Naval air power - what's the matter with it?

[Aron77]

Dear Gamers
Can you just please help me: what type of aircrafts are to be used in naval warfare? And how to use properly?
I built 1940 light airframe floatplanes with one light torpedo and 1940 medium airframe flying boats with light torpedo and I feel like they are just useless. Hundreds of them patrolling one seazone, and during most of the encounters with convoys, they are unable to sink any ships, even more, they lose one or two in many of the contacts.
What am i doing wrong?
many thanks in advance

 

[TarsTarkin]

What does your spotting look like? Any Radar? if not, any surface/sub patrol fleets?
Oceans are big, and naval warfare can be big game of "hide and seek". Land based Radar helps a lot with spotting in adjacent Sea Zones (for aircraft or ships). Aircraft spotting can be improved with floats (low tech, reads like you have some float planes), or "Air-Ground Radar" (requires higher Radar tech levels). Naval ship patrols can find the enemy, and NAV's will join the party. Flying around in the deep ocean without much spotting ability is burning fuel.
and when you get medium torpedo's, upgrade to them. Convoys are a little funky in that damage is simply repaired between battles, you have to hit hard enough to actually sink the convoy outright to do much good. (if it goes several rounds say with friendly ships involved, I think you get a few repeat chances to sink the convoy, but a quick "one off" airstrike is going to be a either you sink some thing or you don't situation, damage per hit is going to matter).

 

[William9113]

Dear Gamers
Can you just please help me: what type of aircrafts are to be used in naval warfare? And how to use properly?
I built 1940 light airframe floatplanes with one light torpedo and 1940 medium airframe flying boats with light torpedo and I feel like they are just useless. Hundreds of them patrolling one seazone, and during most of the encounters with convoys, they are unable to sink any ships, even more, they lose one or two in many of the contacts.
What am i doing wrong?
many thanks in advance

Naval bombers are incredibly good at destroying enemy naval vessels. They are very often the most IC efficient way to sink a fleet, so I suspect that something else is going off here for you to not notice them sinking anything.

Are you sure that the enemy is in the zone? Fleets on strike force will provide naval supremacy as if they are in the zone, but they remain at port unless they go out to engage an enemy fleet.

What mission are your naval bombers on? Are they on naval patrol, naval strike, port strike, or all of them?

If you could attach some screenshots with windows+shift+s that would help us determine what the problem is.