Talk:List of fleet standard aircraft carriers by upgraded maximum stats/@comment-84.90.161.45-20141212234052/@comment-108.250.231.80-20141217173702

The initial torpedo strike really stops mattering pretty quickly in my experience. Its terrible the first time you encouter it, but once your fleet is mostly CAs and BBs, the torpedo strike, even with a full torpedo bomber loadout, becomes weak and innacurate, especially if you have fighter planes of your own. Moreover, if the enemy is commited to torpedo power, then they will almost certainly lose air superiority, rendering their torpedo power meaningless anyways.

Having Air Superiority is, for me, mostly about getting artillery spotting. All ships have pretty shakey accuracy and a huge damage dispersion under normal circumstances, even fully kitted out BBs with surface radar. I've seen my full fleet of BBs spend two full rounds of shellling, missing or doing scratch damage to greatly inferior targets. Getting cutins and double attacks drastically ups your chances of scoring good hits in combat, and scoring them before the enemy does, especially if you are also negating the enemies artillery spotting in the process. The difference between achieving AS or greater is like night and day for a battleship fleet and can turn an even match into a crushing victory. I'd take a mediocre fleet of battleships that have AS on their side over a fleet of Yamatos any day.

If you devote your carriers to attack power, they will score pretty powerful hits, but then you give up your BB/CAs much higher artillery spotting power and you open up your fleet to the enemies artillery spotting. Moreover, carriers filled mostly with fighters can still hold 1 Suisei in their smallest slot (plane count doesn't matter for divebombers) and still contribute to taking out anything below BBs. Besides, as I've said before, carriers are a bad source of damage. Their poor armor and penchant for attacking after anything relevant means that they will frequently be taken out before they can fire once. Focusing on torpedo power also sucks becuase it can be completely negated by enemy air power, it is inherently innacurate, and it weakens your shelling phase power. Cairrers also can't contribute to finishing off the enemy durring night battles. All in all, I would never recomend using combat focused carriers.

I would also like to point out that AA cut ins require a fair ammount of equipment to work. Even with the high angle gun + fire dirrector, you probably need to use AA radar to make it work consistently. They don't happen all the time, unlike fighter power, so they aren't something to rely on a lot either. Basically you are voiding one of your combat vessels by equiping AA cutin gear instead of real weaponry for something that doesn't give you Artillery spotting, doesn't negate enemy Artillery Spotting, and may not even stop the enemy torpedo strike.