Method to direct naval attacks?

[wga8888]

6 hexes from my major base, the enemy is landing at my minor base. Opponent has mid-sized bases 2 and 4 hexes in the opposite direction, both with ships in port and significant CAP. I would like to attack his ships at my base 6 hexes away but my flights go instead to his bases that are closer; I gets significant bomber losses. I think the computer selects naval targets based on range, target value, and/or strength of CAP.

If I restrict my search arcs so only my base 6 hexes away are searched (and hopefully only those enemy ships are found, plus any coastwatcher resorts which I do not control), is if possible my planes will attack the enemy 6 hexes away? or are naval attacks target selection not within my control?

Once he captures my base, I can then attack 'port' and that may result on hits on his ship, but that is after the fact.

[Bo Rearguard]

It seems strange that your planes are attacking ports and bases instead of ships. Do you have the Group Mission for your planes set for naval attack with a secondary mission of port attack or something else? If so, you may want to set it to just naval attack with "rest" as the secondary mission so they will only go after ships.

[wga8888]

I am doing my turn planning now for my pbem game. Will limit patrols for target I want to do to and do no secondary mission. Will find out tomorrow morning how thing went. Last time they went in the undesired direction and ran into 40 cap, I lost about 15 F/FB and a similar number of bombers. Only knocked down 1xClaude and 1xZero. My planes have had several bad days in the last week, some due to my not knowing AE differs from WITP which I have been playing for 6 years in pbem game.

[wga8888]

Only opponents ships at range 6 location were spotted by patrols. But none of my planes in that area few. Perhaps weather related. So no attacks but no attacks in the wrong direction either. Will attempts same in next turn.

[GetAssista]

Concentrate your search where you want your Naval attacks to go, abstain from search where you don't want the attacks, and pray. No detection - no attacks.
Remember that search planes automatically search full 360 for some short distance (4 hex?) around their base no matter their search orders. Also think about rebasing Naval bombers if you can play the distance instead of the angle

[RangerJoe]

Yes, they automatically search four hexes.

[Yaab]

Some old discussion on the same topic here

https://www.matrixgames.com/forums/tm.asp?m=3595346

EDIT: fixed the broken link

[jmscho]

On my wish list is the ability to tell Naval Strike missions to avoid one or more specific hexes - to handle this sort of situation.

[Lowpe]

ORIGINAL: Yaab

Some old discussion on the same topic here

https://www.matrixgames.com/forums/tt.asp?forumid=528

Link doesn't work, at least for me.

I went into great detail on how to do this in one of my AARs.

DL is king...and you can get DL from other sources than just aerial naval search. So you really need to understand how MDL and DL work if you want to keep your strike planes on target and flying.

[Yaab]

Thanks. Fixed the link.