Definitely. Because of the nature of the flying, there are a lot of midairs. Bring a balsa plane, even "armored" with fiberglass, and you'll leave with a broken heart, a bag of bits, and a bad taste in your mouth for combat. What's fiberglass, but glass fibers that break like glass when you hit them. Strong, but not impact-resistant.

You don't want it to feel like building, because if you get serious about combat, you'll be building a lot of planes. You want a plane that's inexpensive, builds quickly, and is tough.

The most common design for combat planes is a reinforced foam wing, coroplast tail feathers, and some sort of creative bit of something for a fuselage. I've seen fuselages made from wiffle ball bats, PVC downspout, plastic fence posts, and coroplast. Some fuselages are even CNC machined from solid pieces of HDPE plastic, and some combat planes don't have fuselages at all.

If you're getting started out, definitely check out the SPAD stuff. While they don't hold up to today's armored foam wings, the coroplast wings are easy to mass-produce and hold up fine against other coroplast wings. You could start a club "one design" combat series.