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Post by landcrab on Jan 18, 2021 8:17:40 GMT -6
Let me start by stating that I have read the excellent beginners manual made by akosjaccik that is a pinned thread on this forum.
I have recently bought the game and have managed to survive to 1947 placing me firmly in carrier era.
Here is my problem - the carriers work for my enemy. Land based aviation is also decent once it decides to join the action..But mine own carriers seem to be just there to absorb enemy air attacks and never play deciding role in a battle. Most of the killing is still being done by BB and BC.
Now I am in 1947 and since 1921 my aircraft carriers have sunk couple of DD, KE and TRs. Not single BB, CV or any other ship was sunk. Yeah, I do get unknown ship torpedoed messages and so on, but when I check the after battle reports afterwords, going into individual ship logs - nope no damage...
So what gives - what am I doing wrong here?
If you had an aircraft carrier with following composition (please comment if you have better experience with different compositions) of aircraft and would launch a big strike on a target with known position - how would you split your package (TB split is smaller groups or one big one?) in order to maximize damage on enemy ships. Note that all aircraft are all up to date tech wise but that torpedo bomber has poor reliability.
As an example of a typical battle:
I just had a battle with 152 air planes present on my side and enemy perhaps double that number
(convoy battle with both fleets in strength).
My airplanes manged to sink 2 TR (done by dive bombers). One dud torpedo hit a CL. One 500 lb bomb hit a DD.
As usual I managed to launch only 1 wave of aircraft before sunset. '
On other hand waves upon waves of enemy airplanes hit my forces. Both of my larger CV were hit several times, with one of them being hit by 8 bombs and other one being torpedoed. One BB was torpedoed and had to fall out of the battle line. Escorting DDs and CLs were hit too.
What won my battle were BB and BC engaging and defeating their BB/BC force quickly before my BCs+destroyers hunted down their carriers when night fell. My 152 aircraft were expensive sidekicks as many times before.
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Post by nimrod on Jan 18, 2021 9:39:17 GMT -6
I'm going to repeat a little that akosjaccik wrote and yes it is an excellent guide.
Make sure you select your target type - CV, BB, TR or any. Any is the default and will garner a number of attacks on DD and smaller ships which are tougher to hit, but less deadly against your AC. Elite pilot training. This is unconfirmed by me, but it seems to encourage your pilots to tackle more heavily defended targets. At least they don't attack the first ship they come across and look around a bit before attacking. In the 40's and later, I would up your DB contingent at the expense of the TB or just go all fighter. Under 1000 lb bombs don't seem to do much against modern BC and BB; and in the mid 40's TBs have issues penetrating strong AA defenses. To repeat the TBs seem to attack DD, CL and TR if everything is kept at default in the mid 40's and later. In my experience, BC's and BB's tend to need multiple 1000 lb bombs to sink or become seating ducks unless a magazine is hit. I tend to have units of 20 AC and then adjust down as needed in the airstrike menu; non-20 AC units tend to be fighters that are kept strictly for CAP... Well, unless I desperately need a few bombs on a crippled ship and night is falling or similar situation. I also tend to do un-coordinated strikes. They seem to wear down the enemy CAP while also causing additional disruption to enemy ships - as they maneuver to evade attack and it allows me to get better positioning and or delay the launching of their airstrikes. If I'm in large CV battles, I tend to split my carriers into two strikes - 50% will be un-coordinanted and 50% will be coordinated. Biggest issue I have is getting my strike into the enemy formation - i.e. seeing and attacking the ships. Smaller strikes seem to launch faster. Additionally coordinated strikes take longer to get airborne, so my small un-coordinated strikes really are to pin the enemy down for a surface and air engagement. Good luck and let us know how your next battle goes. |
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Post by landcrab on Jan 18, 2021 11:11:42 GMT -6
I'm going to repeat a little that akosjaccik wrote and yes it is an excellent guide.
Make sure you select your target type - CV, BB, TR or any. Any is the default and will garner a number of attacks on DD and smaller ships which are tougher to hit, but less deadly against your AC. Elite pilot training. This is unconfirmed by me, but it seems to encourage your pilots to tackle more heavily defended targets. At least they don't attack the first ship they come across and look around a bit before attacking.
