Board Thread:Fleet's Prepared-ness/@comment-26355218-20160115093844/@comment-26848183-20160116045535

The developers tweeted that it will be an easy event. However, you are missing lots of suspected branching ships. Odds are that you'll get screwed over by branching. They say it's based off Operation Rei-Go, so I'll expect to see lots of enemy planes, enemy PT boats, and a land-based boss based on historical context.

Fleet levels:

Outside of suspected special branching ships, weak points of include your destroyers, aviation cruisers, and I presume your auxillary ships too. Your DD depth is low, so if they reintroduce the transport expedition fleet, expect to see some pain.

The ships I suspect as special branchers right now are the following: Kasumi, Kiyoshimo, Asashimo, Ashigara, Ooyodo, Ise, and Hyuuga. There's nothing you can do about Kiyoshimo and Asashimo, but if you aren't restricted by ship slots, I recommend holding onto at least Kasumi, and Ise and Hyuuga if you choose.

Whether or not to grind is at your discretion. You'll need a decent stockpile if you want to aim for both farming and clearing the event with hard difficulty.

Equipment crafting:

I saw your equipment and thought one thing: you cheapened out on your plane crafting by using the 20 30 10 90 recipe. You lack enough Ryuusei Kai because of it, and you'll have to pay for it now. Since you'll need more Reppuu for the Reppuu 601 upgrade anyways, it's back to crafting with the 20 60 10 100 recipe until you have enough torpedo bombers.

Equipment improvement:

It's good that you're using your daily quest frequently. Improving equipment takes a long time, and it takes months to see a big enough change in your fleet preformance. Rather than telling you what to improve, I'll focus on showing you how I gather my improvement materials to fund equipment improvement. That'll probably be more useful for you in the long run.

This flowchart aims to combine as many objectives together in a single run. At times, if you include daily quests, it you will able to fulfill 6 sortie quest objectives with the same sortie. It will save resources and time, and dead-end nodes won't be as salty.

The requirement is to have Nachi, Myoukou, Haguro, 2 leveled CAVs, and 2-3 wolfpacks of submarines.

It's very sustainable. It takes very little resources, as the bulk is of the sorties is just using submarines. The weekly portion is quite friendly on buckets too. I lucked out this week, and completed this week's questline without using a single bucket. The sparkling at 1-1 for bw1 pretty much pays back for entire month's repeatable quests.

There are guides like the one below. I don't follow it directly, mainly for my personal preference and bias. Since the event is looming soon, I would start by adding one star to equipment that you are certain that you will use during the event. A pair of 20.3(2) and (3), a pair of 41cm cannons, a 381mm kai, a pair of OTO 152, a pair of 10cmm+AAFD, a searchlight, etc. Just scatter improvements to a bunch of equipment because you don't have the time to improve anything to 4 stars right now.

http://kancolle.wikia.com/wiki/User_blog:Hayashi_H/Advanced_Equipment_Guide#What_should_I_upgrade_first.3F

Other notes:

Sparkle your expedition destroyers. Pre-spakle a bunch at time (you can use bw1 at the same time), and swap them out when they get tired throughout the week. You need to stockpile efficiently if you want to solidify your chances of getting the hard medal. After you hit cap, you're losing nearly a third of the resources you should be gathering from these expeditions. Getting great success will help your destroyer situation, as experience gained per expedition doubles if it is a great success. It really adds up over time.