then you're ****ed anyway) it doesn't matter much. About the only time you should rush in like that is when you don't have much fuel left but you have to fight regardless. If you wanna keep telling me that your tactics were good because they worked against AI then be my guest. I'm just trying to help here, but if you don't want it then you won't have to ask twice. Splitting the fight into a 1v2 where your bandits get help after some minutes is a way better choice than to rush head straight into all 4.

1) Title says 2v4. Wingman doesn't even appear on the scene until all bandits are dead. :megalol: 2) Try that against players. First thing you'll notice that they'll reliably dodge shots fired at 6nm instad of getting killed by 12-14 nm shots from low altitude. Second thing you'll notice they won't give you the courtesy of sitting within your azimuth limits. Hey guys, let's make sure he can monitor us and fire at us all at once without moving a finger! Third thing you will notice is them firing everything at your ****ing face when they got all the cards against you instead of turning cold with no shot as seen by the 3rd artificial retard. lmao Other crucial mistake: you just bracketed yourself with their flights. Your gameplan is all well and good if you delete all of their planes in one go. Problem is that's impossible against any half competent group of guys. They only need a mile or two ladder formation and the guy in trail will never go down with the current missile performance. Better approach would be to offset one side and create as much time as possible between engagements. If you crank one side you basically create a temporal 1v2 instead of fighting all 4 at once. If the close flight is cocky and they want to take you then you have a really good chance at killing them before the others arrive.

Nothing, you can miss your missiles from bigger ranges. This is why many of us care more about guidance issues getting attention instead of ranges. Having range is all well and good but guidance is far more important. Reducing range will only downscale engagements, ****ing up the guidance will mess with meta tactics and the outcome of various situations in a manner that makes no sense. That's the real problem. If you got a royal flush you shouldn't lose to a guy because the wind blew your cards into the trash.

Well this pretty much confirms what I said. :) Flying around M2 also creates other problems that are really hard to deal with. The environment is already dynamic enough with quite high closures even if you fly at normal speeds. For instance in DCS if you have a lot of guys coming at you with all their ECM on popping up at 25nm will leave you with little time to react, and if the other guy is doing the exact same thing then he'll be in launch range within a couple seconds. It also requires you to know the target's position from a decently long range with a long enough timeframe for you to accelerate up to M2. In a 15 that could take minutes, even if you already have the altitude. IRL and also in the sim the most common thing is that pilots accelerate to a more efficient point, M1.3 or so, which takes a lot less time and fuel while still benefiting them quite a lot. Not to mention screaming towards a guy from a long range will probably alert them of your intentions. :D Spot on.

I remember the first time I merged a Mirage and thought it was gonna be easy. About 10 seconds later I went pure WTF. It flew circles around me :megalol:

In word-to-word combat (see what I did there? :) ) it does, but in reality it doesn't. Most commonly you don't want to be screaming at such high speed, and even when you do, you can't afford to. Simply put it takes too much resources to get there and the benefit is marginal. If you do this tactic, you have 1 or 2 attacks at maximum per plane before you're out of fuel, and bear in mind that once you have reached this speed you MUST attack or else the resource is merely wasted. If you have a rotating CAP of normal flights they can happily circle around for all-eternity compared to that.. On top of all that, I seriously doubt there's any record of missiles being fired above M1.5 in combat scenario*. Training or testing, maybe, but not actual combat. It's even rare in the ****ing sim where we all know how careless everyone is! What is a hell of a lot better capability instead, is the ability to accelerate from cruise speed to slightly above transsonic region. For instance to go from M0.7 to M1.4 within the least amount of time and with the least amount of resources wasted. This will enable the planes to maintain their position and fulfill their objective while still having the option to pose as a very deadly threat more than just 1 or 2 times, at any given time. EDIT: *Here I meant from aircraft that are not considered to operate in normal conditions when flown at M2 or above, i.e. MiG-25 and MiG-31 excluded. I'm sure they have fired missiles well above M2 from those planes.

