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This is my second attempt at playing America since NSB. My first playthrough, the first big naval battle with the Japanese I lost half my navy, and the Japanese only lost something like 8 destroyers. I had 2 carrier fleets just in the Pacific theater, each with 2 aircraft carriers for a total of 4 carriers, I had a few destroyers on patrol, the rest of my fleet was set to strike force. My navy and naval airplanes were fully trained, I had about 1,000 land based naval bombers, about 100 land based fighters for air superiority, and I had plenty of capital ships to screen my carriers, and more than enough light ships to screen my capitol ships. So I don't understand how I lost so decisively. Was it just bad luck, am I doing something wrong? Maybe I just don't understand the naval part of the game? Any tips would be appreciated, thanks.
I can give you one advice that is useful regardless of fleet composition. Build several new naval bases in Hawaii and disable all small ports in pacific for repairs. That way your damaged ships will only return to hawaii and repair there (provided you use autosplit).
This is my second attempt at playing America since NSB. My first playthrough, the first big naval battle with the Japanese I lost half my navy, and the Japanese only lost something like 8 destroyers. I had 2 carrier fleets just in the Pacific theater, each with 2 aircraft carriers for a total of 4 carriers, I had a few destroyers on patrol, the rest of my fleet was set to strike force. My navy and naval airplanes were fully trained, I had about 1,000 land based naval bombers, about 100 land based fighters for air superiority, and I had plenty of capital ships to screen my carriers, and more than enough light ships to screen my capitol ships. So I don't understand how I lost so decisively. Was it just bad luck, am I doing something wrong? Maybe I just don't understand the naval part of the game? Any tips would be appreciated, thanks.
You can destroy the Japanese navy very early every game by
1) training your fleets constantly and researching the naval tech boosts.
2) refitting and not building new ships in preparation for war. I redesign as soon as new tech allows.
Make sure manilla and guam are protected with good air support.
You didn't mention doctrines. I usually stick with Base Strike. The US should have your chosen category well filled out, as you can afford the fuel to constantly keep all of your navy training, generating a lot of XP. All your ships should be well trained before the war starts, along with the air units. Remember that new ships start off green. Often I'll just make a fleet with a training TF in a safe spot (like a US coast) where all new ships get sent, only getting assigned to a line TF once they're trained. You should also be generating air xp from training all your air units, so keep up the air doctrines as well. (That's more important than blowing it all on model upgrade variants, as useful as those can be.)
I like to aggressively hold the Philippines. Build up the ports and airbases in Guam and Manila. Send some extra troops over -- like some of those National Guard divisions, and recruit some Filipino divisions. Manila can be your main naval base instead of Pearl, with the goal of holding the line of the South China Sea and the Marianas. Strong NAV and FTR patrols in both sea zones. You'll also want to keep watch in the Philippine Sea, as their fleets will penetrate that far. The AI seems to like to attack Mindanao along with the northern part of the island chain, so don't abandon the south side entirely.
You'll probably want more than 100 fighters per zone if it comes to air combat, mostly in the Marianas. (One early war goal is taking all the airfields in that sea zone. The easiest way to have air superiority is to own all the close airbases.)
Subs are very useful for fighting Japan. They've got an army in China, so cut off their supplies with convoy raiders in the East China Sea and Sea of Japan. And they can't run their industry without imports from the Manchuria region and SE Asia (East China Sea and Coast of Japan). Keep up the sub research and keep building them. (I'll usually have at least one and often two lines building subs all game long -- and I'm not going for all-out sub spam.) Turning early subs into minelayers means you can drop a lot of mines in the SCS and Marianas, which help in naval combat because they slow down enemy ships, making them easier targets for your air or your own navy. I find it less useful to try to wall off Japan's home islands with mines, because there's not as much to actually kill the ships there. You might want to try it just with the long view in mind, as at some point your forward naval line will be the ECS and Japanese coast - but you've probably already had a couple of big naval clashes before then.