I did not wrote it in the original post but I do actually have preferred target type selected almost always (sometimes I forget). Also elite pilot training doctrine is turned on per default.
Now, I did couple of fleet exercise (one CV and one BB with 4 floatplanes for scoting on friendly side against one empty CV, CA and 2 CL on enemy side) to see whether it is a point in splitting up torpedo or dive bombers in smaller groups instead of two large sqd and it appears to be no observable difference. Also CV on and off did not really matter. The only thing which seems to happen is that all ships get attacked evenly (and misidentified routinely) and the older slow CA (23 knots from around 1911) is the one which always gets damaged.
Two things with above text - the enemy group consisted of 2CL , 1 CA and 1 CV. What KE did my aircraft bomb? No designs of mine have only 12 light AA guns?
17 09:01 5 TB He 321 from CV Graf Zeppelin torpedo bomb enemy KE
17 09:01 CL, CL, CA, KE, CL, fire HAA at attacking aircraft!
17 09:01 Combined AA factor: 56
17 09:01 HAA: No aircaft hit!
17 09:01 MAA: No medium AA guns available!
17 09:01 KE fires 12 light AA guns at attacking aircraft!
17 09:01 LAA: No aircaft hit!
The second detail is while log reportes 4 bomb hit and so do the post-battle air info, in reality only 3 bombs hit. Misinformation about bomb hits is one thing I knew about but not about fake info about ships attacked.
I did switch to see how AI operates my aircraft and it attacks in small groups up to 5 aircraft most often - I managed to launch 1 - 2 attack waves while I was hit 8 times when switching side. When I played the oposition the CV was consistently attacked and suffered a torpedo hit while a CA got hit 3 times with bombs and CL once.
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Post by rodentnavy on Jan 18, 2021 12:04:54 GMT -6
Okay first off do not beat yourself up. I think learning carrier ops is the most most difficult part of this game. As you accrue more battle experience and play more campaigns you will get better at judging what they can and cannot do in a given period. As Old Pop noted mission killing enemy ships can be worth it especially when laming their vessels allows yours to close or escape depending on need.
Launching lots of small attacks works in the early era of carrier warfare as CAPs suck and anti-aircraft might batteries tend to range from weak to absent. However if you launch entire squadrons you will find they divide into waves of 5 or fewer to make their attack runs.
My tendency is for a load of roughly 40% torpedo bombers, 20% dive bombers and 40% fighters on fleet carriers, remember both TB and fighters can carry bombs if the circumstances present themselves such as going for a convoy without aircover. Save your torpedoes for the good stuff as stocks are limited. Dive bombers are good, killing off odd merchantmen and pesky destroyers is useful but they can also smash battleships and burn aircraft carriers. They do seem to die a lot more than other types though.
In the later part of the game big coordinated strikes seem to be the key, you can overwhelm those defences with numbers arriving in a small time window.
On light carriers I tend to have a single squadron of a full deck load of TBs and make up the rest with fighters, though you might prefer other loadouts as different arrangements work under different circumstances.
In time you will work out what works for you and your play style and the circumstances you tend to find yourself in.
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Post by nimrod on Jan 18, 2021 14:05:29 GMT -6
Now, I did couple of fleet exercise (one CV and one BB with 4 floatplanes for scoting on friendly side against one empty CV, CA and 2 CL on enemy side) to see whether it is a point in splitting up torpedo or dive bombers in smaller groups instead of two large sqd and it appears to be no observable difference. Also CV on and off did not really matter. The only thing which seems to happen is that all ships get attacked evenly (and misidentified routinely) and the older slow CA (23 knots from around 1911) is the one which always gets damaged.
The second detail is while log reportes 4 bomb hit and so do the post-battle air info, in reality only 3 bombs hit. Misinformation about bomb hits is one thing I knew about but not about fake info about ships attacked.