TDC, radar elavation and TWS / radar on/off should be at the most comfy spots, these are the things that you use all day. Being able to cycle radar modes is also important, i.e. bore, vertical, normal BVR, and you can have a nav to reset everything. TWS target reset is also a handy thing, and ofc having CMs not on your keyboard can help a bit. I'm gonna quote myself from another thread to link a few sources that are worth to read:

Yeah that's kinda what I meant but poor wording. But if they aren't stupid and they crank too then it is indeed halved! :megalol: It also makes the other guy's missiles fly longer paths (not only because of reduced closure, but different direction of flight) which is super obvious but I didn't mention either. Especially important in case of missiles that can't always be immediately spotted on launch like the slammer or ETs. You might presume they're there and you might also guess when they were launched but you don't always know for sure. This gives you an even more significantly higher reaction time to whatever the hell is happening. Indeed. What's kind of missing from my posts though, is that pretty much all default advice I give relate to normal 1v1 setups, assuming both guys see each other. This is the absolute bread and butter of everything and once you're good at this you can adapt to whatever else is happening. I know you know this, but just putting it out there for the others to see, might not be so obvious to them. :D

Who said you need to fire from the crank? :) Cranking before the shot gives you more time to react in case something happens, because it reduces your closure. It also reduces the angles you have to turn in case you have to ditch the fight. Think about it if you crank at 60 degrees your closure speed to the target is halved (cos(60) = 0.5)). If you wanna fire you can always leave the crank if your fight is set up correctly you'll always have time for that. Otherwise you just sit in your crank and have a much higher chance of survival because of the geometry.

I'm fairly convinced that people like Pierre Sprey are just well paid to come up with their so called bullshit expertise with totally ludicrous claims by someone who benefits from it. It's all politics. Plus there's no way such highly educated people can be that braindead.

Both. First of all I'll be the first guy to tell you that all moves can and will work, but only if used right. I can pretend to fly like a retard and dupe people into making mistakes. But the important part is that first you must understand the basics. Firing a 2nd missile can give you an edge but not if both of them are ludicrously far away. If you're firing outside 10 miles below 25kft that's basically a defensive shot and there's no point to fire 2 there. If you're confident you're not alone I'll go as far as saying that there's no point in firing defensive shots on a MP scenario. If you don't know if you have support or not, it's a different story. Skimping on defensive shots in a 1v1 will lead to being abused into a shit position for the most part. The other part that you're doing wrong is not cranking before firing. Or atleast I assume you don't because you didn't explicitly say it, and most of the people who do this don't. Flying straight at things is the quickest way to get your ass kicked. But you should really watch some of your own tacviews, if you really did you wouldn't be complaining about how all your missiles missed because you would've noticed a trend of them running out of energy before they got halfway to the target. :) Other than this your post was pretty vague so there isn't much to say.

Oh but you are. :) The first thing you're doing utterly wrong is firing at 20 nm. The second is firing another after 4 seconds. This basically means you wasted at least 1/4 of your payload, or far more if you're not a fool flying around with 8 slammers. If you do this you might aswell throw apples like you say, because you'll be back to base before you got to 10 miles of a guy. You know people dodge slammers from within 5 miles right? :D Because a) they don't know how to fly there and b) there's no point in flying there. Back in old days everyone ran around at 40kft.

Fly any multiplayer event. Fuel is a far more important resource than weapons.

Welcome! I recommend flying MP as soon as you can, fighting AI will only develop bad habits. There are a bunch of threads on the forum that will help you better understand the basics of fighting, tactics, and some details of avionic usage. I'll link a few that are definitely worth the read: http://forums.eagle.ru/showthread.php?t=124439 http://forums.eagle.ru/showthread.php?t=120790 http://forums.eagle.ru/showthread.php?t=132872 http://forums.eagle.ru/showthread.php?t=100117 If you want more you can always go to search > advanced search > search by title and then try BVR or some other terms that you're curious about. Oh and by the way don't be shy on TS, if you want to know something ask away!