Tactically, if you want to fight a decisive doomstack battle, then you should probably have one task force with all four carriers and appropriate screens (four other capital ships (BB or CA), plus at least 8x3 and preferably 8x4 screens, CLs and DDs). More than four CVs attracts an arbitrary anti-doomstack penalty. In case of bad weather, those BBs can come in handy as well. For the clash of navies phase, replace the CAS on the carriers with NAV. I'll usually do half FTR and half NAV (since I'm not going to adapt my playstyle just to exploit any temporary bugs related to carrier FTR in naval battles), or maybe 1/3 FTR and 2/3 NAV. You might want to just rebase the CAS units to a land base somewhere rather than disband them to preserve their training. You can use carrier CAS after the enemy navy is gone for air support for invasions. Fighting in your "home" sea zones -- here, the South China Sea and Marianas -- should give you a decisive air advantage. For admirals, traits that affect visibility, speed, and positioning are useful.
You've got the fuel to patrol with your strike force instead of letting it sit in port. Ships do get wear and tear in use that you'll need to repair, but you can also catch lots of little enemy TFs and draw out the enemy fleet.
If you integrate the Philippines, you can build radar there. I doubt that's really worth the effort and PP, but it's nice to have. Taking Taiwan gives you a good airbase for making the South China Sea your own domain and projecting power into the ECS. Okinawa's good, too, of course.
You can destroy the Japanese navy very early every game by
1) training your fleets constantly and researching the naval tech boosts.
2) refitting and not building new ships in preparation for war. I redesign as soon as new tech allows.
I see the button for refitting ships, and I've tried to do it many times, but the production just gets frozen and doesn't move, and the ship never gets upgraded. What am I doing wrong?
I also had a very similar experience playing as Germany. I know the Germany navy isn't very strong, but I had 5 destroyers on patrol, the rest of my navy was on strike force. My submarines I separated from the rest of the fleet and had them focusing on convoy raiding. I had many ground based naval bombers and fighters, and my first naval battle with the British I lost half my navy. My entire navy was concentrated in one sea area, the Eastern North Sea, and I still lost. I can't figure out what I'm doing wrong.
I can give you one advice that is useful regardless of fleet composition. Build several new naval bases in Hawaii and disable all small ports in pacific for repairs. That way your damaged ships will only return to hawaii and repair there (provided you use autosplit).
ctrl + clicking on port, should show "disabled" icon
coupled with dedicated repair ports and plenty of naval factories available for repair really improves the maintanance of the fleet. Nothing worse than having BB or CV sitting in lvl 1 port and waiting months for repair.
This could be the most important bit of advice in the thread. Tora Tora Tora gives the Japanese massive naval buffs for six months after they declare war on the Allies. Fighting them during that time, even with a larger fleet, is often asking to lose the naval war. Just keep your ships in port in California or Pearl Harbor during that time, the AI doesn't port strike with carrier groups so you'll be safe. Once the buffs wear off you should be able to take them out with your much larger fleet.
I also had a very similar experience playing as Germany. I know the Germany navy isn't very strong, but I had 5 destroyers on patrol, the rest of my navy was on strike force. My submarines I separated from the rest of the fleet and had them focusing on convoy raiding. I had many ground based naval bombers and fighters, and my first naval battle with the British I lost half my navy. My entire navy was concentrated in one sea area, the Eastern North Sea, and I still lost. I can't figure out what I'm doing wrong.
I’m guessing you need to rethink your fleet composition and basing given the result. @Anaraxes has given you some great pointers. As the US, you already have the edge in production, resources, technology and in naval experience, imo these easily negate the meagre advantages the imperial navy has in national spirits and Yamamoto (which the AI will rarely employ for its carrier fleet), so challenging them from the get-go is totally feasible.
Until you get to the late game, naval warfare is mostly a numbers game. You’ll want a beefy strike force to match the enemies’; dividing up your capital ships too much will result in them being picked off before you can bring the rest of your fleet to bear as naval battles are brief, I suspect that's how you lost most of your ships. The AI will aim to build its strike fleet as follows:
4 CV + 10 BB/BC/CA + 56 CL/DD (close to a dozen CL and the rest DD) for a total ship count of 70.
Additional strike forces will roughly follow this composition but will depend on available ships. The strength of these fleets can vary wildly as the AI is unaware of the actual design of the ship, so to it, the Hosho and the Akagi are worth the same despite the latter fielding 3 times as many aircraft. This also leads to the AI to mixing its slow obsolescent battleships with its faster modern vessels meaning you can expect these strike forces to rarely exceed 25 knots even with bold. All this to say that you’re going to want to bring a similar number of ships to the party. More or less, depends on your designs, the fleet size penalty is negligible so you can doomstack if you want to but you can make short work of them with far fewer ships if you take a quality over quantity approach, very much an option for the US. It’s a good idea to have your strike forces stationed not too far from each other so one can reinforce the other in battle if need be. Protecting where they are based is also important as others have said, from invasion but also from port strikes from neighbouring islands (crucially while Tora! Tora! Tora! is active), you can easily defend the Philippines, Guam and Wake, by strengthening the garrison and shoring up defences by building radar, AA, naval forts (unnecessary in my experience), airbases.
