Or just use a CV w/ 100% Carrier Fighters and a dozen screens and forget the other capital ships. Carrier Fighters munch ships with their 0.5 Naval Attack that ignores armor. Of course, a bigger CTF will kill you.
Are surface raiders viable?
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Or just use a CV w/ 100% Carrier Fighters and a dozen screens and forget the other capital ships. Carrier Fighters munch ships with their 0.5 Naval Attack that ignores armor. Of course, a bigger CTF will kill you.
But at that point, I have to ask why you would waste time deliberately convoy raiding.
If you are using four carriers, you are a major naval power. Surely there is something more interesting for your fleet to do besides raid convoys.
If they catch convoys inadvertently, that's fine. If they hit convoys while waiting for an invasion to fire, that's fine. If you are interdicting an invasion that is taking place, that's great. But why in Hell would anyone build carriers and subs together to convoy raid on purpose?
Like what? Convoy raiding is the main advantage provided by having naval superiority. You can always naval invade even if you don't have actual naval superiority and if your enemy doesn't know how to raid properly, you can get away with it too. Convoy raiding without having naval superiority is only worthwhile in speed 3 games where the enemy cannot respond properly or if you don't have proper house rules/mod preventing do not engage cheesing.
Like sinking or bottling up the opposing country's fleet?
If the enemy has basically no navy, then you might as well sink convoys, but if you have 4 carriers, sinking the opposing fleet would be a priority.
Hell, if your enemy can't or won't contest the skies, those carriers can pursue the enemy to port and bomb them to death.
And what's the point of sinking opposing fleet? The main reason you want to sink the opposing fleet is so that you can raid more easily and prevent him from raiding. If the enemy fleet is not contesting your raiding or raiding you, why would you even give a crap about his navy that is basically sitting there doing nothing?
A navy that is sitting there basically doing nothing is what we call a "fleet in being." The fleet in being might still come out and cause problems. It's one reason the British spent so much time and effort trying to sink Tirpitz in Norway, despite the fact that she was sitting there doing nothing.
Controlling the ocean is also all about denying or allowing naval invasions. Even if you have a crappy surface fleet (Germany) you can still use it to launch invasions when facing an opponent with superior naval strength (Invasion of Norway). Or, as we saw in our last MP game, the Axis can scrape together 13 destroyers and invade North Africa from Spain. The British really should have made more of an effort to sink them when they had the chance. That invasion hindered the movement of Allied forces in the Med for six months or longer, as they had previously been using Casablanca as a port for shuffling troops to the Italian theater (or from the Italian theater) since it took less time to route via Casablanca than to sail around the Horn (Gibraltar in Axis hands).
I'm not saying you shouldn't hit convoys, but your carriers should really be focused on killing all enemy naval assets they can first and foremost. Letting the enemy have a navy while your awesome carriers are wasting time hunting convoys (especially given how easy it is to build convoys) is suboptimal in most cases.
(I only play MP. SP is far too easy) Building a single level 1 or even 2 level 2 carriers is viable for Germany by 1939. Building a major carrier force that can challenge a human RN is not viable without major major "I'm going to get owned by the USSR" style concessions. I mused that maybe a single fighter carrier could protect my surface raiders from CTFs. I've seen carrier fighters shred CAGs when they have a tech advantage or something.
From what I have seen in MP, the axis navies only tend to fight under air cover, which renders the British carriers pretty useless.
Everyone makes mistakes. We lost a lot of German and Italian ships last time to port strikes when we made some fatal mistakes regarding air cover in Italy.
And then the Allies made mistakes and didn't follow and sink other Axis ships when they had the chance to use BBs and CVs to bag them. It ultimately contributed to the liberation of Italy from Allied occupation and the closing of the Suez.
Getting lazy with navies and not exploiting mistakes or advantages can be costly. The priority should always be to sink enemy naval forces with capital ships (unless you are running the Bismark strategy). Convoys are a secondary target for capital ships in most situations.
If the Germans have a capital raider group roaming the Atlantic, that's going to draw a ton of British ships away, if only because a player will get sick of reading the notifications. It presents a great way to destroy British ships piecemeal
Your ability to sink enemy fleet depends entirely on the mod and house rules you are playing with. On vanilla, it is not possible to sink navy with a navy. You can only kill ships with naval bombing missions. If mod and rules actually allow you to chase fleets, you can only do it in locations where the enemy has no air cover. If you get an opportunity to do that, you can temporarily stop the raiding and go for it but trying to catch a navy when it is not possible to do so instead of raiding is just bad play.
I think Italy and Britain lost a total of 90 destroyers this afternoon in various naval battles (not counting the CAs, CLs, and a list of other ships I can't remember).
Many of the hits and kills came from non-NAV sources.
Of course, if a carrier has planes that sink another ship, I still consider that a ship on ship kill.
I sank the entire Turkish navy today with the Black Sea fleet in a contest that included WWI era Soviet battleships slugging it out with a WWI era BC that Turkey had. No significant contribution from air power from either side. (Submarines helped finish the Turks off this time.)
Sure, pursuing enemy ships into air cover protecting them can be dangerous, but depending on the Allies approach, the Axis may not have coverage over every port they might retreat to. Especially earlier in the war, it's a big globe with lots of air regions to fill. And naval air regions can be quite large outside of the English Channel and the North Sea, limiting the effective number of aircraft that can even be employed.
If you are sinking ships with ships on vanilla, your enemy either doesn't know how to play or you are playing on speed 3 and he doesn't see what is happening. If the enemy fleet is stronger, just put your fleet on do not engage and you won't lose anything to ships.