The great thing about Warthunder is the level of depth it provides players both in-game and in each nation’s trees. The unfortunate by-product of this is that Warthunder is also extremely difficult to learn in general, but especially in Air RB. This in-depth guide will help soothe those jagged learning curves by providing pragmatic points of interest you can study to make to your piloting skills stronger, which should make getting a decent KDA and, subsequently, getting the planes you’d like to unlock, a little bit easier over time. One thing to remember is that, while this advice applies to all aspects of Warthunder’s aerial combat, the jet portion of the game becomes almost an entirely different beast, and not all advice listed here will apply to more modern aerial combat.
Feel free to read it all, or select the sections of this guide that you feel are most important to your study as a Warthunder player below:
- Understand the Core Styles of Aerial Combat
- Understand the Flight Characteristics of Your Plane
- Don’t Neglect Your Crew
- Fly “Bad” Planes
- Respect the Bombers
- Git Gud
Understand the Core Styles of Aerial Combat
An important thing to drill into your head as a Warthunder player is that this game is a simulator at its heart. While it doesn’t do everything perfectly, it does retain the flight characteristics of planes to an extremely accurate degree. Certain planes were built to engage in turn fights, while others make better energy fighters, and others still do neither very well and might opt to Boom n’ Zoom or play as a supportive bomber or ground striker.
Understanding the differences between these flight styles and where they apply to what planes and in what situations can make the difference between one good hour in Warthunder and one bad one. Let’s briefly cover them:
Turn-Fighting: When a pilot decides to turn-fight, they rely on their plane’s ability to outturn its opponent to get guns on target. This uses a great amount of energy and leaves fighters in vulnerable positions if they aren’t aware of their surroundings, which makes it a fighting style that benefits lightweight fighters with strong acceleration best.
Popular planes that are strongest when turn-fighting include the A6M “Zero” of the Japanese tree, the Spitfire lineup of the English tree, the Yak-3 Lineup of the Soviet tree, and the CW-21 of the Chinese tree.
Energy-Fighting: When a pilot decides to energy-fight, they rely on their greater energy state to outmaneuver their opponent before readjusting to get guns on target. Generally speaking, this is a far more advanced fighting style and requires a pilot who not only knows their plane but their opponent’s plane, as well.
Sometimes, this fighting style involves pulling a plane into a verticle spiral with an enemy tailing. The verticle spiral is a highly taxing maneuver, and if the plane that tails doesn’t have equal or greater energy retention in the verticle, it’ll stall out, making it an easy target for the leading pilot to fall back on.
Other times, energy-fighting involves turn-fighting in verticle loops instead of horizontal loops. This makes for fights that are akin to turn fights, but with the upper hand going to the plane that doesn’t bleed too much speed in the verticle.
The core principle to understand with energy fighting is that it should only be done in situations where you will end up with more energy than your opponent at the tail end of the maneuver in question. This can be due to your plane’s better flight characteristics or because you begin the fight with a greater potential or realized energy state. Either way, speed is key.
Popular Planes that are strongest when energy fighting include the BF 109 series of the German tree, the P-51 Series of the American tree, the Corsairs of the American/French tree, and, thanks to their incredible climb rate, certain Spitfires of the English tree.
Boom n’ Zoom: Unlike energy-fighting, boom n’ zooming (BnZing) is a relatively straightforward fighting style. When a pilot decides to Boom n’ Zoom, they are making use of their speed to approach an enemy, often from above, get shots on target, and then flee the scene.
For most players, BnZing is the first fighting style they are told to learn, and this is because, as long as you have the right plane for the job, it’s a difficult fighting style to mess up. Generally speaking, the fighting style follows this pattern in Air RB: Climb above your opponents, dive down on them to get shots on target, and fly up and away.
Thanks to your higher altitude, flying down onto your opponents generates a ton of speed (energy), which means flying up and away negates any chance of your enemies getting a shot on you while also retaining some of your altitude advantage.
It’s simple, it’s sweet, and it’s a relatively safe fighting style.
