Views sort - ealry war allied air power

[strawb]

In my limited experience of 3.2 on both sides it seems that allied land based air is rather too good at sinking (big) Japanese ships. Take the AARs coming out of mine game vs LST (and I had the same when playing Japanese).

It seems that Dutch and CW crews, either with their starting aircraft of Martins and Hudsons (range 5 - very handy) , or requipped with Havocs or Mitchels, inflict major losses, or rather losses of major ships, with single 500lb bombs hits . Vs LST my Hudsons are now 70+ experience and frequently breaking through Zero CAP to take on CVs - I have even re-re-euiped units with Hudsons for the range!

My slighter wider experience of history tells me that this is wrong. Allied air, espeically non-naval air crews, could not find a carrier in a goldfish bowl, never mind bomb it. And that every tanker they saw was a CV and every destroyer was the Yamato.

So let's say that the ability to get through and hit an IJN ship is the relationship between the power of the allied 500Ib bomb and bomber unit experience vs the carriers armour/durability and any Zeros flying CAP. Let us assume that we are relatively happy with the 500lb stats vs IJN CV armour/durability: IJN damage control is poor, decks thinly or none armoured etc, and reducing 500lb bomb stats then impacts on allied air abilities later in war to skip bomb hell out of IJN.

So we come to experience; you could increase all CV based Zeros experience: this reduces chance of Hudsons etc getting through but does not effect ability of allied air to get on to transport or other 'softer' TFs , which, if air power is properly deployed and set up is a valid and plausible outcome. of course if an air TF is around they always hit that first as that is why air tfs are there, to cover other TFs. But still would reduce chance of hits, and hence of one hit wonders. Downside: you then mess up the relationships of experience between Zeros and say US carier air and Midway becomes (more?) one sided.

OR - you have weak 'early war 500lb' and a stronger 'late war 500lb' but that feels fake to me.

OR - you considerably reduce experience of the starting allied air ie CW, British and Dutch army air units. Sure they are 'well trained' as they generally had long peactime careers. But that means they can land in the darkwithout pranging, keep a nice V formation for air shows etc and (just about) do their job of bombing supply depots and other army targets. It does NOT mean that they can (or have any training and experience of) successfully square search the ocean and find, identify and bomb a moving naval force, even if they had help from say a Catalina shadower. I prefer this fix.

View?

[Sardaukar]

I'd also reduce the exp of some Allied air units. Especially Dutch East Indies air groups become painful for Japanese in game..and IMHO shouldn't be.

Cheers,

M.S.

[Capt. Harlock]

I kind of like the "old" and "new" 500 lb bomb approach. Admittedly the bomb itself didn't really change, but the new tactic of skip-bombing made a major difference in accuracy. (Mind you, it would probably have been much less effective against ships with side armor.)