Fighters on a carrier mission vs naval strike

[DicRoNero]

From the patchnotes:
- Carrier planes no longer take area coverage penalties on their targeted/ground missions

Does that apply to fighters on a carrier mission for the naval strike protection purposes? How is that instant battle actually resolved with fighters in mind? Do they even contribute? @bitmode?

The wiki doesn't seem to contain much on the subject, and the results I observe are quite unsatisfactory: the naval bombers cover several hundred miles off their base and make ships bleed bit by bit, being mostly only 'disrupted' to a moderate extent, even though there are almost as many fighters '44 as there are '36-'40 NAVs, and the fighters launched off the carriers should be [presumably] always nearby not just to 'distrupt', but to outright smash slow torpedo bombers who stand no chance in dogfights.

Some NAVs are getting randomly shot by fleet AA, but we all know how poor that is (especially when it's carriers which are targeted first). And as for CV fighters, I honestly expected the same level of protection and mortality rates as they grant in naval battles.

Also, some ranting. Among convoluted/untransparent/unbalanced HoI4 mechanics, the nav strike is easily among my most-hated ones. Why is it that the # of NAVs to attempt a bombing run scales directly to the amount of HP within the task force, while only 1 ship shoots back? [albeit with its AA buffed by 20% from the rest of the taskforce]. Why the damage reduction formula makes it [practically] very quickly cap at mere 0.5? Why deck armor is not a thing? Why ship speed isn't taken into account? And on it goes...

 

[el nora]

CV planes on CV missions don't ever deal with range. All planes brought to a naval battle on carriers participate proportional to their (sortie efficiency) * (carrier overcrowding) * (carrier traffic) * (CV organization) modifiers, which are unique to them, and not shared with the usual air missions. This number can be higher than 100% because of stacking sortie efficiency - Japan - so you can compensate with overcrowding decks in order to bring more total planes to bear at 100% efficiency. With massed strikes from base strike doctrine, stacking all their sortie efficiency modifiers, and Tora Tora Tora, they can overcrowd carriers to nearly 200% while operating at 100% efficiency.

CV planes on bombing missions don't get mission efficiency reduction for not being able to cover their airzone. This means that CV CAS and NAV on CAS, port strike, and naval strike missions are not penalized. Notably, this does not include air superiority or interception missions, but does include kamikazes.

However, as with all CAS, if a battle is not occurring within the plane's range circle, the plane will not participate, regardless of it being in the plane's operating airzone. For example, take Libya. If you put CAS in the central airbase, they will have high mission efficiency because they cover most of the airzone, but cannot reach battles occurring at the edges. On the other hand, if you put them in the airbases closer to the battles, they will have very low mission efficiency for covering less than half of the airzone.

 

[DicRoNero]

@el nora, I might not have been clear enough, but the things you mention are all known for me. It's the naval strike (mission by land-based planes) going right through the CAG's umbrella which gets me mad. I never really made it work in the past, then I got away from HoI, and now as I get back to it it still isn't clear to me. From the look of it, even 8 carriers (I had 4) won't protect the task force on its mission all that much, since the number of NAVs will just go up in the same proportion.

 

[bitmode]

Does that apply to fighters on a carrier mission for the naval strike protection purposes?

Fighters don't have ground missions, so no. This change was just to shoehorn a Pearl harbor like attack into the otherwise inadequate air combat abstraction.

How is that instant battle actually resolved with fighters in mind?

The idea of the air combat unification in MtG was that naval engagements don't have separate air combat anymore.
The instant naval battle from naval/port/kamikaze follows after the normal air combat in the region. So unless your TF is anchored and fighters assigned to operate in the region, they don't come into play at all.
And if you do assign them this way, they will perform like the same number of land-based fighters.

 

[el nora]

Ah, no. CV fighters do not sortie to intercept land based naval bombers unless they are on interception missions. The will not react at all to getting bombed while on CV missions. Essentially, unless you use your CV as floating airfields separate from the rest of your fleet, in order to protect your fleet from land based naval bombers, you would need to use land based fighters.

 

[Louella]

The instant naval battle from naval/port/kamikaze follows after the normal air combat in the region. So unless your TF is anchored and fighters assigned to operate in the region, they don't come into play at all.

So, carriers have little automatic air defence against land-based aircraft, and only by assigning static task forces with fighters, would they defend against land-based aircraft ? And if they're static, then their range circle comes into play, and they'll have terrible efficiency, and not cover task forces outside their range ? And even when they do intercept, there'll be like 5 carrier fighters against 200 or so naval bombers ?

This seems... less than ideal.

What about if the carrier task force is assigned to patrol a region, and their aircraft are also assigned to that region ? Do they then function like land-based aircraft, and although they won't then participate in naval battles, they'll attack land-based aircraft ? How'd their efficiency be in that case ?