As for airstrikes, you have standard bombings, but you also have more precise things, a carpet bombing. The areas which are going to be hit are lit up in red. Oh, and then there's the killsat, which is pretty awesome.
I suppose since I brought it up, I may as well expand a little on this one. In EDF 5, at least, Air Raiders' support strikes tend to come in four main targeting flavors: let's call them beacon, grenade, laser and zone.
-Grenade is what it says on the tin, you throw a smoke grenade and your Magical Offscreen Thunderfucker Team drops a pie plate of ruin in the general area of where the grenade landed.
-Beacons are fired from a gun, usually calling in more precise gunship fire on a target - high-damage single rounds, things with smaller AoE but better tracking, that sort of stuff. They also tend to use a timed reload/cooldown rather than requiring your team to get enough kills to reload them like your more, ah...
spectacular attacks need.
-Lasers are point-and-hold style targeting, for things like guided missiles and
motherfucking laser cannons from space. Sometimes they are things you can paint a target and let God sort the ashes, but most of them will constantly track where the laser is pointing, like a giant cat made of high explosives, letting you do crazy shit like whip a missile barrage around like fucking boomerangs, because that guy over there? That one thinking he's safe around that corner?
Fuck him and everything he loves.
-Zone attacks tend to call in
massive strikes from aircraft, from strafing runs all the way up to
bombers dropping 50 meter (or so) long walls of napalm like you're in bug Vietnam. Rather than firing a tracer or anything, when you start to deploy a Zone attack, the Air Raider will kneel on the spot while your camera pulls far, far back to give you a wide-angle view of the map, letting you move the Red Stripey Death Zone around until you have it
just right - said Zone is fully visible by the other players while you're manipulating it, and many of them are
fucking big. We're talking "fuck several city blocks" big, and God help you if it just
stops moving on top of you.
Air Raider is everyone's best frenemy. Love him.
Fear him.