Allied Harbinger feature

Name: Harbinger
Side: Allies
ERA: Red Alert 3
Base Asset: EA (rigged by Gunship_Mark_II)

The Allied Harbinger is a fixed-wing ground-attack and close air support gunship, that is only available via a reinforcement support power.
This support power becomes available 5 minutes after placing a technology centre, and cost $5000 to use.

The Harbinger will fly in from the edge of the map, to any location that you place the support power decal, but be aware that the path of the Harbinger, on its way to the location, does not take it across enemy anti-air.

The Harbinger is armed with a chain gun that can hit both ground based and aerial targets, and 4 large howitzers (a pair on each side).

The Harbinger excels as a ground-attack aircraft, doing massive damage to all ground based targets.
It is a lot less effective against aerial units, and is only really effective against targets with very low health.

The health of the Harbinger means that you can plan to take a number of hits, before you retreat. This allows you to obliterate enemy attacks, or to pummel static defences etc.
The fact that the Harbinger self-repairs plays into this tactic, since once you have retreated you will be able to recover any lost health (it should be noted that you do not need to be away from combat in order to recover health, it is just assumed that you have removed your gunship from harm so you can rebuild health).

The Harbinger is a stealth detector. Once again, this is mostly relevant when facing the allies.

Proton Cannon

The Proton cannon upgrade is available every time you get a Harbinger. It cost a lot of money ($2000!), and it slows down the rate of fire of your gunship, but it massively increases the damage it will deal (and slightly increases the damage radius).

The biggest addition however is that it adds a short EMP effect to the Harbingers howitzers. This means that you can disrupt any enemy ground unit or structure. For example you can damage and EMP enemy anti-air installations, reducing their effectiveness, or you could damage and EMP a bunch of anti-air enemy vehicles, again reducing their effectiveness.

It is recommended that you only purchase this expensive upgrade if you are sure that the EMP effect will be of benefit to you in battle. If the EMP effect is not needed, the standard howitzers do more than enough damage, and it should be noted that the upgrade is per individual Harbinger. If you lose a Harbinger, you lose the upgrade and will have to purchase it again in the future.

Flare upgrade

The aircraft flares upgrade is available at the Battle Lab. It provides anti-missile\rocket flares for both the C-130 and the Harbinger.

This of course reduces the number of hits from missiles every few seconds. Since the flare will either intercept a missile or not, you get the most value out of the flares, the stronger the damage of the missile being intercepted. This means that the most useful missile interception is from the MiG\Harrier.
Please note that the flares do not make you invulnerable to enemy missiles, take care not to go into areas that are too hot.

The Allies ironically have far more missile based attacks, so they end up being the side that this upgrade has the most effect on.

Please note that this does not protect against shell based anti-air attacks!

Counters

For the allies the Harriers (5 of them) is the preferred counter (nothing else does enough damage in a short space of time).

For the Soviets MIGS (5 of them) will easily take out the Harbinger without loss.
From a base defence perspective, the best deterrent by far is a triple Flak-squad\Battle bunker set-up. The EMP effect of the proton cannon does not effect this set-up, and it will deliver an insane amount of damage that the Harbinger cannot avoid. Indeed 2 full Flak-Bunker set-ups cost less then the Harbinger, and will easily destroy it before it can do significant damage.

If you can keep your Harbinger alive for 5 minutes or more, you will be able to add another Harbinger to the mix! The Harbinger is a time limited aircraft only, you can have as many on the battlefield as time and money allow for!