Fighting against the traffic, tips?

[Simpledude42]

Hello last I played this game about 1-1.5 years ago and when I came back about 1 month ago I saw how many chances were made.
One of them is the insane air traffic and the gatekeeping of craft/weapons over score goals that unlock important research contacts.
Can someone give me tips on what I can do to well... actually get something rolling ASAP or something along those lines?

My current gameplay experience on the new version over 6 or so campaigns on fair was the first 3-4 months, many missions with good score growth then I get my ass handed by traffic with low as 2-3k drops mostly from what I have seen by necro pirates/bandit blimps that decide to do loops around the world, plus additional nuisances such as police and raiders. And after 3-4 months of this, I give up because the enemy starts to scale faster than me.

I barely get even in a month and it's driving me insane, with a 100% mission completion rate...

[Nalca]

Shoot down every flying thing you can down, except civilian and govt ship (Or eat the malus for doing that).
Especially the ratmens (Very slow craft, but stay for a long time one the map).

Of course, you need an armed craft (Aircar, Daredevil, or even land craft like the convoy or the battle cab !) for that, a weapon AND ammo (Most likely, 14mm, but LMG or HMG work against ratmens). So you need to plan for that.
Don't forget brainers, cause they help you get new shinny weapons, and also give you score (And money).

Also, try to unlock missions as soon as possible. More missions = more opportunity for loot / score.

[zombieguy223]

Shoot down every flying thing you can down, except civilian and govt ship (Or eat the malus for doing that).

I would like to interject that shooting down civilian craft does not lose you any score (I believe the lore reason is that they don't have good enough communications to tell people that you shot them down). You only lose score by killing the civilians on the ground and by capturing civilians that you have not researched yet.