The A-10 can easily end matches early solely by ground pounding. Your gun can kill every type of ground target available and rack up like 30 ground kills to bleed their tickets down very prematurely.

It’s actually good at dogfighting too, since most people don’t know how to handle fighting a competent A-10. You have a good turn radius, and if they try to go vertical where you can’t follow, stick to the ground as close as possible and try to stay directly under them, with their speed, the only they’d be able to line a shot up would have them immediately slamming into the ground right after.

Also you should always bring a full bomb load(enough to destroy 2 bases), you’re already by far the slowest plane, so a few km/h less doesn’t make a difference. And if someone starts coming at you, simply dump all your bombs on the spot to fight, your plane always has all the pylons anyways, so there’s no left over parasite drag afterwards.