I’d also like someone from Detroit to send a reply and let me know the specifics on what values you’re using for naval air. I have my own ideas about what to use, but if you all have been using them and they work there's no point in reinventing the wheel (propeller?) and I'd like to be able to shamelessly take advantage of your experiences with them.
We didn't actually ever put it into practical application, but we did discuss it with Mark and John.
We just thought that you could have a generic naval air unit that was just like the UK Swordfish unit for each nation. The UK would never change over to using regular fighters on the carriers. The same restriction would apply to Italy and Germany. And the Japanese and US light carriers.
Or you could have it that they could choose to put a fighter or a naval air unit on a carrier, but they would still be limited to one air unit on a CV.
The US and Japanese fleet carriers could operate with any combination of the two fighter units.
A naval air unit would help with the problem that we saw concerning the air allocation in naval battles. I didn't agree with fix that the Bostonians had come up with forcing half of the fighters in any naval battle to go air-to-air and half to go ground.
By having units that are specialized in what they historically were designed for, you then can allow the player to make their choices as to what is on the carriers and what job they will perform. But said choices will also be driven by the fact that the different units will have their strengths and their weaknesses.
You will still be able to use a fighter to go after surface naval units, they would just have a poor value for that. Just as using a naval air unit for air-to-air combat will be a less than perfect proposition.
Craig
