How to build a powerful Navy from nothing: Operational Example

[Dinglehoff]

Since this is active again; has anyone ever found a ship based counter or defense to land based air unit attacks against fleets?

 

[Altruist]

Since this is active again; has anyone ever found a ship based counter or defense to land based air unit attacks against fleets?

With "land based" you mean planes like NAV?

From my experience , using NAV as a player seems overwhelming.
But at the same time, as a player, I've never found it a problem on the receiving side. At least not in the way of game or even fleet breaking.
Probably quite a different story in multi-player-games?

 

[Dinglehoff]

With "land based" you mean planes like NAV?

From my experience , using NAV as a player seems overwhelming.
But at the same time, as a player, I've never found it a problem on the receiving side. At least not in the way of game or even fleet breaking.
Probably quite a different story in multi-player-games?

Yeah, NAV but also big stacks of other plane types. My recent game as USSR I had a problem against air. I had a very large fleet with one of the short range carrier types. Escort carriers(I think, I don't remember it well). I was thinking; obviously this low engagement range for them won't be a problem since they are supposed to be doing fleet defense, and the planes will have to come in range to strike. That fleet gets brutalized and a later better fleet with real carriers is also smashed up, with the land squadrons suffering not very heavy and replaceable losses.
Considering how the major ships take years to construct and are quick to go down, and how little the land squadrons seem to get hurt, some way to mitigate this would be appreciated.

 

[Altruist]

Considering how the major ships take years to construct and are quick to go down, and how little the land squadrons seem to get hurt, some way to mitigate this would be appreciated.

Well, one of the many military discoveries in WW2 was that planes vs ships are very devasting. As devasting as completly ending the reign of battleships at this point and BBs getting replaced by carriers. So your request, as much as I can understand it, would demand to negate this military developments.

A completly different story is that even carriers are rather vulnerable to NAV in DH... which should be changed and probably in general NAV a bit tuned down. DH went a bit far with overpowering NAV there.

There have been several approaches to fine tune DH setting a bit in this sense:
# within the TRP mod, see this post by DerStudti
# or Pasha's edits of the misc.txt

Apart from this and purely within the standard DH settings, escort carriers (CVEs) are actually one of the few ships with very good AA-values and get dirtcheap to produce from on 1941 (CVE-4 if I am not mistaken). So, even without success you were doing the right thing.
Apart form CVEs also CV and CVLs get decent AA values due to their CAGs (which should be kept uptodate always). The other capital ships: BBs and BCs are rather helpless vs attacks from air.
In terms of escort ships light cruisers are the best in an AA-role. Giving all ships AA-brigades (capitals and escorts) if they need to operate in NAV-infested areas is quite mandatory and helps... a bit.

Nevertheless usually battles of ships vs NAV are rather singlesided towards the NAVs especially since NAV tend to attack already damaged ships and make kills while on the other side ships rarely if ever manage to really kill even a single NAV, instead it is already a success if they get down the NAV's organisation and thus end their attack before they do too much harm.
If somehow possible the best defense vs NAV is to engage them with your own planes. Most of the times difficult or not possible due to range restrictions, though.