BF3 Jet Piloting - Tips?

Download ArmA 2 free, load up the editor, and practice flying helis and jets with keyboard and mouse. You could load some enemy aircraft and battle in the skys :D
 
I am absolutely useless in jets so i decided to give the old joystick a go.

Holy **** im a maverick. Seriously get a joystick its a different game.
 
RichIbizaSport said:
I recently became a master of both the jet and the chopper (excuse my ego)

I use an xbox controller for both. I only really started getting lots of kills in jets when I started to use the rudder.

Before the rudder - Following someone, they make a tiny movement left. To actually hit them with my machine gun I would have to rotate 90 to the left and then pull up to move my aimer left.

With the rudder - You stay level, move the rudder left very slighty and it moves your machine aim, like an actual gun you can move. Revelation!

Also use braking and sharp turn with rudder when getting chased. When flying I'll use 3rd person, but when attempting to shoot something it's always 1st person. I have max upgrades and I use:
Air radar - quite possibly the best upgrade, vital when dog fighting.
Flares - I find these better than the ECM jammer.
Land based missiles - 2 of these + a little machine gun fire will normally destroy a tank.
I don't use heatseeker at all in the jet, they don't reload fast enough compared to flares. Especially when you opponent is ducking and diving to avoid a lock.


As for the chopper, that does take a fair chunk more practice. Half my time was spent learning and judging how far you can lean forward without hitting the ground, that's done purely with practice. I fly 99% with 1st person, it's much easier to learn how far you can push it before smacking in to the floor. Once you get the hang of flying it's very easy to avoid missiles by hiding behind building/trees etc.
When you face an enemy helicopter always try and keep above it. As soon as I see one coming for me I'll jump straight on the ascend button. Use heatseekers but only fire when your fairly close as the flares will waste your missiles.
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This. I'm still nowhere near good against ground forces in jets but run a pretty mean tail with the cannon against other air foes. I hardly use heatseekers as they take too long to lock.

Chasing someone around shooting with cannon is just too fun!
 
I'm absolutely useless in a jet but am getting pretty handy in a helicopter and I only use mouse and KB. best thing I can say is whack the sensitivity up for the helicopters (using a standard 2 button MS optical atm so whatever the normal DPI is) and get used to it. I would also recommend NOT flying way up high trying to dogfight with the fighters. As soon as I unlock something other than heatseekers I'll be dropping the missiles. Maybe. It can be useful when squaring up against another chopper but really you shouldn't be way up saying to everyone with an AA missile and the Mobile AA 'OVER HERE! YOOHOO!!'

Keep it under 100 feet if you can, use the terrain and buildings to keep out of Line of sight as well. The game changes so much once you have a few decent unlocks. The Extinguisher is bloody brilliant for example. Instantly puts any helicopter over 50% health so as long as you don't take any more fire (or land and repair/get repaired if one of you is engineer) you can be back in the fight after hiding for a while. The only thing is don't be too low or you're making an RPG to the face an inviting proposition!

When a gunner lock on missiles need a longer range and are pretty slow and even then don't give a huge amount of damage. A frontal hit won't even disable a tank for example. Lock on with the missile, let it loose then switch instantly to cannon is the best bet. Zoom Optics is very useful, thermal optics not so much as you should be spotting and so should the pilot. In fact, EVERYONE should be spotting, THE WHOLE TEAM, ALL THE TIME! Tell the helicopters where the tanks are and they'll come save you! Probably.

Anyone unlocked the TV missiles yet? Are they 2142 style fully guided by the mouse (which is very annoying and fiddly IMO) or BF2 style click to make adjustments?


Also, thread title should be changed to piloting tips.

Come fly with me (lets fly, lets fly away!) one night. Add me on Origin, Tesslacoil and I'll take you for a ride!

And while I'm here, is Fraps still the best for making videos of gameplay sessions or can Afterburner do it for example?
 
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Edinho said:
I am absolutely useless in jets so i decided to give the old joystick a go.

Holy **** im a maverick. Seriously get a joystick its a different game.
Click to expand...


I do ok in the Jets & Choppers with mouse & keyboard, not amazing but it depends on who your up against!

Interested in trying a joystick after your comment, I have no idea about joysticks these days, I had a decent force feedback one years & years ago.

What should I be looking at now? Nothing to expensive though! ;)
 
I realised the other day that with a good few hours of flying under my belt my throttle on my joystick has been doing absolutely nothing! Spose it was just a placebo that i seemed to go slower while doing tight turns but i may have to rebind my speed keys to actual buttons if it doesn't work... Cyborg Evo

Also agree that heatseakers are not worth the effort, their range is crap and with stealth they take about a week and a half to lock on and by then you could have killed them 5 times over with the cannon.

Have just unlocked the missile pods but haven't played much recently (back into starcraft and got the new zelda) so haven't really tried them but i also suffer from failing every time i try and strafe the ground (damn lampposts) so hopefully these should improve that.
 
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