Until recently I bought the idea that the stealth was confined to the roles suggested here. As in another thread about this I will tell what I have found. I noticed that the stealth fighter has perhaps the highest defense rating, possibly excpeting the F15, which I believe the US has.
The role intended is to thin out enemy interceptors. To do this you fly as much into the heart of enemy territory as you can. In my case about a third of the time an interceptor will intercept. I never lost a stealth fighter this way (but did to flak when over cities). I will however mention that I was going up against prop fighters, but whether I had any jet fighter interceptors before I quit I'm not so sure. At first I'm thinking that the only way they didn't get shot down was because the prop fighter is maybe so much less effective than the jet fighter, but if you saw how many stealth bombers I had shot down by prop planes, then you would expect, perhaps wrongly, that the stealth fighters would handle jets.
Also, one small problem, over an extended period of time would be that you run out of targets to bombard in trying to draw out interceptors. This can occur because it's far better to bomb tiles without AA in them, so cities are generally out of the question as targets.
All I can tell you is that prop fighters were shooting down my stealth bombers, but not my stealth fighters, and despite how the game may work, I can tell you that stealth fighter is a sucker compared to a stealth bomber in terms of intercepting and shooting down in real life. I suppose more work would have to be done to see for sure whether jet fighters would shoot them down or not.
Also something to consider, is that for Civ games that include experience for the planes in the game (I can't recall whether it's civ3 or civ 4 at the moment), I always build mine from airports for more experience starting out.
