Air Superiority Openers

This guide focuses around opening with a single air superiority fighter, why it's bad and why you should just do something else.

Air Superiority Fighters

Air superiority fighter openers began to be popular very early in open beta. They were popular because of their amazing ability to wipe out all helicopters and all bombers with absolute ease.

But we don't live in that world anymore.

People still open with air superiority fighters and they shouldn't.

Air superiority fighters are intended to destroy other air superiority fighters and bombers.

My argument is this, you are better off getting the bomber than the fighter.

In the first a single air superiority fighter cannot do enough damage to stop a bomber from carrying out its task. Any early game bomber is going to be intended to hit a specific spot with a specific target and with a guarantee of doing a specific amount of damage.

Your opponent here is assuming that you will not stop your army and will just continue over a set area whether it be a single bridge that leads from your base or a road that is surrounded by impassable terrain.

Because of this your air superiority fighter will always shoot down the bomber only after it has caused the damage. Your opponent however has measured off the idea of losing this bomber in terms of gain. Now if a cluster bomb hits your entire army or napalm blocks your path you are losing far more than that 60-80 you shot down to stop it.

Instead a wiser path is to play aggressively. Air superiority fighters are DEFENSIVE units and can be acquired very quickly after you have gained position.

Make sure all or most of your beginning units can take a position on a map and deal damage to gain position.

It is far better to send a bomber off to try and pre-emptively napalm a position than to send out an air superiority fighter.

On Helicopters

Air superiority fighters are not a counter for helicopters.

Helicopters have VTOL (Vertical Take Off and Landing). This means as soon as an air superiority fighter shows up they can simply land their vehicle making the air superiority fighter opener pointless once again.

The opponent will still be able to get his infantry out of the helicopters and into position and nothing will have been done here.

Instead napalm or bomber might have been more effective here as napalming the area he was dropping to would have in the least preventing the infantry from gaining that position.

Alternatively your own helicopters with infantry could have fought their infantry with helicopters for that location.

Conclusion

Air superiority fighters are a great mid and late game unit for defending your units once they are in their proper position. They work very well in high numbers and once all AA is cleared out they can stun enemy tanks in position.

They are however a terrible early game option and ought to be avoided at all costs.

Instead set your mind to a goal, "which set of units will help me get to the middle of the map the fastest and win the opening encounter." In no such world is an air superiority fighter going to be an answer.

[troublmaker]

This was unfortunatelly written in a drastically different meta game. In the current meta game people like to rush with helos. I should note that groud based approaches are still very strong in the game.

[m o o m]

how about "defending against the bomber the enemy will bring to wipe your early-start helicopters" (if they are following your advice, that is ) ? usually I'd care more about securing my helicopters than about killing the enemy's.
also, making them land early does not sound too bad me... when people do this to me it sometimes foils the entire opening plan.

when i go to grab a deep position with airborne troops, I'd try to be well covered with multirole + interceptors aircraft, and I'd bring them *before* any enemy aircraft appears, too