To Doomstack ... or not to Doomstack?

[Lanksta]

I am currently playing a save as the Empire of Japan in 1938 and as I plan for the Pacific War I am a little unsure of what to do in terms of organising my Imperial Navy.

So far I have kind of gone semi-realistic with ships organised into Carrier Divisions and such with units usually made up of 10-12 ships. I can send the Divisions off on their own or send multiple divisions to the same place together but remain separate.

My question is what does the US do with its Navy? I don't want to send my Divisions out and get wiped out by a US doomstack because that's how it does its Navy in this game but neither do I want to make the mistake of preempting this and making my own doomstack and find that the US was doing what I planned on doing and has split its Navy into small task force. I don't want to cheat the game and neither do I want it to cheat me.

What way should I send my navy out to make sure it is a level field for both me and the computer?

 

[Kovax]

I prefer to send out mutually supporting mid-sized groups to adjacent sea provinces, which covers a lot more territory than a single doomstack, and if one does run into heavy opposition, you can bring in additional firepower quickly enough to turn the battle around.

As has been mentioned repeatedly in previous threads on naval ops, you don't want to mix full CVs in with other capital ships, because the escorts will hang back to defend the more valuable CVs, leaving the BBs and BCs unsupported and taking all of the fire at bad odds. Normally, the faster escorts draw off more than half of the fire, and most of that misses because of their smaller size and greater speed/maneuverability. CVLs are not prioritized over BBs, so you can mix those into your Surface Action Groups (hopefully you've researched the techs enough to bring their speed up to that of the BBs, and not slow the whole fleet down), and put the actual CVs into their own fleets with suitable escorts.

 

[Phili]

Having land based aircraft nearby to lend support can be usefull.
Multi Role with thier longer range might be better than Interceptors to help against enemy CAG's.
Plus some spare CAG's that can be rotated with the CAG's from for your own CV's when they get depleted.

 

[k75fish]

Doomstacks of 25 DD's roaming the seas will eat up AI Fleets