There are many ways you can sink the enemy fleets; you can focus on whichever attack type you prefer given you’re already dealt a winning hand as the US. However, especially regarding the issue you ran into as Germany: by and large, you can’t win a surface engagement with (far) fewer ships unless you have a big edge in tech or doctrine. As building a balanced quality surface fleet to beat the Royal Navy would take too long and be too costly, you’ll want to take the more efficient quantity over quality approach. Submarine raiding will eventually starve it of fuel making it vulnerable and ineffective, and you can add mines to the mix which the AI can’t really counter. Naval bombers are also highly effective and will whittle down the AI same as mines. However, to expedite the process in a glorious surface engagement, the most efficient wombo-combo to obliterate the AI is light attack + torpedo. Relying on light attack heavy cruisers (1 medium battery + max light batteries, unarmoured), as capitals, they will be safe from light attack and torpedoes, and will easily dodge most of the heavy attack (due to high speed and low visibility) while shredding the enemy screens. You pair them with roach destroyers: cheap as can be, purely expendable. These merely distract the enemy fleet in a way, by sponging up the light attack and blocking torps while the cruisers take down the screens. You’ll also want a few torpedo destroyers to annihilate the enemy capital ships once the screening efficiency drops. This in conjunction with trade interdiction and the raiding fleet designer is unbelievably cost-effective since all designs are far cheaper than relying on heavy attack or carriers which are still far less IC efficient I believe and take ages to build. This is or at least was the MP naval meta, I don't think it has changed much. Only way to match the Royal Navy in a reasonable amount of time and without a huge sacrifice to your army or airforce afaik.
As for spotting, only the average surface/sub detection, visibility and speed matter (coordination also factors in). So, the ideal design is a maxed-out floatplane CL with radar & sonar, you can use the smallest gun and should go unarmoured, AA is worth having on them imo. Cruiser subs are a valid choice as well since they are much cheaper but they're not as effective and slow. Have these spotting cruisers operate alone to cover more sea zones. They’ll find the AI fleets almost instantly and should never get caught unless you let them engage, so naval bombers will be the only threat for them. Adding other ships to the patrol task forces will decrease their ability to spot. Destroyers are terrible for this role unfortunately due to their low surface detection. Intel will also give you an edge so it's worth investing in and infiltrating the enemy navy if you have the DLC. I had 100% naval intel during the entire conflict, allowing me to port strike and hunt down the enemy fleet a lot faster.
A few small strike forces or patrol fleets with some firepower or depth chargers to intercept the lower-level threats such as enemy subs or DD escorts can pay off but will be vulnerable to nearby enemy strike fleets until those are dealt with. Surface raiding is very effective but risky for the same reason, so best to leave that to the subs early on, with the Hunter-killer perk on Arleigh Burke and the full doctrine they are lethal despite being ancient designs. Speaking of admirals, most the higher-level American ones are great and they can all receive concealment expert which is easily one of the strongest traits in the game due to how visibility impacts hit chance, a must-have.
I recently finished a pacific campaign, running vanilla 1.11.5 regular difficulty. As with previous versions, it still felt like seal clubbing, though I suffered noticeable losses at the start because I was ill-prepared and I never stopped contesting the waters despite having most of my carriers out for repairs. Lost 120 vessels total, of which 2 BB and 3 CA, most of the light hulls I lost could have been avoided if I had just pulled them back. I took Japan down to less than 10 ships and sunk all their convoys by the end of 1941. The AI defended some of its islands but once their navy was declawed which didn’t take too long, it was rather straightforward but not as much of a cakewalk as in the past.
