Hi there guys, I am a long term HOI4 player and a bit of a navy nerd, I know a lot about carriers but never fully understood carrier efficiency. I am currently playing Japan, from what I know you should only put 4 carriers per admiral but also Japan apparently has a buff to be able to use 5? Also with the new navy rework have they said any changes to carriers.
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Also 1 more question, as you guys know spamming out light cruisers with constant planes is good for spotting, how does the spotting penalty work? Is it based on 1 ship either in or aside from a fleet on patrol or does it stack based on multiple ships with spotting?
So far no mention of changes to carriers. You can partially remove the overcrowding penalty by going down the base strike doctrine path. I don't remember enough about Japan's tree to confirm if they have something as well. I would clarify that it is 4 carriers per task force, not per admiral.
Re: light cruisers with spotting planes, you don't need to spam them, just a couple for patrol to find enemies. They generally don't need to be in your strike force, just your patrol.
Re: light cruisers with spotting planes, you don't need to spam them, just a couple for patrol to find enemies. They generally don't need to be in your strike force, just your patrol.
Thanks for the reply yes I always put my spotter cruisers on do not engage as a seperate task force on patrol, just wanted to know if they stack the spotting values on top of each other to understand how the spotting stacking works but yeh, hopefully with the navy update they talk about adding 10 dockyards for capital ships and lowering the IC production costs and allow higher tier ships to be researched more earlier so they can be pumped out in time with how higher tier ships were commissioned.
The wiki isn't much help, but I think it checks the spotting value of the entire task force. So the values would stack. You probably don't need to stack it very high though. An important note is that each task force can only spot one opposing task force at a time, so spreading your spotters out is a good idea to be able to see 'more'.
Carrier overcrowding and over stacking are two separate penalties.
Overcrowding is having more planes on your carriers than your carriers have space for. When carriers get overcrowded, sortie efficiency is penalized. Generally, this means you should never overcrowd your carriers. Mass Strikes in the base strike doctrine reduces the sortie efficiency penalty per plane over the deck size limit. This lets you slightly over stack your carriers if you have bonuses to sortie efficiency. Admiral traits like air controller and Japan's Tora Tora Tora national spirit give boosts to this, which is probably what you were thinking of.
The carrier stacking penalty is a separate mechanic that operates as a soft cap to the number of carriers in a battle. Every carrier over four gives your fleet a -20% penalty to the number of wings that will sortie, capping at -80%. A wing in this context is not an individual air wing, but any individual carrier's complement of a given plane type. For example, a carrier with 60 naval bombers and nothing else has one wing for the purpose of this calculation. A carrier with both fighters and naval bombers has two wings.
If you have four carriers with only naval bombers, you have four wings and no penalty. If you add a fifth carrier you now have five wings and a -20% penalty, so your first four wings will fly. The order is based on the order of your carriers in the fleet manager. So in this example, your first four carriers are sortieing normally and your fifth carrier does nothing.
However, you can manipulate the math in your favor. If you have four carriers with only naval bombers (1 wing per carrier) and a fifth carrier with fighters, CV CAS, and CV NAVs (3 wings), you have a five carrier fleet with seven wings. 80% of 7 * 0.8 = 5.6, so your first five wings will fly. Since the fifth wing is the first wing on the fifth carrier, you can add a fifth carrier with mostly naval bombers and 10 each of CAS and fighters. Any nation can get a fifth effective carrier this way, not just Japan. Fighters also aren't affected by the penalty, so you can add as many fighter carriers as you want.
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So basically use 5 carriers, 4 of which are torpedo bombers and the last one with just CV fighters?
Carrier stacking penalty is just stupid. There is an opinion from one American admiral who said optimum is 4 carriers in one task force. Historically this was not any limit for effectiveness. The Japanese First Air Fleet made it's most succesful operations (including Pearl Harbor) with 6 fleet carriers: Akagi, Kaga, Hiryu, Soryu, Shokaku and Zuikaku. It experienced it's worst defeat when it only had 4 carriers present at the Battle of Midway. Not optimum.
Developers, please remove carrier stacking penalty for up to 6 carriers. The historical success of the Japanese First Air Fleet with 6 carriers tells more than an opinion from Mitscher (or whomever).
Developers, please remove carrier stacking penalty for up to 6 carriers. The historical success of the Japanese First Air Fleet with 6 carriers tells more than an opinion from Mitscher (or whomever).
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That would work, yes. However Carriers typically are used for dealing damage, and CVs with naval bombers or AP Bombs CAS are the highest DPS ships, so you really want to maximize your naval bombers like in the example I mentioned. If you're optimizing for damage, your fifth carrier should have all but 20 planes be naval bombers, then 10 CAS and 10 fighters.
If you're willing to do more complicated math, there are breakpoints for when the number of carriers out-scales the penalty since it caps at -80%. However, in basically all situations it's more cost effective to just stop at five carriers and put the rest of your naval IC into light cruisers or super-heavy battleships.
You able to show me the templates for the ones you would use against enemy fleets and what would you split between the carriers in the amounts of each?
Technically, a full carrier build does by far the most damage of any navy, it's just very questionable as to if its worth it or not
I always wanted to try and make it work in the practical sense but the problem is that it's a glass cannon nuke build, that does insane damage, but if you get bad weather for example, your fleet is just dead, since you probably won't have a decent chunk of SHBB/armor CL's as you would in the standard meta fleet
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Assuming basic game start carriers with 60 deck size, in the order your carriers show up in the fleet manager:
Carrier 1: 60 NAV
Carrier 2: 60 NAV
Carrier 3: 60 NAV
Carrier 4: 60 NAV
Carrier 5: 40 NAV, 10 CAS, 10 FTR in that order.
If you add 1 more deck space to the starting carrier design to fill out the carrier, you'd just add 20 NAVs to each carrier. If you get the MIO policy for +1 deck size, add another 10 NAVs to every carrier.
I agree that it feels stupid, but I suspect that it's primarily a balancing decision, "justified" by that one admiral's opinion.
If carriers in HoI4 were as impactful as in real life and had no artificial limit, there would be little reason to build other capital ships. So either strong carriers, or no limit, but not both.
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Thanks for the reply, is their a limit to the amount of deck space I can add per ship or does it not matter? I.e one can be 120 and another 100 without effecting sortie etc.
Out of curiosity, do kamakaze planes act as a 4th wing, or do they get tied in with one of the other wing types?
They do count as a 4th wing, but they are pretty useless as a whole
Allows japan to be able to launch more carriers worth of naval bombers though, but that's like i said a questionable build given you can already fly a lot more planes under tora tora tora (which is when you can actually do the most damage to fleets)
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Ok thanks, but to summarise basically maximise the deck space, 4 carriers should be carrier torpedos and the 5th one carrier fighters to be best?
Close, but the fifth one should be as I said. All but 20 should be naval bombers, 10 should be fighters, and 10 should be CAS.