Popular planes that are strongest when BnZing include the P-51 Series of the American Tree, the P-47 series of the American/German tree, the BF 109 series of the German tree, and the J7W1 of the Japanese tree. It isn’t a coincidence that planes that are strong when energy fighting are also planes that are strong when boom n’ zooming.
Understand the Flight Characteristics of Your Plane
As you would have deduced from the recommended planes listed above, every plane has its own flight characteristics. At the heart of Warthunder is a simulator game, and the effort Gaijin has gone through to keep the planes’ flight characteristics realistic is such that you must fly your plane to its strengths or you’ll likely be left to J out of 99% of matches.
Luckily, understanding one plane’s general flight characteristics is, in the most basic of cases, as simple as understanding the core fighting styles of aerial combat, since flight characteristics often shake hands with fighting styles and vice versa (but not always!)
In the case of the very popular Spitfire series, the flight characteristics of most models are fairly straightforward: they have great energy retention in horizontal, outstanding 360-degree turn speeds (sub 17 seconds, in some cases!), and some of the best climb rates in the game relative to their battle rating.
But, of course, flight characteristics accompany all aspects of a plane, not just the positive. For all of the Spitfires’ strengths, they also include many weaknesses. For instance, the spitfire models often have poor flight performance at higher altitudes compared to many of its common enemies, such as the German BF 109. Additionally, they experience moderate control stiffening at higher dive speeds, making them poorly suited for Boom and Zooming, and they don’t retain a great amount of energy in a straight line, meaning enemy planes that are looking to energy-fight them can often dictate the terms of engagement.
This is why spitfires excel at lower battle ratings where players don’t often know how to exploit their weaknesses but appear to be much more “on par” with their opponents at higher battle ratings, where there are more experienced pilots.
Let’s look at a more complicated example in the G.55 Serie 1:
The G.55 sits at a 5.0 Air RB battle rating, which means it faces the strongest prop-based planes Warthunder has to offer. It features decent climb rates, decent speed in a straight line at all altitudes, decent turn rates, and phat armaments that can tear through anything.
A new player might make the assumption that these qualities make the G.55 Serie 1 a decent plane, and they’d absolutely be wrong about that. Being a jack of all trades makes a plane unable to defeat anything that has a specialization.
The G.55 cannot out-turn a spitfire. The G.55 cannot outrun a BF 109. The G.55 cannot beat a P-51 in an energy fight. The G.55 cannot out-bomb a ground-striker, and the G.55 cannot beat you in an arm-wrestling contest, so what can it do?
As stated, Warthunder is a simulator at its heart, and this means that understanding the more niche aspects of a plane is very important. In the case of the G.55, the most important aspect in this regard is the plane’s rip speed in a dive.
Thanks to its structural integrity, the G.55 can dive without ripping apart at speeds up to 840km/h. This one fact, along with its three nose-mounted armaments and two wing-mounted cannons, introduces an interesting playstyle that is ultra-reliable in a plane that would otherwise be outclassed by everything flying with it: Head-ons and Diving.
Head-ons are a straightforward tactic: two planes facing each other shoot at one another. With three nose-mounted weapons and high structural integrity, the G.55 excels at shrugging off the occasional cannon round while delivering nightmarishly accurate firepower in a straight line.
Diving as a means to shift into an energy fight with the G.55 is the kind of tactic that only exists when someone understands the flight characteristics of the plane to a nuanced degree. By diving away from an opponent that is willing to follow, the G.55 can obtain speeds that the following plane cannot. Either the following pilot chooses to disengage and shrug off their energy, leaving the G.55 with the opportunity to turn back up and get shots on target with superior energy, or they follow and shred their vehicle apart.
This is why understanding the flight characteristics of any plane is important. If you don’t, you’ll feel outclassed without knowing what you can do about it.
Don’t Neglect Your Crew
This one is simple, but often overlooked:
Newer players tend to forget (or simply don’t know) that you can upgrade your crew. G-tolerance, stamina, awareness, and even the ability to survive getting shot are all aspects of your crew that can be upgraded. Make sure to spend your crew upgrade points and make dogfighting just a little bit easier over time.