I did switch to see how AI operates my aircraft and it attacks in small groups up to 5 aircraft most often - I managed to launch 1 - 2 attack waves while I was hit 8 times when switching side. When I played the oposition the CV was consistently attacked and suffered a torpedo hit while a CA got hit 3 times with bombs and CL once.
You tested - that is awesome!
Regarding the lack of difference in the large vs small attack wings. Did you notice how disruptive the 8 small attacks were to your formation? That disruption and pinning of a fleet to a location can be very valuable as you redirect your larger (coordinated) AC strikes in or your surface forces.
A lot of the time I will send a few float plane scouts or fighters with bombs out at the start of a battle if they find something interesting, their bomb runs disrupt the ships and I'll be able to launch everything against it while their air-operations are disrupted. Personal experience is that in larger CV battles (4+ CV's per side), I've seen my and the enemies first wave or two get totally decimated by CAP and anti-air fire, with the following waves making it through and launching successful strikes. Point being, with multiple CVs I think the dynamics change enough (multiple layers of CAP, larger defensive screens, etc) that multiple strikes rather than an alpha-strike seem to work out better. Again this is my experience and others have the opposite experiences due to fleet size, historical vs game resources and or other changes in game dynamics.
Yes ships are routinely misidentified - I've seen a sinking CVL be misidentified as a TR before. Veteran and Elite air-groups help but don't fully correct this, their is always a good chance of missidentification... Usually at the higher experiance levels, they won't go two classes off - i.e. a CL might be a CA or DD but it usually won't be reported as a KE or BC like the good / fair and poor ratings report.
Rodentnavy is correct - TB's are great early on. I find that they tend to putter-out around 1945 as their slower speeds relative to DB and Fighters tend to bring poor results with higher casualty rates. Also, larger ships tend to have torpedo protection; so rapid destruction of larger ships just doesn't seem to occur for me. I'm usually playing as Germany, Italy or Japan though with historical resources; so I'm often at a disadvantage to the larger nations (UK, USA) and have to focus on damaging enough of their ships to then have a free hand in sinking the heavily damaged ones that are out of formation.
Depending on country I'm playing as I might keep using TB's through the end game. However, as you are playing as Germany, I highly recommend getting rid of the TB and going Fighter Bomber and or FB / DB. As Germany you get bombtorpedo's automatically in 1944 which converts some bomb near misses into torpedo hits - since you should have that technology DB and Fighters are in my opinion the best.
If you were playing as Italy I would recommend a squadron of TB through the endgame due to their torpedo running patterns technology - Motobomba FFF technology in 1942. The Italian torps become pretty useful in attacking an enemy battle line or in a convoy attack mission. A discussion on some elements of unit load-out can be read at: nws-online.proboards.com/thread/5422/jabo-effectiveness
I wrote: "Useful really varies on your needs - what country you are playing as.
I tend to use a lot of fighter-bombers late game as they can do - CAP, Escort and Bombing missions. Early to mid game fighter bombers with up-to 350lbs bomb loads tend to not do much bombing in my play-throughs. The FB approach works for me with Italy, Germany and Russia, which are in enclosed seas and often are fighting off an enemies coast and have fairly limited budgets. I can provide what ever type of air support I need for a pretty good bang for my dollar. Additionally, Germany has a pretty good advantage with this style of play - the torpedobomb tech, which I believe converts some near bomb misses into submerged torp hits - same idea as diving shells.
DB's I believe are kings of accurate air attacks and use SAP or AP bombs; but they are a specialized one trick pony.
As Germany, Italy, Russia by the early to mid 1940's I tend to fill about 60-80% of my carrier capacity with fighter-bombers (varies on country, CV and CVL capabilities and where I'm fighting) and the rest with DB with maybe a smattering of TB. Land-based usage really varies on what territories I have and what I'm up-against.
I would imagine that USA or England can and should go with more specialized setups do the nature of fighting in the Pacific and large budgets.
P.S. I don't know if it is just me, but I think FB survive better attacking land based targets like airfields. I'm not sure if it is their speed advantage or if they are dumping bombs and fighting as fighters, but they seem to do just as good a job as the DBs and I seem to be able to launch more attacks with more AC at the end of a long days battle."
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