Board Thread:Fleet's Prepared-ness/@comment-26354948-20160717165744/@comment-26464279-20160717183110

All hard will be close to impossible with the ships you have available there unless you put in a lot of leveling effort before the summer event.

Be warned that devs already announced that the event will be a larger one while being not as large as Summer 2015 or Spring 2016. So to say you can expect 5 or 6 maps or maybe 4 maps with the mechanic used in Winter 2016 E3 coming back where you have to clear a transport route first before being allowed to face the actual boss on the same map.

Also they told us to prepare our bauxite which implies that it could be a CV heavy or land-base heavy event.

Let's start with the better things first.

Your CL and CLT are good choices and nicely leveled. Modernize Abukuma, Sendai, Kitakami and Kiso to max and you are good to go.

During the event try to get a hold on Ooyodo for the Fleet Command Facility that will make your life on combined fleet maps a lot easier. She also drops on regular maps (1-6 & 3-5) but her droprates there are abysmal low so it will likely just be a resource sink to try and get her from there.

Your CAs are also looking quite good. Bring Maya to Kai Ni and you are pretty much set. On the other hand your CAVs are in dire need of some levels. Getting Tone or Chikuma to Kai Ni level would be a good idea and if you really intend to go hard you should bring at least 2 of your back-up Mogami-class CAVs to level 60+.

As for BBs get Haruna to Kai Ni and give Mutsu & Fusou some more levels to bet at least at 60. As a strong back-up you should bring your Musashi to Kai with daily pvp. But don't sortie her to maps where she can take damage or your repair bills will explode.

You have 2 decent CVLs with RJ and Chiyoda but that's all there is to say about your CV(L)s.

Bring Akagi to around level 60+ and Kai Ni Chitose. Kai Ni Hiryuu & Souryuu and also bring Chitose and Chiyoda to level 60 if you have the extra time and Complete the Hiryuu/Souryuu plane quests for the Tenzan (Tomonaga) and Suisei (Egusa) squadron.

As if it would be better to try and get a prototype catapult for Zuikaku Kai ni or use the blueprint that is required with the catapult on Tone/Chikuma I'm hardly biased towards Zuikaku nonetheless I'd suggest you to train both to the required level and decide with whom to go when the breanching rules are layed out and you know if you are better off with a strong CAV or a strong CV(B).

As for your DDs, you have barely enough for one transport combined fleet. That's one possible ship lock you can cover with that. Also of those you still need to bring Kasumi to Kai Ni. To that you should add at least 4 more Kai Ni or high level strong Kai DDs to be on the safe side. Ayanami, Asashio, Fubuki & Murakumo are good Kai Ni DDs that are on your shiplist or easy to obtain. But if it's for the main fleet of a transport combined fleet using ships like Mutsuki or Kisaragi Kai Ni there should also work in there.

At last you should follow the dev tweets or kc-wikia discussion about those tweets as devs often announce the strategy the event is based on beforehand and leveling the ships who took part in those missions early can help you to avoid the hard routes on event maps and allows for easier branching.

That being said rather than trying to force all hard you are better off to start hard and drop down to med/easy later on instead of wasting tons of resources on pre-event leveling and use your time to gather more resources instead. The best ships won't help you if you don't have the resources to support their sorties.

If you were to do that you could probably get through without a Tone-class Kai Ni and with only Hiryuu instead of both Hiryuu and Souryuu. Also you don't have to train 4 aditional DDs to Kai Ni to be prepared for shiplocking and are fine with Kasumi and one or two others. Also you can set the minimum required level for your event ships to 50+ instead of 60+