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Nemo121 -> RE: My CV attacked .... (10/7/2006 2:46:50 AM)
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It seems to me a simple matter of logistics...
You can produce 900 (roughly) fighters per month. You can adequately crew 30 of these from your pilot training pool. End result: You will suffer massive losses in any aerial battle due to inexperience of your pilots. If you try to fight the enemy on his terms you lose. Therefore, you must change tack in order to be succesful. If you can tie the enemy fighters up shooting down your fighters for long enough then even with the Allied ueberCAP you should be able to get some bombers through.
I've been observing the air model and since there is a limit to the number of engagements which are possible it is, theoretically, possible to force the Allied ueberCAP to waste its total number of engagements on the fighter component of a Japanese strike. I've looked into it and with the following assumptions it is possible to penetrate Allied CAP and/or simply exhaust their ability to sustain an offensive beyond land based air ( but only until 1944)....
1. Assume that Japanese fighter type and pilot quality do not matter ( except in the relatively small manner that better japanese fighters and pilots will cause the Allied CAP to have to make slightly more passes in killing them and will be able to inflict a very slightly higher loss level than exp 30 pilots... both of which help to reduce allied CAP passes during an A2A engagement).
2. Assume a limited ( although very large) number of passes are available to the ueberCAP.
3. Accept that any fighter passes made against fighters count against the total number of passes available to the ueberCAP. Thus the more ueberCAP passes you can force the Allies to make against your fighters the fewer passes they can make against your bombers.
The end result is that the actual PERFORMANCE of your escorts is, almost, irrelevant. All that matters is sending a large enough escort to "absorb" most of the ueberCAP passes ( the better they fight back the fewer escorts are needed. At this stage though they can't fight back well so you must use their airframes and bodies to absorb the passes instead of relying on them to shoot down the ueberCAP). With very few passes remaining after the escorts are destroyed most of the bombers should get through and be able to attack the fleet.
One thing this forces the Japanese player to accept is that they should husband their airpower for 1 large strike rather than sending in 3 or 4 medium-sized strikes.
Given your production I wouldn't be at all afraid of committing 900 fighters as cover for 400 or 500 bombers. Even vs a 500 fighter stock CAP most of those bombers should get through... I've tested this against Corsair CAP and when things go right I'm able to get bombers through even when my escorts are 30 Exp A6M2 pilots flying leftovers from 1941. It is damned costly - you can easily lose 600 or 700 planes in a day BUT if 300 Bettys get through to attack their carriers the result will be decisive and well worth the loss. It won't be decisive on that day but will be on later days as medium-sized follow-up strikes pick off the cripples.
One other thing that is essential is that the fighter units fly from a well-supplied ( more than 20,000 ton) base such that after they are almost entirely slaughtered in the first day they can be immediately brought back up to strength for further attacks on Day 3 ( they'll be repairing on Day 2 and not capable of flying effective strikes).
lastly, Oscar IIs. They fly up above enemy CAP, fly to long range and carry a good payload. They are excellent kamikazes and are useful in the approach phase of an invasion fleet where they don't cause much damage to CVs and BBs etc but do tend to destroy AAA weapons making your real strikes all the more effective. In my AI vs AI game I'm still building Oscar IIs even in 1945 for ONLY this reason. Every time the Allies come near one of my bases 10 Daitais hurl themselves at the Allied fleet every 2 days. By the time they are in range for a decisive engagement several DDs are limping back home and the CLs, CAs, BBs and CVs have lost a few AAA weapons and slowed down a bit, becoming more vulnerable to the large kami strikes which follow.
To give a numerical example. Let us suppose a Japanese defensive sector has 500 fighters and 500 bombers available and that an Allied ueberCAP has the capacity to shoot down 600 planes in one attack.
If the Japanese send in 2 attacks of 500 planes each all of their planes are shot down. If, OTOH, they send in a single 1,000 plane strike they will lose 500 fighters and 100 bombers to CAP but 400 other bombers get through.
In 1943 onward I really think the game boils down to a numbers game in which you must seek to simply exhaust the number of ueberCAP passes on the fighter component and then let your bomber component go to work. Since you have unlimited 20 and 30 Exp pilots and can produce a lot of obsolescent airframes this works out well.
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