Talk:Winter 2015 Event/@comment-24903916-20150218004737/@comment-4125495-20150218012249

The reason is that >1 CV means you're running a fast response fleet, and the shelling order is reversed. Your escort fleet has to take the brunt of the enemy attacks before the main fleet has a chance to fire, and that means they're forced to survive several rounds against multiple battleships, Cruiser demon in node A and CV Hime in pre-boss nodes. That's probably not going to end well for you. Additionally on the boss your fleet is unlikely to be able to sink her during the day, you're going to be relying on your escort fleet's ability to knock her out at night. Effectively your main fleet is there entirely to escort your second fleet through to the boss and hopefully soften her up a bit so they can kill her during a night battle.

You could run 2 CVLs instead of 1 CV but then you're running two ships with low HP and low armor instead of just one, and even a glancing blow from one of the BBs on the way there will be enough to knock them out a lot of the time.

I'd give it a try with Nagato and whichever is higher out of Yamashiro and Hyuuga and your two Kongos, plus if you can Kaga loaded entirely with Reppu (not even a saiun - this does means she won't fire at all, but she probably won't do much damage anyway) and if you have a CAV put them in the 6th slot with a couple of floatplanes. A floatplane on Hyuuga/Yamashiro in the biggest slot might help too. Assuming you got a Reppu 601 from one of the earlier event maps and can load Kaga's other 3 slots with normal Reppu or better, you should be around 206-210 air power which is enough to get AS on the pre-boss node in every configuration on Easy with enough of a buffer to get through the previous nodes, and also get you AS on the boss. A DD which can do AACI in the second fleet is helpful too. It doesn't stop the pre-boss CV Hime from ruining your day, but does take a bit of the sting out sometimes.

Sparkle everyone and run both support expeditions if you can. Even if you have to use underleveled BBs & CVs in the support fleets, it's worth it. I ran fairly low-level ships in my support fleets because I'm an idiot that focused entirely on leveling Fast BBs & Yamato for the last year or so and so my Nagato & Mutsu are both only level 30, but they were pretty effective in support regardless.