Invulnerable battleships?

[Raeder]

As I understand the rules, heavy fleets are largely invulnerable to anything but the fire of another heavy fleet. Am I missing something?

This mainly bothers me from the naval air point of view. Without a massive tech upgrade, it appears carrier airgroups cannot harm heavy fleets. They only get a ship attack rating of 4; heavy fleets negate 3 dice with armor, leaving an attacking carrier airgroup 1 die to match the fleet's defense of 12, which simply cannot happen. With 1 tech upgrade to ship attack, they would still roll 2 dice vs defense 12, a one in 36 crap shoot that is very unlikely. The airgroup doesn't really get dangerous until ship attack is upgraded to 6 or 7, but the battleship owner can easily offset this with cheaper upgrades to heavy fleet evasion.

In the real war, several times as many battleships were lost to air attack than were lost to naval gunfire; this is the reason no nation built battleships after WWII. GGWoW's potrayal of this relationship appears flawed to me.

[Forwarn45]

The key to effective attacks against shipping is the torpedo attack. Any torpedo attack (by subs, other ships, or air) is not negated by armor. The Japanese, in particular, have a pretty decent torpedo value (4) for their starting carrier air, and other nations are not bad (3). Thus, carrier air should have a good chance of hitting on its own. Also remember that the first attack of any unit against another, even if it is entirely ineffective, will reduce the target's evasion by 1. So if you soften up the units with other types of attacks (by fighters, for example) - this will give you a chance of hitting even if your torpedo value isn't that high.

[Raeder]

Thanks for the clarification.  I wondered why the game distinguished torpedo attack from ship attack, when they seemed to do the same thing.  I did carefully consult the manual before my original post, but it doesn't seem to mention torpedo armor negation.  After reading your post I finally found this mentioned in the "Official Rules Clarifications & Changes" sticky.
 
I am generally not pleased with the manual for this game, it seems to concentrate to much on the "fluff" historical notes at the expense of clear and complete rules explanation.

[Lebatron]

ORIGINAL: Raeder

I am generally not pleased with the manual for this game, it seems to concentrate to much on the "fluff" historical notes at the expense of clear and complete rules explanation.

For World at War-A World Divided which will be out soon, Joel is making sure the new manual is more clear on the type of things you mention. But to help you out now, did you know a recent feature has been added to WAW to help players understand the mechanics of combat? It's a new text pop-up that appears when you mouse over the combat rolls in the detailed combat report screen. If you have used that then you would have been able to see that armor does not negate any torpedo attack dice. Just look for the specific text on that and any other combat modifiers and you will soon understand all the ins and outs of combat mods.