Explain air-to-air combat to me

[rezaf]

I'm currently playing the mission again and it went from "omg, how am I even supposed to survive" to "yawn".
Another of those things where hindsight makes all the difference in the world.
I purchased two additional Zeros, glued the non-core carriers on the western border of the map, cruisers directly up front so they can use their AA attack without moving (this indeed works much better and they even occasionally hit something), left some destroyers back there and deployed most of my core naval forces south with the invasion force.
The torpedo bombers, pounded on by six Zeros that know upfront from where they'll arrive, end up flying strange zig-zags and even back and forth some turns, so only a single one actually reached one of the carriers so far and did one point of damage.
There's still some remaining incoming aircraft, so I guess I'll take some more losses in the end, but I'm not really struggling atm.

I suppose the key comment by adherbal was the one about the supply limits being dragged down by the damaged carriers.
Since you have no ground based airfields (before capturing Midway, anyway), your air supply limit is stretched to the max. Once your carriers get hit, you overrun the supply limit, your efficiency decreases, you can stop less incoming aicraft, you get hit again, your supply situation further deteriorates ... and so on. It's a brutal downward spiral.

Moral of the story, I WAS approaching the situation in a less then ideal manner after all and everything adherbal wrote was absolutely correct.

Personally, I think giving the player no tools whatsoever to turn such a situation around is somewhat bad game design, but what do I know.
Maybe it's a neccessary byproduct of all the other parts of the game I actually like a lot.
_____
rezaf