Re: US navy
I’ve recently keyed in on just spamming out a bunch of planes, as the allies.
One interesting thing with the US, if you’re going for a “floating bridge” to take and reinforce Greece: once you get a carrier set up in SZ92, you can move fighters from that SZ to Greece, while also having fighters from the Eastern US (with the airfield) able to reach SZ92. In this way, your carrier is always loaded, while also moving new fighters to Greece every round (once you control the territory) – taking 2 rounds to get from the Eastern US all the way to Greece.
I should also say more generally, my initial assumption about the US navy build was just to dump carriers with aircraft into SZ101, however:
With the airfield and the scrambling ability, fighters placed in the Eastern US can effectively defend the territory and the SZ With the airfield allowing planes to move 1 extra space, this makes it effectively the same distance as moving from the SZ Even with the harbor in play, the planes can still move 1 space further than the carriers, so it’s helpful to have carriers that are already launched and further up the pipeline, to catch planes – even when/if you are putting out new carriers.The other thing is while I feel a loaded carrier is a strong defensive/deterrent piece of any naval group, it doesn’t really serve much purpose in SZ91 once the Atlantic is cleared of Axis subs/ships (and especially if there aren’t any bombers close by.) You also need a good number of destroyers for defense of any naval group, but I’m not sure a carrier is necessary for SZ97, if the idea is to be landing fighters in Greece all of the time (and maybe laying down an airfield?)
I recently tried an early battleship buy, pairing that with the starting cruiser and adding destroyers, to use as the tip of the spear going into the Mediterranean. Since you’re likely to need a few landings in Yugoslavia to wear down the Axis, the shore bombardment is nice to have – and it feels like more value than just parking a carrier there to passively defend.
So, I’ve said before that you probably want at least 2 destroyers and a loaded carrier as part of any naval group; now I’m trying to see if I can pare that down and be more efficient with how I spend and set things up. I can pretty easily get a “global domination” win as the Allies by about round 20, but I feel like I should be able to speed that up.
