Why are my planes that stupid

[Aufricer]

Hello everybody,

any hints on why enemy planes are

constantly attacking and hitting my CV or main BB on first chance

while my own planes seem to attack mainly DD or well protected CA + barely do a hit.
Enemy is attacking with like 5 to 8 planes, interception does not do well and its like 2 bomb hits or torpedoes.
My own wave of 10 to 15 planes is attacking while 3 to 8 are damaged or shoot down.

I have send my waves to the reported enemy carrier group (like 5 CV, 3 CVL, small ships). Priority target is CV as well.

I wonder if it is realy bad RNG or if it has to do with status of training etc. War is fresh, crew quality is -1 or -2 and half of the ships came from WU status, thus even the CVs only have a 60 % to 80 % plane strenght.
My fighters lack 5 years behind as the newest fighter is still rolling out (4:1 old vs new fighters).

I am open to advice on how to improve.

By the way in the OB tab behind some ship names I find an 1S or 2S. The manual says M is for mines, but what could S be ?

[WLRoo]

That's mostly a training/quality issue.

Things that may help:

Turn on Elite Pilot Training in preferences

Don't put CVs, CVLs or Airbases into Reserve even in peace time (or else reactivate them as soon as you hit Yellow tension levels)

As for age of aircraft, that slows down as the game progresses. Early on, 5 years is a big performance discrepancy and you'll fall behind quickly whereas later on performance barely changes.

[mrchuck]

I think there might be more to it than that.

I'm finding as the game wears on, that while my CAP eventually gets very good at shooting down enemy strikes, they are truly abysmal at locating and attacking enemy carrier forces, even with elite training and decent planes. I've seen this many times. The AI does not seem to suffer from this problem nearly as much. It has got to the point where I'm routinely declining carrier battles simply because I can't make them work for me.

Part of it I think is the very confusing way in which spotting reports are handled in the game, which I and many others have mentioned before. It's very hard to sift them by eye, and the way they're presented when targeting strikes doesn't help.

It would help a lot of instead of popping up a lot of confusing numbers in the panel, the targeting screen would show the sighting position on the map, some indication of whether strikes are likely to make contact or not at the last known heading and speed, and the summary of what was spotted.

May I suggest that SSG's Carrier Strike from 30+ years ago did this a lot better, and while obviously a much simpler game, still left plenty of scope for bogus or misleading sightings or failure to locate, while giving the player a decent chance of actually finding something and hitting it. If you haven't seen it, download it from some abandonware site and you'll see what I mean in about 5 minutes, Another notable thing about Carrier Strike is that the way weather is handled is actually quite sophisticated. It makes possible running into rain squalls to hide from nearby strikes, which you can't do in RTW because there is just one weather over the whole battle area at any given time.

CS also has a 'TF broke radio silence' event, which gives you a pretty solid indication of enemy forces with radiolocation, and is not modelled in RTW at all. This should happen whenever the player or the AI adjusts final strike destinations.

I've found the only thing I can be sure of finding and hitting are forces spotted by my surface forces, so I usually sigh, target them, and often get good results doing that. The alternative seems to be sending strikes off on a wild goose chase, and them returning without results.

Twice only in a LOT of games, I've found enemy carriers with my surface forces and then proceeded to shoot them up, may I say with considerable glee as they burn nicely. But this is about as rare as it was IRL.

The other criticism I have around carrier ops is that you don't seem to be able to do two very important things--first, pack up all air ops and just flee if you need to, or second, and conversely, keep fighting your planes even if you're staring down the muzzles of Yamato's guns, like Sprague did.

[WLRoo]

Are you checking your recon arcs at the start of battle?

They always revert to default, which isn't useful in every case.

I try to set an arc of about 60 degrees forwards of my travel path (you can probably get away with less) for carriers, then have the airbases adjust their arcs to cover a similar region.

You may also need to increase the distance that recon flights will travel, especially as aircraft range increases. Instigate a 2-phase search, once you have night-flight capability add night recon as an option.

Other than that, I've always found the ability to target a spotting report useful.. Date, time, number and class of ships reported followed by a heading. Date can be ignored though, it's not that often you'll be looking at massively out of time data.

Oh, and remember to ready the aircraft first. It is a risk, but it allows you to launch much more quickly.

For example, I go to order a strike at 1202. My most recent reports are:

1146 3 TR 312
1129 1 BB 2 CA 3 CL 10 DD 201
1128 2 BB 4 CA 15 DD 048

I'm going to target either 1129 or 1128. Both of these report a heavy fleet presence, likely the same one (I think lat and long are also reported to check this data) and it's an ID mismatch. I could double check this before opening the strike screen by clicking on the reports in the log.

The other thing is, remember to check you have the range to reach the target, have a scout around to find the target, attack and fly back. Most torpedo bombers fly with a heavy, or if lucky a medium, load when carrying a torpedo - this is noticeably shorter compared to the light load range.