Speaking about enemy NAVs. I always build heavy fighters 1 instead fighters 1 (I do not produce them) before I start producing fighter 2. You can use the heavy fighters well in pacific and you don't need that many since the airfields are limited. Also I love using TAC bombers (with doctrine), so I do not actually build NAvs myself, I use Tac bombers to stratbomb ports and airfields in pacific and these tacs can also be used fine for support during invasions, so I do not need to bother with shuffling planes. If I really feel I will need NAvs (like I expect decisive doom stack battle), I will use the carrier planes on land airfields as emergency. Not optimal (range/cost) but works.
I guess my USA naval gameplay is influenced a lot by my many Italian playthroughs, since the country is so low on production you have to prioritize and not waste production too much and every ship is precious.
I’m guessing you need to rethink your fleet composition and basing given the result. @Anaraxes has given you some great pointers. As the US, you already have the edge in production, resources, technology and in naval experience, imo these easily negate the meagre advantages the imperial navy has in national spirits and Yamamoto (which the AI will rarely employ for its carrier fleet), so challenging them from the get-go is totally feasible.
Until you get to the late game, naval warfare is mostly a numbers game. You’ll want a beefy strike force to match the enemies’; dividing up your capital ships too much will result in them being picked off before you can bring the rest of your fleet to bear as naval battles are brief, I suspect that's how you lost most of your ships. The AI will aim to build its strike fleet as follows:
4 CV + 10 BB/BC/CA + 56 CL/DD (close to a dozen CL and the rest DD) for a total ship count of 70.
Additional strike forces will roughly follow this composition but will depend on available ships. The strength of these fleets can vary wildly as the AI is unaware of the actual design of the ship, so to it, the Hosho and the Akagi are worth the same despite the latter fielding 3 times as many aircraft. This also leads to the AI to mixing its slow obsolescent battleships with its faster modern vessels meaning you can expect these strike forces to rarely exceed 25 knots even with bold. All this to say that you’re going to want to bring a similar number of ships to the party. More or less, depends on your designs, the fleet size penalty is negligible so you can doomstack if you want to but you can make short work of them with far fewer ships if you take a quality over quantity approach, very much an option for the US. It’s a good idea to have your strike forces stationed not too far from each other so one can reinforce the other in battle if need be. Protecting where they are based is also important as others have said, from invasion but also from port strikes from neighbouring islands (crucially while Tora! Tora! Tora! is active), you can easily defend the Philippines, Guam and Wake, by strengthening the garrison and shoring up defences by building radar, AA, naval forts (unnecessary in my experience), airbases.
There are many ways you can sink the enemy fleets; you can focus on whichever attack type you prefer given you’re already dealt a winning hand as the US. However, especially regarding the issue you ran into as Germany: by and large, you can’t win a surface engagement with (far) fewer ships unless you have a big edge in tech or doctrine. As building a balanced quality surface fleet to beat the Royal Navy would take too long and be too costly, you’ll want to take the more efficient quantity over quality approach. Submarine raiding will eventually starve it of fuel making it vulnerable and ineffective, and you can add mines to the mix which the AI can’t really counter. Naval bombers are also highly effective and will whittle down the AI same as mines. However, to expedite the process in a glorious surface engagement, the most efficient wombo-combo to obliterate the AI is light attack + torpedo. Relying on light attack heavy cruisers (1 medium battery + max light batteries, unarmoured), as capitals, they will be safe from light attack and torpedoes, and will easily dodge most of the heavy attack (due to high speed and low visibility) while shredding the enemy screens. You pair them with roach destroyers: cheap as can be, purely expendable. These merely distract the enemy fleet in a way, by sponging up the light attack and blocking torps while the cruisers take down the screens. You’ll also want a few torpedo destroyers to annihilate the enemy capital ships once the screening efficiency drops. This in conjunction with trade interdiction and the raiding fleet designer is unbelievably cost-effective since all designs are far cheaper than relying on heavy attack or carriers which are still far less IC efficient I believe and take ages to build. This is or at least was the MP naval meta, I don't think it has changed much. Only way to match the Royal Navy in a reasonable amount of time and without a huge sacrifice to your army or airforce afaik.
