Board Thread:Special Events/@comment-25730832-20150427154046/@comment-1915363-20150501053936

Faeriedust wrote:

Ar-cen-ciel wrote:

Surface Task Force - Hard-hitting main BB fleet attacks first, protecting the escort fleet so they can deliver the final blow in night battle.

Carrier Task Force - Escort fleet attacks first (complete with the closing torpedoes). You know, to protect the aircraft carriers from getting chuuha-ed halfway to the boss.

Trouble with the latter is the escort fleet couldn't quite ninja the enemy attacks as much as they would've hoped, resulting in costly retreats whenever they got taiha-ed. This is false.. in carrier task force, the main fleet attacks first with opening air strike... :P

So with carrier task force you actually get significantly more damage upfront, but your escort fleet has to fight a bit earlier so they risk getting hurt, and they're probably your main hitters at the boss fight.

Whereas with Surface task force, you hope that your main fleet can soak up most of the damage, so that escort fleet stays shiny and fresh.

Personally I hate taking damage at all, so I'll go with carrier force whenever possible and trust in evasion of escort fleet (sparkles are probly must). Same case with the Surface Task Force actually. The preemptive strike goes like this for both of them:

Airstrike -> Support shelling/airstrike -> torpedo salvo -> Formation -> Battle

You're right about more upfront damage from carrier task force part, but that's only true only if your carriers have enough bombers to deal that kind of damage. As for trusting on evasion, well, only very high level escort ships (at least Level 70+) are trustworthy enough to worth the trouble of using the carrier task force, so yeah, it's a high-risk, high-return formation. Sparkles is a must, but personally I wouldn't use that as mainstay until I got a full fleet of married escort ships.