Slitherine

Gabe, I haven't started with this campaign yet, but I'm also curious how the first scenario is going to work out against these odds. My game's naval units are sometimes a bit faster, so they possibly have a better chance, but hardly against somewhat faster aircraft too.
All my naval units have supportAA, so sticking together can help. Your ships look a bit too wide spread there. For a good air defense of ships, you have to let your fighter aircraft sit on top of ships and don't engage anything yet if they are going to suffer some damage. In this extreme example though, it's likely that the many AI fighters will immediately engage your fighters too and quickly decimate it. It still looks more like a kamikaze run on US side. Moving directly in opposite direction of the Jap carrier fleet is already good strategy.

There were subs all around, too, BTW, just didn't do much damage, as usual. My cruisers are still vanilla, so no supportAA, just the three(!) provided destroyers, which were cumulated around the BBs as soon as they arrived (can be seen under the planes on the screenshot). The cruisers do most AA damage if not moved, so I tried that. But with such weak stats I was lucky to land a 1HP damage per attack. Couldn't use the battleships AA effectively, they were just running away from the torpedo planes, couldn't risk them being a stationary target...And believe me, I know about the fighter's support mechanic, which worked to a degree, if not pushed away by the numerous enemy bombers (what you see on the screenshot is NOT the initial attack wave!) or shot down real fast if surrounded by Zeros...
The blue teams (AI controlled) quite numerous planes were just behaving like usual (going after the weakest enemy units only), I couldn't use them to support my fleeing ships and just had three quite weak fighters at my disposal. I'm not saying it's impossible to accomplish with some bold or interesting strategies, but too hard, IMO.

This kind of "desperation" scenario could work very well to demonstrate the "against all odds" situation the soldiers were facing there, but all prim. AND sec. objectives should still be achievable, that's my only point in this.

Horst, thanks for all the comments on my mod page, BTW, the bunker ideas sound real good.
Now all I have to do is: to actually do all the work in the mod and documenting it porperly *sigh* ...and I'm kind of postpoing that the last few days, to be honest...

So, I've been playing a cool adventure game I found recently to clear my head a little...

I managed to save enough battleships and 'win' this scenario during my initial playtest.
But the scenario may have gotten more difficult after later modifications.
The jury's still out...

Erik2 wrote:I managed to save enough battleships and 'win' this scenario during my initial playtest.
But the scenario may have gotten more difficult after later modifications.
The jury's still out...

I remember the very first version having a undersupply of the Japanese fighters from the start, this helped a lot. The Zeros were still a problem then, but I've managed to save almost all BBs (heavily damaged, of course) on my first playthrough..

And I admit, I haven't tried holding my ground near Pearl and shooting down the airplanes via the battleship's own AA batteries, just seemed too risky. Maybe that strategy would've even helped with the blue teams fighters being more near by? I also considered deploying a carrier (having the supportAA trait) near Pearl, but then I'd probably lost the carrier instead, and that didn't seem like a good trade.

During my test I moved the battleships towards the exit and used their AA against whatever Japanese bomber nearby.
The (non-core) US land-based fighters were sacrifying themselves trying to protect the BBs.
Many of the Japanese fighters should now start from the carriers to avoid cluttering the airspace above Pearl too much.