As for spotting, only the average surface/sub detection, visibility and speed matter (coordination also factors in). So, the ideal design is a maxed-out floatplane CL with radar & sonar, you can use the smallest gun and should go unarmoured, AA is worth having on them imo. Cruiser subs are a valid choice as well since they are much cheaper but they're not as effective and slow. Have these spotting cruisers operate alone to cover more sea zones. They’ll find the AI fleets almost instantly and should never get caught unless you let them engage, so naval bombers will be the only threat for them. Adding other ships to the patrol task forces will decrease their ability to spot. Destroyers are terrible for this role unfortunately due to their low surface detection. Intel will also give you an edge so it's worth investing in and infiltrating the enemy navy if you have the DLC. I had 100% naval intel during the entire conflict, allowing me to port strike and hunt down the enemy fleet a lot faster.
A few small strike forces or patrol fleets with some firepower or depth chargers to intercept the lower-level threats such as enemy subs or DD escorts can pay off but will be vulnerable to nearby enemy strike fleets until those are dealt with. Surface raiding is very effective but risky for the same reason, so best to leave that to the subs early on, with the Hunter-killer perk on Arleigh Burke and the full doctrine they are lethal despite being ancient designs. Speaking of admirals, most the higher-level American ones are great and they can all receive concealment expert which is easily one of the strongest traits in the game due to how visibility impacts hit chance, a must-have.
I recently finished a pacific campaign, running vanilla 1.11.5 regular difficulty. As with previous versions, it still felt like seal clubbing, though I suffered noticeable losses at the start because I was ill-prepared and I never stopped contesting the waters despite having most of my carriers out for repairs. Lost 120 vessels total, of which 2 BB and 3 CA, most of the light hulls I lost could have been avoided if I had just pulled them back. I took Japan down to less than 10 ships and sunk all their convoys by the end of 1941. The AI defended some of its islands but once their navy was declawed which didn’t take too long, it was rather straightforward but not as much of a cakewalk as in the past.
Your part about the light attack heavy cruisers and torpedo/roach destroyers is good, but your first paragraph and the spotting/patrol section is not optimal.
First, why bother with a specific ratio of carriers to capitals to screens? Just go with 4 CVs + every other ship you have minus subs and convoy escort destroyers in one doomstack. Telling OP to split his fleet into several 70 ship strike forces is bad advice.
Second, when I play the US or Japan I just use a fleet of 10ish destroyers and one or two light attack heavy cruiser for patrols. Don't use floatplane cruisers for spotting surface patrol fleets, just use normal light attack ones. "spotting CLs" are a trap from my experience. You don't need tons of float planes to spot enemy fleets, just the base spotting from having your 10 ships will be enough to spot the enemy, and having actual guns on your spotter fleet will enable you to piecemeal sink the enemy patrols. You also get bonuses to detection from naval doctrine so it's not like you can't detect ships at all. All ships have enough base detection to find the enemy with enough time. You say that using small patrol fleets with firepower is vulnerable to enemy strike fleets, but the nature of using some meta light attack ships in your patrol fleets is that they sink the enemy patrol fleet before the strike force can arrive, and the battle ends. This does double duty of making the enemy waste a bunch of fuel while his strike force sails, but then it doesn't get to join the battle (it ended already) and has to sail back home again.
Generally my naval build-up as the USA starts like this: Convert every battleship in my fleet into an AA ship. Start building roach destroyers. Convert every cruiser in my fleet to a light attack heavy cruiser. Once 1940 Cruisers and medium battery 3 is researched, start building 1940 light attack heavy cruisers with the coastal defense or raiding designer. Do that for the rest of the game, with dockyards assigned to roach destroyers and light attack CAs so that you're producing many of each. One thing to note is that in single player if you convert to heavy cruisers too early, the UK might get mad at you for having too many capital ships in breach of the naval treaty. So hold off on the conversion until you can withdraw from the naval treaty.
Another thing you should do if you can afford to spare the research is to get sub 3's with the raiding fleet designer. Japan is very vulnerable to convoy raiding while having limited destroyer escorts, and you can often run Japan out of fuel just as if you were playing Germany against the UK.
For fleet composition, I split off my submarines and about 50-60 destroyers to use for convoy escort. I put the rest into one big strike fleet, and then split off a few small 10 ship patrol fleets for that, one for each region I plan to be patrolling.
For doctrine, trade interdiction is always the way to go, even if you have carriers and aren't building submarines. The lower visibility on your cruisers and capital ships really makes them more resilient to damage, in turn assuring that they can survive longer and keep dealing damage. This combined with the massive benefits to submarines that can strangle your enemy makes it the best doctrine by far.
