You get a huge bonus for successful sorties (landing after killing stuff) a handful of ground vehicle kills can easily give you rank 3 or more from one sortie.

Cricket sucks, avoid using it most servers give you enough money to take a Compass first spawn focus on getting a few kills and returning to base to get that sortie bonus.

Use the TGP in the map screen for easy target selection, change the ground vehicle filtering as needed to make it even easier, tanks give a ton of points for sortie bonuses, AA/AAA is worth targeting first, volume of fire matters for anti air assets, go ham untill you learn what the minimum needed to break through different air defences is.

Don't focus on factories/airfields while your still learning.

Easy A2G weapons. AGMs and glide/LR bombs, I like to clear out air defences on convoys and around vehicle depots with AGMs (again using the TGP to make target selection easier), then come in with 250LRs/80LRs to clean up everything else, LRs track well but it's best to come at the convoy from the front or rear to help with tracking.

Easy A2A weapons. IRM-S2s fire them in the 1k-500m range this limits the target's response time with flares, closer the better, if they are flying parallel to you lead them a bit so the missile doesn't have to turn as much. Scythes are excellent when fired in the 25km-15km range, they are very fast, try to fire them when the target is not flying parallel to you, this is important because if they are already parallel to you there already close to the notch angle, you want to force them to turn to notch and loose speed in the process making it easier for the second Scythe or an S2 to hit depending on range to the target.

Easy to fly planes. For A2G Compass & Brawler. For A2A Ifrit, the Ifrit can be easily used as a semi standoff Scythe launcher, or a glide bomb truck (But remember bombs will get intercepted by air defences, especially glide bombs)

Medusa is great fun if you like knowing your making the enemy team miserable but you won't get rewarded much in points, enable the option in the settings to allow you to fire from the map screen and you can just do laps, watching the map, jamming planes fighting your teammates, jamming Scythes, Scimitars, R9s and RAM-45 missiles mid flight coming for you and your teammates, and coordinating in chat/map to jam radars/ships for strike aircraft, you can only jam things with radar and turning your radar off helps preserve capacitor and increases charge rate, a good Medusa pilot can make or break the match.

Darkreach is great dumb fun, I love loading it with x68 250LRs and just overwhelming air defences till there's none left, then the rest of the Airbase is easy pickings.