(lots of)Questions about the Pacific Campaign

[Chilled Legumes]

I'm trying to learn the naval game, so I'm playing the Pacific Campaign as the United States. I wanted to try out carriers. I've learned a lot from this play through, but I'd like to see if anyone can give me some pointers. I lost this game choking on attrition.

Anyways, once the fighting started, I had a few armies of marine divisions to help take key islands. I wanted to move my carriers forward to the coast of japan, and launch strategic bombing runs from Iwo Jima.

The first problem that I ran into was that even when I decked out my carriers with single full wings of fighters (carrier capacity 55), they were only able to cover less than half of the region each. I originally thought that was because I didn't increase the range of my fighters, but carrier fighters seem pretty gimped compared to airfield-based planes. A friend of mine who is better than I am said that carrier planes are really just best at attacking other ships, and assisting with attacking islands, but not quite so much as taking on the entirety of Japan.

So, looking back at my options, would a better option be to tech into heavy fighters (due to their increase range), and increase their range (further), launching them from the Iwo Jima airfield? I'm pretty sure I could get away with basing my strategic bombers in Guam.. Someone correct me if I'm wrong.

One of the biggest lessons I learned (and once I fixed it, saw a really big improvement to combat) was about carrier overcrowding. The thing that intrigued me was that the flavor text actually seemed to be telling me how to fix the problem, by the 4:8:24 ratio of carriers/support/screen. Are these numbers actually accurate? Or is there a better fleet composition for a carrier fleet?

Another problem that I had was trying to get my fleet from the west coast to the east coast. For some reason, they were unable to sail past the west coast of Mexico. After some investigation, it was due to the smaller ships (cruisers and destroyers) not having the range to make it to the next naval port. I think i could resolve this by gaining military access with them, but they absolutely refused to allow me to have it, even when I raised relations to +100, caused a democratic revolution, and completed all of the diplomatic national focuses.

I'm... not really sure if this is a bug or not, but I couldn't figure out how to move my smaller ships to the pacific. Unfortunately I only realized this in 1942 when I tried to move my fleets into position, and every single ship i had constructed ended up on the east coast. I was able to move my capital ships, because they had the range to get over there, but i basically wasted around 80 destroyers and a dozen or so cruisers that really could've been of use (considering one of the lessons I learned this playthrough was that submarines shouldn't be used to hunt cruisers or destroyers).

So, does this sound like a bug, or should I take it as a lesson to build my ships in the right port?

And last but not least, supply. When the fighting started, suddenly, I got around six alerts saying that I had no supply. I just got done reading the entire wiki page for the logistics system in hoi4, but I'm still a little confused.

So I understand that supply flows from the capital, and can only go overseas once. However, I'm a little confused about how infrastructure and naval bases interact in the chain of supply. Should I be upgrading my infrastructure, my naval bases, or both? Also, for ships, how does resupply work? Do they have to return to home (naval)base to resupply? or are the supplies delivered to them if they're in range of a friendly naval base? Can supplies be remotely delivered by transports to fleets that are not in an area with a naval base, or do they have to travel to a naval base? If so, is this controlled with the repair or breakoff controls?

That should be about all the questions I've got right now.. Thanks for taking the time to read all of this, if you're still here

 

[Dalwin]

Sorry to be answering just one small part of your list but here it is. When trying to make a move that is beyond the range or all or some of the fleet, such as your move to the Atlantic, first rebase the fleet to some port on the other side. This is done by control right click on the port icon while the fleet is selected. You should then be able to right click on the port to move to it. Once you have gotten close enough to be in range of your new home port, you should be able to give orders normally.

 

[foothill]

First, the low down on carriers.

1. Only have a carrier fleet patrol one sea area at a time so that the flight wing doesn't suffer from range issues.
2. Max carriers in any given battle should be 4 as more than that and you get something akin to a stacking penalty.
3. Heavy fighters are a necessity in the Pacific. Here's why: if you have Air Superiority in a sea area, carriers can't deploy planes and are vulnerable to basically everything.
4. Fleet composition: what works for me is 3 Destroyers for every capital ship (CA's or better) and one light cruiser for every 3 destroyers. This strikes a good balance as the cheap destroyers take the hits for your expensive caps. A good fleet will have a mix of all ship kinds because while carriers reign supreme, they don't always work (weather and/or enemy air superiority). Ship kill list: SHBB -> BB -> BC -> CA -> CL -> DD -> SS. While not an absolute truth, each higher class of ship will make mincemeat out of anything below them.

 

[Daelyn75]

Realistically, Carriers could never dominate, meaning destroy and level whole industrial regions of major nations like Germany or Japan. Their bombers are first off meant to target ships, but could also offer ground support as well. They can take down naval bases, and airfields including all the supporting AA and buildings associated with these targets, but to use them to bomb cities/factories or to gain air superiority over entire nations is asking too much from them. Their bomb loads for one would be a big limiting factor, but also the number of fighters that can be projected to wrest superiority from land based air forces over their home nations is probably stretching it. Until land based air forces can gain air superiority, it would have been a waste of resources to do it alone, especially since these nations would be harboring a large interceptor force to deal with incoming bombers.

In game just about anything can take place. As Japan, I've invaded the Western US coast and dealt with just about no enemy aircraft, but this was probably around the fall of last year in an old build. As Germany, I've invaded the US and Canada twice, and both times I faced around ten thousand fighters and bombers. It was a bit of a slug fest, but I let my land based aircraft deal with that. It was just too much to even consider sending up what was probably at most around 500 fighters in my three carrier fleets of 4 carriers each. I instead saved my carriers to deal with any enemy fleets that opposed me. When I went up against 12 US carriers in one engagement, months after I was making headway into North America, I knew that was the correct choice.

The Air AI keeps on changing and it will all change again once 1.4 is out. So it's hard to say what you will be facing in the future, but like I said, trying to use your carrier fleets alone to get air superiority over an enemy nation might be asking too much from them. At least from an Axis point of view. It's quite possible that the Japan AI currently puts up next to nothing due to several limiting factors at the moment - such as the AI sending them all to Europe to help out the Axis there, and the very difficult to obtain aluminum for Japan right now.

 

[SteveStevenson]

Given Japan's crappy industry, you can probably make do with carrier planes. With 4 carriers you will have ~140 fighters (+an large number of replacements from USA's bottomless bag of airplanes) which you can part outside of Japan (near Tokyo since thats closest to the center of the air zone). Not sure why its not working for you.

If you want to get air superiority over the mainland of Japan from Iwo Jima you will probably need 1940 heavy fighters at Iwo Jima. Of course, your strat bombers have will no trouble getting there though especially with USA's strategic bomber focus.

I would like to add onto what foothill said about ships. It actually seems to be a very rock paper scissors relation-SHIP

BB Most effective vs CA, Least effective vs DDs
CA Most effective vs CL, Least effective vs BB
CL Most effective vs DD, Least effective vs CA
DD Most effective vs BB, Least effective vs CL

The reason DDs beat BBs but not CLs is because DDs are so much cheaper than BBs and come equipped with torpedos which ignore the heavy armor of bigger ships.



Despite being developed with the intent of being more intuitive than HOI3's supply system, the supply system we have now is pretty obtuse. Generally speaking, if you want to upgrade island supply, you have to level up the port at the island. Make sure your navy isn't based there since they eat up supply.