I rarely lose more than a few ships to the AI with this build, so take that as you will.
Doomstacks are convenient if you do strike force in single naval zone, like when you use Italian fleet around Malta. But if you want to cover more regions, it's better to split them. I mean, having whole fleet moving across pacific because of some subs being intercepted by convoy escorts sucks, especially if they could intercept something else, like huge jap fleet for decisive battle. I also dislike mixing slow ships with fast ships. Feels like wasting potential of modern fast ships.
But since teh AI is bad and doesn't build competitive ships (or any dcecent ships actually), pretty much everything works as long as you know what you are doing. It's more about if you want to "RP" pacific war or not, I mean you can gimp the JAP AI by fortifying Phillipines (and bombarding the shit out of JAP just from the start), but where is the fun in that eh? I always let it capture land, so I have reason to island hop and play with all those marine division toys and experiment.
I guess I like the pre-war setup more than actual finishing the ww2 eh.
ctrl + clicking on port, should show "disabled" icon
coupled with dedicated repair ports and plenty of naval factories available for repair really improves the maintanance of the fleet. Nothing worse than having BB or CV sitting in lvl 1 port and waiting months for repair.
Your part about the light attack heavy cruisers and torpedo/roach destroyers is good, but your first paragraph and the spotting/patrol section is not optimal.
First, why bother with a specific ratio of carriers to capitals to screens? Just go with 4 CVs + every other ship you have minus subs and convoy escort destroyers in one doomstack. Telling OP to split his fleet into several 70 ship strike forces is bad advice.
Not quite the point I was making. The composition of AI fleet was only to educate OP about what he's up against since he made the mistake of dividing his carriers which more than likely lead to him having his fleet sunk piece by piece. Doomstacking is one way to go, I'm aware it works with minimal loses since fleet size penalty isn't enough of a disincentive. I'm of the same opinion as @Dalnar so I don't do it, I set up a fast carrier strike group (+28 knots) and a slower battleline strike group (comprised of slower battleships and slower cruisers), the latter will get into the battle eventually and I often retask them for shore bombardment. 70 ships is by no means a number to adhere to but it should serve as rough estimate as to the minimum number of ships you need to not get hammered in a one on one with the main enemy strike force. Using a similar number of ships mainly ensures a minimal fleet size penalty (if above enemy ship strength), allows you to retask other vessels and with better design/composition you'll still win comfortably.
Second, when I play the US or Japan I just use a fleet of 10ish destroyers and one or two light attack heavy cruiser for patrols. Don't use floatplane cruisers for spotting surface patrol fleets, just use normal light attack ones. "spotting CLs" are a trap from my experience. You don't need tons of float planes to spot enemy fleets, just the base spotting from having your 10 ships will be enough to spot the enemy, and having actual guns on your spotter fleet will enable you to piecemeal sink the enemy patrols. You also get bonuses to detection from naval doctrine so it's not like you can't detect ships at all. All ships have enough base detection to find the enemy with enough time. You say that using small patrol fleets with firepower is vulnerable to enemy strike fleets, but the nature of using some meta light attack ships in your patrol fleets is that they sink the enemy patrol fleet before the strike force can arrive, and the battle ends. This does double duty of making the enemy waste a bunch of fuel while his strike force sails, but then it doesn't get to join the battle (it ended already) and has to sail back home again.
Fair enough but they will be much slower at the task, with destroyers actively lowering the spotting speed, also more likely to be intercepted. Regarding enemy patrols, in my game, Japan wasn't patrolling at all: I noticed I wasn't sinking patrol groups as in previous runs, turns out the groups were being tasked with naval invasion support along the Chinese coast, pretty sure light guns make for poor fire support but I'm not one to question the genius of the AI. They didn't have a single patrol order, despite that their strike force was able to engage me as I'd battle their subs & convoys, so it moved around a fair bit. Screen shredding cruisers are definitely a good idea for patrols, I didn't have any to spare as I needed them for my carrier group. I didn't go for a meta build at all, I even built 4 brand new 1940 BBs with improved heavy batteries because I could, apparently improved heavy guns decrease combat performance according to a recent forum post so unsurprisingly they were quite a waste.
