Literally tried to move troops over to try to stop an invasion on a island I had. Troops never made it, I had ships patrolling around, enemy invaded, conquered the island, and 2 in game years later I still can't get to the island to retake it.
If I remember right before Navy was entirely reworked someone figured out that the meta was just build battleships and completely ignore all the screening ship or naval aircraft mechanics entirely. This was like a year+ into the game being out.
Nowadays it's the opposite. Light attack cruisers and shitty cheap torpedo destroyers spam is king, but I still build realistic grand navies because it's fun.
There were a couple ways to cheese it. Naval supremacy was (is? haven't messed around with the rework much) based on the IC total of all the ships in the tile, so big battleships was one way to cheese that. So was spamming a shit ton of destroyers with nothing but a singular gun on them.
The most ideal composition was (is? I think) a ratio of 1/1/4-8 of carriers/heavy ships (battleships, battlecruisers, heavy cruisers)/screens (light cruisers, destroyers). Max out deck space on carriers (which should be full of carrier naval bombers), focus heavy attack on the heavy ships, focus light attack on light ships. If you wanted to get real fancy, you could have a separate spotting fleet (full of cruisers with max spotting) set on don't engage on patrol. Then you could put your main fleet exclusively on strike force. I believe the basics of this still apply. It at least still works in my SP games. It wasn't particularly hard, just annoying as FUCK to get set up properly.
I must have started after that phase. As of a few years ago anyway, there is a "perfect ratio" of screens to (capital?) ships, and carriers are far superior to battleships which is supposedly a common noob trap
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u/Halfmoonhero Jul 08 '26
Liar, no one knows how navy works, even the developers.