Up to now it seems most of the AI talk has been about ground-attack or troop deployment missions and the troublesome problems that must be overcome for these missions to succeed. I'm going to tangent away from that and list a series of "real world" tactics that have proven useful to me in pure "air superiority" missions. Tellingly, most of these are WW2 vintage and concentrate on multiple fighters covering one another. I'd also like to hear about anyone elses experiences of "real tactic" use or any unique tactics of their own devising.
To begin, this overtly technical break-down of virtual dogfighting, which nonetheless is useful once you crawl through the maths:
http://www.sci.fi/~fta/acmintro.htmIn particular, the diving under an enemy's climb to force him to turn around, giving your plane time to bead him, is useful when using very-man planes, like Lightnings, against high-man planes, like Tau Barracudas.
This, the "thatch weave",
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thach_Weave has proven useful to me during the first head-on flypast of battles, as it stops your enemy being able to zero out one aircraft while giving you piles of shooting opportunities - I like to stagger the aircraft (say 4) at altitudes 4,5,6 and 7 left-to-right and then use cards to swing them all upwards - one of the things that always comes out of ww2 books is height is all, up to now, I don't think I've had a single fighter drop below alt4 and it hasn't done me any harm.
This
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luffberry I haven't had a chance to use yet, as I've only one Marauder, but I imagine it'd work well. Having said that, in AI, once a bomber is empty, screaming towards board edge seems like the best idea!
This I think, should be obvious to those who've read air combat history, but not everyone has; so:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finger-four a luftwaffe tactic that gives a group of fighters all around cover from each other. I've always used it, or a division of it (usually 2 planes) and I remember a distinct early point in most books about the Battle of Britain is that the RAF 3-triangle formation was eaten by the finger-four.
A more general tactic that has came out of this game for me is that even though pure fighter battles can get really mixed up (at times every plane on the board can be pointing different directions) the idea of wingmen still holds up, keeping a minimum of two planes following roughly the same moves within a +/-1Alt of each other seems a lot more effective than lone-wolfing, unless your the one hi-man plane on the board
Another tactic, especially with the Imperial Navy, is to launch all your A-2-A 'skystrike' missiles at the first instance, as once combat gets going you'll never be far enough away to use them effectively. The rules pretty much demand this, as they are "luxury" add-ons, not the weapons primary armament, whose ammo you ought to be more concerned with.
I can only speak from an Imperial perspective, though I hope to get a nice chaos wing soon (and an excuse to build a cool land-aircraft carrier from Double Eagle!) which, just looking at the rule book, demands a swarm of helltalons scaring the enemy while a hellblade sneaks in for the kill.
Anyone else got other thoughts?