Naval Strategy and Fleet Composition questions

[spicy57]

I have a few questions about naval strategy and fleet composition and wanted to get a sense of how others set up their navies (In single player). Obviously, the nation and circumstances along with your playing style makes everyone different, but I wanted to get some different points of view.

Fleet size: when a task force engages, does the larger of the two suffer the penalty (I’m guessing that it’s harder to position a large fleet properly compared to a smaller one)? If that’s the case, it probably scales depending upon the magnitude of the difference, correct? Is there a sweet spot in terms of how large you’d want a task force? Does the mission (strike force versus patrol) change your sizes? Do you feel that submarine fleet size should be different when compared to surface fleets?

Convoy escort: let’s say you’re setting up an escort in 3 regions. Is there a difference in efficiency if I create one group of 12 versus three groups of 4? Does the size of the area to be covered matter (e.g. Red Sea versus West Indian Ocean)?

Naval invasion: if a carrier is part of a naval invasion sortie, do the planes automatically contribute to the attack? Do carrier CAS automatically becomes active, or do carriers need to be held in that area and then planes manually assigned?

I really appreciate your perspectives. Cheers!

 

[el nora]

With regards to fleet size, yes there is a positioning penalty for bringing a larger fleet. No it doesn't make a whit of difference. The penalty is -25% positioning beginning at 2x fleet size and -50% positioning at 3x fleet size. It doesn't continue to scale from there. And that is a laughably small penalty. Lancester's square law requires that each ship the 2x fleet brings be 1/4 as effective as they would otherwise be in order to provide a fair fight. The positioning penalty doesn't even come close to that. Positioning causes -0.5% damage, -0.5% screening efficiency, -0.7% AA damage, and +2% sub reveal chance per percentage point of positioning below 100%. And it is easily countered by a good admiral with high maneuver skill (+2.5% positioning per skill point) and the superior tactician trait (+25% positioning).

Doomstacks beat smaller, well composed stacks every day of the week.

Submarines are a different story. The +% sub visibility can spell the end of a sub task force. You want to keep them at least smaller than twice your enemy's convoy escort fleet size.

With regards to convoy escort, yes there is a difference. A single task force of 12 ships can participate in only one battle at a time. Three task forces of 4 ships each can participate in 3 battles at once. When you're scaring off subs, even a pair of destroyers is enough. But when raiding convoys, every intercepted convoy causes the route efficiency to be disrupted and it takes at least a week to recover the efficiency, even if no convoys were even sunk. It is much more efficient to make many tiny task forces for both convoy raiding and convoy escort than it is to group them into one large task force. The size of the are covered doesn't matter, rather the length of the convoy route is the factor that determines the number of convoys used and thus the required total escort size.

No, carrier planes do not automatically contribute to naval invasions. To get carrier cas support for your naval invasions, you must park the carrier off the coast and then manually set its planes to cas missions. What's nice about carrier cas though is that they do not have a mission efficiency penalty for lack of range coverage in their operating airzone.

 

[spicy57]

Brilliant! Thank you!