I’m not sure how authoritative I can be in this discussion, since in the 5 games we’ve played so far, the game only went on long enough for Japan to get into the war twice, and in those two Italy surrendered on the next turn, petty much ending things, so anything I say will be largely based on theory as opposed to experience. But based on how the system in this game works, and what I’ve seen in other games, I think I like the idea of a separate unit for naval air.
Something I experienced in our last game as Britain was that I had to decide when building fighters whether to build Spitfires or early naval fighters. If I didn’t have an extra or two, my carriers were useless until I could build replacements for combat losses. I kind of liked the realism of this decision process, and I’d like to see every other country faced with this as well.
One idea might be to have naval air units with an attack value of 3 for both air-to-air and bombing. Then, for combats involving aircraft versus ships, the naval air units would function as both a fighter and a bomber. Instead of the normal sequence of play, all planes on each side fire at each other in air-to-air; all surviving planes then move on to attack ships. If this results in too much carnage, make the naval air units have a 2 for air-to-air and a 3 for bombing. There is a justification for this; the naval air unit would represent a group of fighters and bombers together, while other air formations are exclusively fighters or bombers. With this route, you could make the naval air units 2/3 air-to-air/ bombing and regular fighters 3 air-to-air and 2 (or 1 if you prefer) against ships. Personally, I like this because it forces you to take into consideration what the mission will be for a given unit when you’re building units. So, the proposed units would look like this:
Naval Air
Air to Air – 2
Bombing (vs. ships) – 3
Bombing (all other) – 2
Fighters
Air to Air – 3
Bombing – 2
(Or 1 against ships and 2 against other targets)
I don’t like the half-and-half rule, if for no other reason than the problem that was brought up of when you have no ships to attack you’re still required to commit half of your planes as bombers.