Fly “Bad” Planes
Spitfires, P-51s, and 109’s will yield the best results over time for the majority of pilots, of course. But flying out planes that are widely considered “bad” for their BR will give you the experience needed to understand why those aforementioned three planes are good in the first place.
The Zero is considered good by new players and bad by experienced players. It’s easy to read that Zeros are bad because they cannot keep pace with any of their competition, but it’s much harder to truly understand what that means and what that feels like without flying the plane out for yourself.
The FW-190s are considered decent boom n’ zoomers, and poor at everything else. Flying them out yourself will teach you that they are actually excellent mid-altitude fighters who are the best-in-class defensive fliers in the game thanks to their outstanding roll rates at low and high speeds. This is not an attribute you’d be able to cipher for yourself just by reading that they are generally sub-par on Reddit, but information you’d need to be exposed to first-hand.
If you read that a plane is bad, fly it out for yourself first to see if that’s true in the first place, but also to get a first-hand account as to why that might be the case.
Respect the Bombers
Bombers are generally considered a hindrance both from a design perspective and a gameplay perspective by players who don’t truly understand their role in Warthunder. Even experienced pilots with thousands of hours in-game will make the mistake of assuming that bombers are planes for selfish players who are looking to farm up Silver Lions and Research Points at the expense of their team’s capabilities.
While it’s true that bombers cannot dogfight with even the least-capable fighters in the game, the role they serve in-game keeps Warthunder varied from a macro-design perspective, while also acting as soft caps on the various kinds of planes flown out in a single match, resulting in much more interesting matches.
Look at it this way: A match with no bombers is a match where high-altitude fighters that can climb well, like the BF 109s, are the top dogs with no targets to meet them. As such, teams that often face 109s in these kinds of bomber-less matches will stop trying to match the 109s at their altitude altogether, and will instead opt for medium to low-altitude fighters altogether such as the LF spitfires or Yak-3s.
Following this logic, the 109s will be forced into medium to low-altitude fights, which inevitably brings every match into an unvaried dogfight fest where the medium to low-altitude fighters reign supreme 100% of the time.
Introducing bombers into this variable causes the 109s to serve a purpose at high altitudes, and gives their opponents a reason to fly up to their level: to protect their bombers. Bombers are a threat that cannot be ignored since they can end games on their own, and as such, flying an LF spitfire to 6,000 meters for the sake of punishing 109 pilots who tunnel vision on bombers is a reliable method of farming kills.
In this instance, pilots will begin flying out interceptors to sure up their anti-bomber capabilities, which makes the combat relationships between all of the planes on each team healthy: Interceptors beat bombers, bombers beat lightly armored (and armed) fighters, and lightly armored fighters beat interceptors, while ground strikers passively drain enemy tickets by attacking vehicles on the ground, giving low-altitude fighters a role of their own.
Additionally, flying out bombers can introduce you to weaknesses other planes possess. A tailing spitfire might be able to keep pace with a high-altitude bomber, but will be easily dispatched with 13mm ammunition often run on German bombers, for example. Inversely, interceptors that usually struggle against fighters that can out-run and out-turn them will have their strengths shown with their strong armament and air-spawn that lets them make easy work of bombers who don’t respect their position on the map.
Respect the bombers and they’ll teach you many secrets in Warthunder.
Git Gud
Getting good in Warthunder, like most nuanced games, is a matter of time over intensity. Keep yourself focused during sessions and pay attention to how enemy pilots (who are probably better than you) fly and you’ll slowly begin to acquire the knowledge and skills needed to perform at a rate that cannot be described as “sucky”.
It’s also important to remember that you aren’t losing matches over time due to “luck”. You aren’t unlucky, you’re just bad at the game (and that’s completely fine.) Take each loss in stride and always be on the lookout for the next aspect of your game you need to improve. With time, this mindset will yield more wins, more Silver Lions, and more Research Points.
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