It allows you to board much earlier. If you have to dance around building a carrier/destroyer just to deal with all that naval fodder, that’s going to set you back a turn or 2, which isn’t good. Weren’t you of the opinion anyways that UK airforce isn’t very useful, since they can’t immediately defend territories? I don’t mind giving up a fighter or two at all, if it means no more threat of luftwaffe strafing.
Please notice you have almost a 60% chance to get cleaned out of RAF
That’s somewhat misleading, since you don’t count the bomber as part of the RAF. I would be disturbed if I lost 2 fighters + 1 bomber, but I do kind of like 66% chance of winning with 1 bomber or more.
If I gave up 2 fighters to clean out the Baltic, then I could land on Norway or Karelia on UK2 without breaking a sweat. The baltic can prevent a crucial landing for a turn.
just waiting for you to bring out a battleship and some fodder to sink it with less loss.
How much less loss, versus the amount of time needed to accrue fodder? Fodder still costs money. Naval units aren’t cheap, you’d probably overbuild 2 tran which is 16 IPCs worth, not a whole lot less than 20 IPCs, but it also took you longer to assemble this fodder and it also required more care in where you deployed your navy so it doesn’t get stung by a massive aistrike with naval fodder.
Also, you never addressed my point - strafing. With strafing, you can limit your losses for the most part. Yes in the 1/12 times you will lose 2 pieces of airforce in one defensive roll, but 1/12 is fairly small (roughly two of these chances equals 1 AA roll). I would point out that there is a 1/6 chance that the UK will strike 3 times, which means it is twice as likely for the UK’s strafe to be more damaging than it is for the Germans’ defense to be more damaging.