mciann
Posts: 4
Joined: 3/24/2008
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The only way I've found to suppress land bases is to launch a steady stream of airstrikes over a period of time. The amount of aircraft in the attack doesn't seem to matter. To test this, I edited the Leyte scenario to add about 400 B-29s to the American bases at Peleliu and Morotai. To put this in perspective, this is more B-29s than were used to level Tokyo. This amount of air force should be able to utterly destroy every single human being within 2 miles of any airstrip, to say nothing of planes, ammunition, and fuel. A single, coordinated strike against Clark Field by this force destroyed about 8 planes, and caused moderate damage to the airstrip, which was repaired within hours. WTF?
I then restarted the scenario, and using the same force, strung the attack out into strikes every 15 minutes, rather than a coordinated strike. This was immensely more successful. I destroyed every aircraft at the base, and severely damaged the airstrip.
The only way to recreate this effect with carrier based air (such as in the Midway scenario playing Japanese, or in Leyte playing the default scenario), is to park your carrier as close to the base as possible and launch strike after strike in rapid succession. The only problem with this is that you will wind up trading plane for plane in losses due to prangs on landing or takeoff, combined with the odd AA or CAP casualty.
In the historical battle of Midway, Midway's bomber force was dealt with by the Japanese CAP. If you expect this to occur in game, you will find yourself rapidly running out of carriers. Even with 100% of fighters dedicated to CAP, it appears that you will lose at least one carrier to land based air on Midway.
In another example of the power of land-based air, I played the Santa Cruz scenario as the Americans. I transferred every plane on board Hornet and Enterprise to Henderson field, then pulled my carriers out of the battle. When the japs got within range of Henderson, I completely annihilated them.
Playing as the Japanese, I can easily wipe out the invasion force at Tarawa, and can annihilate Sprague's forces at Leyte Gulf. The complete inability to stop a land base, combined with the ability to shuffle squadrons around from base to base to get the planes you want at the right bases, appears to be pretty much invincible.
In previous versions of CAW, CAP did 2 things which it does not seem to do in the 2007 version. 1 - CAP would aggregate. If you piled every carrier into one hex and set full CAP on all of them, the combined CAP would work collectively for every surface group in the hex. The 2007 version does not seem to do this. I see very wide discrepancies in CAP effectiveness as different strike groups hit different surface groups in the hex. 2 - CAP would defend adjacent hexes. I would occasionally see CAP casualties in attacks on the Japanese surface forces if the attack happened to take place near a Jap land base. I don't see that at all in the 2007 version of the game.
The resiliency of land airbases is not disputed by the historical account, but shouldn't the planes be a little more vulnerable on the ground? Also, why is CAP so ineffective in CAW 2007 as compared to old versions of the game?
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