carrier trained air units

[voelfgar]

Just converted my ship to a CVL, but I can't assign any air units because none are carrier trained. How do I get aircraft onto the CVL

[director]

You will have to add an air unit to the carrier. It will have to be built up from scratch. Once a unit is formed at an air base you cannot ever deploy it to a carrier, and I don't think you can deploy carrier units to a land base.

Please don't tell Pensacola Naval Air Station and the carrier pilots who flew from Henderson Field on Guadalcanal.

[voelfgar]

Thanks. Looks like if you let the game create the air units at the airbases, then they can't be carrier trained. but if you create the units, then you can add carrier trained.

[jwsmith26]

Aug 6, 2023 1:09:48 GMT -6 director said:

You will have to add an air unit to the carrier. It will have to be built up from scratch. Once a unit is formed at an air base you cannot ever deploy it to a carrier, and I don't think you can deploy carrier units to a land base.

Please don't tell Pensacola Naval Air Station and the carrier pilots who flew from Henderson Field on Guadalcanal.

director , I don't think that is quite accurate. You can create a carrier-trained squadron even if it is created at a land airbase or NAS. Once created, a carrier-trained squadron can be deployed to either a carrier or to a land air base. After a certain point you can develop carrier-trained squadrons even if you have no aircraft carrier in existence. My testing indicates that carrier-trained squadrons will gain experience faster if deployed to a carrier.

[director]

That would be very good news. The last time I tried moving air unit from carriers to a land base and vice versa was in RtW2, and I remember it not working. I have not tried it in RtW3.

[jwsmith26]

I believe it was working this way in RTW2. You must have tried it at some point when the ability to base carrier planes on land bases was temporarily broken. It's unfortunate that you learned this wrong lesson early on. Being able to create carrier-capable squadrons at shore bases makes preparing for the commissioning of a new carrier much easier as you can have some of the squadrons at least partially trained up when the carrier arrives.

[director]

Since I used an existing game, I did not run it ahead several months to see what the effects were. But I was able to delete the air group from a carrier, create a fighter squadron at the New York airbase (checking the 'carrier trained box' when I set it up), move the squadron to the carrier and then back to New York.

Your issue may be that, when I select the Change Role function, I can change the squadron's type but the Carrier Trained and Night Capable boxes are grayed out and cannot be selected. (My current game date is January of 1939).

So, when you form a new squadron on a carrier or an airbase, it is apparently always either carrier trained or not, and ever be converted.

In addition, if you form a new squadron on a carrier it will always be carrier trained, even if you do not check the Carrier Trained box.

If you have a unit at a land base that is not carrier trained, you cannot then move it to a carrier because it is not carrier trained and apparently cannot ever become so.

[voelfgar]

Aug 6, 2023 11:01:18 GMT -6 jwsmith26 said:

Aug 6, 2023 1:09:48 GMT -6 director said:

You will have to add an air unit to the carrier. It will have to be built up from scratch. Once a unit is formed at an air base you cannot ever deploy it to a carrier, and I don't think you can deploy carrier units to a land base.

Please don't tell Pensacola Naval Air Station and the carrier pilots who flew from Henderson Field on Guadalcanal.

director , I don't think that is quite accurate. You can create a carrier-trained squadron even if it is created at a land airbase or NAS. Once created, a carrier-trained squadron can be deployed to either a carrier or to a land air base. After a certain point you can develop carrier-trained squadrons even if you have no aircraft carrier in existence. My testing indicates that carrier-trained squadrons will gain experience faster if deployed to a carrier.

The downside of creating land-based carrier-trained squadrons is that if you do too many, you get a warning that your training facilities can't keep up with the demand for carrier pilots and it will take longer to field new pilots.

Honestly, once carriers are in the game, you'd want the all the fighter, dive bomber, torpedo bomber pilots to be carrier trained.

[jwsmith26]

I generally build one or two converted AMC carriers for training pilots. This increases my maximum allowed total of carrier trained pilots and provides a place to train and house the pilots. These carriers are cheap, slow, unarmored, and largely unarmed because I expect them to stay out of combat. They are there just to train pilots so when my shiny new battle carrier arrives there will be trained squadrons already available. The downside is that the battle generator will sometimes grab these carriers and drag them into a large battle if it takes place in a home territory.

I do this because I value having well-trained pilots. If one is content to use unskilled pilots then it is fine to wait until the carrier arrives to populate its decks. I'll mention that my own testing has indicated that a squadron rated as veteran is roughly twice as effective as a raw squadron. For instance, a veteran squadron will get twice as many bomb or torpedo hits given the same circumstances as a untrained squadron of the same type. That doesn't mean it's a slam dunk to always used well trained squadrons. That training has to be weighed against the considerable cost to achieve and maintain such a squadron. For myself, the cost is generally worth the benefit, but the equation has to be balanced against how you build and use your fleet and carriers, as well as which nation you are playing and how imminent war is.

[ludovic]

In my experience, experienced pilots are also better at air to air combat, sometimes even scoring victories against enemy fighters as torpedo bombers and dive bombers.

That's the long, convoluted reason I use floatplanes. If I didn't use floatplanes, more of my expert pilots would be "wasted" on recon missions. And if I didn't have at least Veteran pilots, then I would have to escort them with fighters and thus have less fighters for CAP and fewer bombers in the airstrike. Sure, occasionally they will lose half or more of their number in a single airstrike, but that only happens once or twice a game, and by the time they are back up to full strength, they are still at least Good.