@Black_Elk:
When I read the suggestions made here I think what people really want is a Cruiser unit that serves as a catch-all. Basically a CA + CL + CC/Pocket Battleship + Destroyer Flotilla leader + Anti-Air + you know, pretty much every conceivable kind of cruiser all-in-one! haha
This sounds a bit like the all-round features that the Tactical Bomber developed under a number of house rule proposals. :-D This kind of thing works fine for Swiss army knives, but not for real-world military units because any vehicle or weapon system design is a compromise between competing features. Generally speaking, you can design a weapon (like the T-34) which has a pretty good performance in most or all of its features, or a weapon (like the Maus) which has fantastic performance in some features but terrible performance in others, but you generally can’t design a weapon whose performance is fantastic in every respect (unless, perhaps, you’re prepared to pay a fantastically high price for it, and to own it in fantastically small numbers – the WWII A-bombs being a good example.)
@Black_Elk:
CWO has a good grasp on how these ships were used at the time. So what do you think dude? If you had to pick a single unit with which to pair a cruiser in A&A what would it be?
I vote infantry or destroyer.
If infantry, say the combined arms is part of a broader marine concept for the whole navy, just being represented here abstractly between the ship and the ground via the cruiser (since its the naval unit that gets the least play right now.) Focus on the bombardment aspect, or the transport idea, or some sort of transport + movement advantage. Basically a combined arms for amphibious model.
If destroyer, you could try to work out some kind of flotilla or cruiser which leads destroyer-groups concept. If the cruiser boosted the destroyer attack +1, people would probably buy more of them, and it would make existing cruisers much more valuable. Basically combined arms for naval.
Just in terms of historical realism, my general impressions on the various possible cruiser combinations would be:
Cruiser + Infantry? Not in terms of transportation, since cruisers weren’t suited to transporting troops. (The Japanese used destroyers as improvised troop transports at Guadalcanal, but that was a peculiar situation arising out of US air superiority in daytime…and in any case, it involved destroyers, not cruisers.) The concept of cruiser fire support for amphibious landings, however, is perfectly valid, since it was a common WWII practice.
Cruiser + Aircraft Carrier? Yes, cruisers added to the protective rings of AAA fire that were thrown up around carriers, whose own AAA abilities were limited. US practice was to put the carriers in the middle of a formation, with battleships surrounding the carriers, cruisers surrounding the battleships, and destroyers surrounding the cruisers.
Cruiser + Battleship? Nothing much to be gained there since, as I’ve already outlined, both ship types differ mainly in scale rather than in fundamental ability.
Cruiser + Destroyer? This has potential, and I’ll need to think about it in more detail later today. Here are some preliminary thoughts for now. First, these two ship types did have somewhat diffferent fundamental abilities, with some overlap. US destroyers and cruisers (the ones I know best) both tended to have 5-inch dual-purpose guns (usable in AAA and surface-attack roles), and both typically had torpedoes, but many cruisers also had 6-inch or 8-inch guns for heavy bombardment, whereas destroyers had anti-sub depth charges. A wartime bonus of having cruisers and destroyers working together was that the cruisers would sometimes top up the fuel tanks of the destroyers, since destroyers were often looking for refills. (They often mooched from battleships too. The Iowas class battleships, whose armour allowed them to venture into seas too dangerous for tankers, were nicknamed “armoured oilers” by US destroyer crews.) Second, the “destroyer leader” concept is interesting, since it did actually exist in WWII. I’ll need to read up on how it actually worked, but as I recall it was used (at least in part) to justify the construction of certain ship designs that were, arguably, either very big destroyers or very small cruisers. I think the Tribal class sort of falls into this category, as did certain Italian cruisers. Also, if memory serves, destroyers sometimes operated in formations called flotillas, with a light cruiser serving as the flotilla’s flagship (though not always under the command of a genuine flag officer, i.e. an admiral). Anyway, more to come later.
Cruiser + Submarine? No. Their mission types were too different to benefit from combined-arms cooperation.
Cruiser + Transport ship? Perhaps, in the sense that cruisers could (in principle) protect them from attack with their AAA batteries. I’m not sure, however, to what extent cruisers were actually used in that role in WWII; destroyers may have been cheaper to use in the same capacity.