When trying to learn you should push yourself rather than play it safe. Try something totally ridiculous and then see if it works or not. The tough part here is that you probably don't really know what should work and if it didn't then how you should adapt. I'll try to give a few pointers here but honestly this is something you have to figure out for yourself. - Don't fire from Rmax. Almost no chance of ever hitting, considered a waste even for a defensive shot. - Focus on your plan. Don't let the opponent freak you out by throwing useless missiles in your face, they aren't a threat. If I had a dollar for every time I made someone turn around with 0 pk launches I would be rich as ****. I even had a few where I had no missiles whatsoever but I still made the guy turn around multiple (!) times. The only way to counter these troll launches is by having a very strong presence of mind and SA. Most people have neither. - Whenever someone fires at you first you have to find out where he's attacking from. If it looks too close or there's no information you should go with whatever your gut is telling you. If you're on the defensive and there's no indication that the threat is either dead or given up on you it's best to assume he's chasing you with full burners. I kid you not this is what 90% of the people do on the server. They will chase you and they won't care if the entire airforce is targeting their ass. If you're confident that he should be far enough from you to reengage then you probably should. Otherwise get the **** out of there. - I'll simplify this to oblivion but basically your fight plan should come down to 2 things. Energy and closure. Relative energy within a given fight is often irreversible because if the guy has it over you it's a low chance he'll just sit pretty while you climb above him. That said usually you should try your best to minimize energy deficit in any given fight before the shooting starts. If you have the advantage you should aim to keep it. Flying in contrails is a matter of confidence / SA. If you don't have control of the airspace it's probably not a good idea. Closure you can control better. You do this by cranking. Generally you never want to fly directly towards a guy who can fire something at you. Flying straight at him will give his missiles the highest closure and the least amount of time for you to react to anything that happens. Obviously flying straight at the guy or doing an intercept course will likely give your missile the best chances too. You want to balance this out by turning towards him when you shoot and cranking the rest of the flight. If your range is closing down you might have to completely turn around to outrun his shot or try to defeat it's guidance. Forget about the "wat do" thinking and get your mind to think about these things. If you flew against a guy and he kicked your ass you should be thinking how the hell you can make it harder for his missile to reach you while yours still has a chance to kill. Flying anywhere below 200 ping is usually acceptable so don't mind having shit pings.

You're confusing WVR and BVR here. Most documentary to be found is about WVR fights and BFM brawls where being lower usually means you're harder to spot, like you said, but it also means you can minimize G load by using pitchbacks or other nose high maneuvers if appropriate. You also can't take away the fact that even in aircraft with close to nonexistant canopy vision obstruction it's still much harder to spot things below your level than above. On the other hand if you're higher than the bad guy you'll be pretty much forced to pull nose low maneuvers where radial G is not much of a friend in terms of keeping your consciousness. This makes you quite predictable and that's no good especially when it's tougher for you to keep track of the other guy than vica versa. If your merge plan is to do a hard sliceback or split S into the bandit and he sees it coming it's almost guaranteed he'll do something where you lose him. If you're doing a split S he could also pull up into you and come back down and you'll be in a tough energetic situation because a) you started slower due to nose low merge plan b) because you probably wasted a lot of energy executing your nose low plan. Some of that also applies in the sim but to a lesser extent because G forces don't affect us anywhere as much as in real. In BVR you want to have energetic superiority in pretty much every case with the exceptions being an ambush or baiting for friends. There might be other restricting factors that force you to fly low but that's about it.

Observing what the other guys do in the hopes of learning something is tricky. Most often they will do things they themselves don't really understand. You have to be careful in that, just because you did something and it didn't work, it doesn't necessarily mean it's bad. Don't forget this works the other way around too. You can do something horribly idiotic and still get away with it. Obviously the start is rough but later on you'll be able to better understand what happened either after watching tacview or throughout the flight itself. For as long as you aren't sure, you should definitely ask others to review your acmi and see what their opinion is.

Well they could fly HoJ in that case, but also notch is not very effective when you have ECM on. I don't recall how exactly it works in game because I haven't been flying much but it's not bad practice to do it. In case you're engaged with someone and he has support incoming but not quite close enough you could leave the ECM on to deny them information.

Define "not sure". Generally in this scenario you should have an idea of what his bearing and altitude should be. That doesn't mean he'll be there but if you have a lot of experience he'll often be close to where you think. AAQ modes work only inside 10nm. In the situation you described you should be in RWS. Reduce azimuth to +-30 deg if you're confident you have a good idea about his bearing from you. Use MPRF. Antenna elevation is the other crucial thing. People tend to fly low so on a server it's mostly favorable to look low first (albeit not always). If you think he's inside 10 but no idea where he is exactly you should still use RWS. If you have a decent idea of where he should be you can start screwing around with vertical or boresight. The latter are best when you have visual idea of their location. With the silly magical jammers we have atm the rule of thumb is whether you want to be sneaky ninja or not. If you don't care about broadcasting your presence to the enemy then you should be jamming because it'll deny them information. If you want to be a ninja then better not use it. It's also recommended to turn it off when fighting against radar guided missiles.