Board Thread:Game Updates/@comment-25730832-20151013050733/@comment-26486243-20151116203028

Vcharng wrote:

So according to you (as well as what I finally found), Akizuki is stronger when she is alone, since every enemy bomber will have to take her ridiculously powerful AA, and what's more, two akizuki-class alone don't have more AA kill rate than one alone, except when joining a fleet, due to more squads assigned?

The part of "Akizuki's ridiculous AA is not due to AACI" was found out hours after my last post though. You could say that the AA effect is determined by the mean AA value of all ships in the fleet, which is very close to being true (with a slight disruption from AACI). When Akizuki is the only ship in the fleet, mean AA = Akizuki AA, which is a lot higher than if you throw in random Jintsuus and Myoukous. However, using fewer ships also results in lower outgoing firepower and greater incoming firepower concentration, which risks ships being sunk. The merits of dual Akizuki-classes in a single escort fleet is that it provides 2/12 ships of very high AA as well as a 91+% chance of API 1 AACI, at the cost of weakening said escort fleet's yasen potential, for instance.

If I remember correctly, I read before somewhere that this 'assignment' is the same one that causes targeting. Basically if a bomber squadron is initial-airstriking Yuudachi, Yuudachi will try to shoot it down; if a bomber is airstriking Akizuki, Akizuki will try to shoot it down. The idea makes sense, but I can't find the source to substantiate it at the moment.

Friendly AA mechanics have been known for some time on the Japanese side at least, though it's not been completely ported over to our end yet until Qunow recently started working on it. Abyssal AA is much newer information, and may or may not be accurate at this point.

Most players should have seen the effects of AACI not being the strongest form of AA in the Summer event on maps E3 and E7 at least, and possibly E6, when observing 18-slots of bombers survive, but yet 32-slots and 46-slots getting wiped out on occasion. If the majority of aircraft kills were attributable to AACI - which is known to shoot a fixed number across all bomber slots, one would have expected that the largest squadrons always survive and the smallest ones always die, which contradicted observations that squadrons seemed to get wiped out semi-randomly, especially on E7 against AD hime. Many players still believe AACI is responsible for the majority of their bomber losses however.