Slitherine

quote:

ORIGINAL: Prince of Eckmühl

A couple of points about damage in the game:

U.S. carriers go down more often than their Japanese counterparts because they take more hits. While they should be able to absorb more punishment because they were better built and had superior damage control capability, so long as about fifty-percent of IJN ordnance is finding its mark, the American carriers will suffer horribly. And I think that this is realistic. The way for the U.S. player to limit the scope of the catastrophe is to disperse his carriers as much as possible.

My only beef in this regard is that such a low percentage of U.S. VB an VS score hits. I believe that the dive-bomber aircrew are under-rated. These weren't kids fresh out of flight school. "Training" with the fleet had been vigorous in the six months before and after Pearl Harbor. If the hit percentage went up, the sinkings of IJN carriers would go up proportionately. Even in this, however, I'd like to do more analysis of the combat results, USN VB and VS attacking carriers, before stating this overemphatically.

What I would raise holy-hell about at this point, however, is the tendency of both sides carrier a/c to go after escorts. Even this is a tangle, though, because it's not always completely clear what's happening. For instance, did that flight attack a destroyer (which were darn near impossible to hit, btw) knowing full well that they were essentially wasting an opportunity to damage or destroy a critical enemy asset, or because the leader thought that all the carriers in the TG were already neutralized? Obviously, it makes a big difference, but because the inner workings of the CaW are so much a mystery to us, as is frequently the case with these games, we never really know.

PoE (aka ivanmoe)

quote:

ORIGINAL: NimitsTexan

This would have been a great question to ask my grandfather (a petty officer on the USS Walker 1943-1945), if he had not passed away last year.