How to stop english navy as italy?

[Boost Me;-) minimis]

As far as i know, i should ignore submarines first and focus on medium and heavy ships right?

[Brett]

The ships are better than the subs. Get naval bomber and air superiority and you should be able to kill the invaders before they even land

[Brett]

Also garrison troops on the coast and ports

[Boost Me;-) minimis]

ok

[glythe]

Just won an ironman game as Italy... for Duce Nuked em and new world order Achievements.

What you want to do is focus a lot of production on regular planes and naval bombers. Have basically all your non subs in the Sicily sea zone. Station about 600 fighters and 1400 naval bombers in that airbase. Make sure to station 100 fighters+100 naval bombers in the 2 north sea zones where Germany has his starting fleet. If you don't it will get smashed and it will not emerge again until ~1945 or later.

Eventually station 100-200 fighters and that many naval bombers in each sea zone off the Italy/Greece coast. Once this area is largely pacified station about 600 fighters and 1400 naval bombers in the English Channel (leave 200 in Sicily and move everything else).

You can work your way towards dominance by stationing 100 fighters+100 naval bombers in every sea zone off the coast of Axis holdings (let Japan take care of Japan).

From now on I will try and help the AI by mass producing naval bombers for the shorelines that the AI does not know how to protect. You can also use tactical bombers to get +1 seazone of distance in many cases. This is very valuable around England to sink hundreds of troops being moved around.

Remember to do yourself a favor - you can make any ship being built go directly into a fleet. Queue up the number of ships you need so when you have free docks you need to change something (otherwise it is 100% automated)


Don't forget that you can always run from a battle by clicking repair now. About to lose a Battleship or Carrier? No problem click repair now (yes btw naval combat is kinda "not finished" yet). I like having my fleet set on auto repair yellow and split engaged once I am winning. Before I am winning I watch every sea battle with my main fleet.

Use the patrol order if you outnumber the enemy and want to "find" the enemy more often. Use S&D to have more ships in the fight sooner at a cost of finding the enemy less often. In other words use S&D at first and switch to Patrol later.


Subs are garbage unless:

1. Apparently you are supposed to use them in groups of no larger than 3 units raiding a sea zone (untested but credible source)
2. there are no enemy destroyers in the enemy fleet.


Don't make any subs except as replacements - put them on convoy raiding and set to do not engage ( will still kill convoys with no escorts). Put them in every sea zone off africa with no more than 3 per group.

Have at least 10 subs in your main battle fleet because when the destroyers get killed subs can easily hit battleships for 20-40% damage.


A quick note about carriers vs land planes. Land based planes only get to attack once per battle. So you need to have so many planes as to make the enemy planes basically not exist. Otherwise a carrier with 2 BB and some screens will kill your entire fleet. If you eventually start building carriers you will laugh at how quickly it will reach max experience level (3-6 months while some ships take that many years of combat to reach level 3).

What kind of ships do you need? A little bit of everything. Why? Destroyers sink/detect subs, so you need about 40 of them on your "deathstack" fleet. These are to soak hits (via evasion mostly). Be aware that subs can be upgraded with anti sub warfare via naval experience (dont bother till max tier destroyer). You need Light crusiers for AA and to trump destroyers in the early battle phase. You need Heavy cruisers to trump Light Cruisers.

Once the English+French had like 20-30 ships each I took all the old crappy ships and made a "b fleet" with old destroyers. I split all of the battleships and cruisers between them. If you are going to build proper battleships you can skip battlecruisers to save on research.


What does an "end game" fleet look like? 10 subs, 40 destroyers, 5-10 light cruisers, 5-10 heavy cruisers, 4 battleships and 4 carriers. You can scale that up but never have more than 4 carriers in a fleet or the planes get massive penalties. You really don't need more than 6 battleships per fleet.

Something else to note is that during a storm Carriers don't get to launch planes. I killed the American navy's Aircraft carriers all in the Carribean sea (which apparently is often very stormy or I gut lucky). Either way I killed 4 carriers during storms. Needless to say I lost basically nothing in those engagements even though I had a battleship heavy fleet.


Note Light cruisers kind of suck at the start of the game but they don't die anywhere near as often as destroyers. That is a usefulness all of its own.


If you have Death and Dishonor you should basically do this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ANABwFSHwM

[Boost Me;-) minimis]

Thanks man!

[glythe]

This is what you should have with DoD before WWII:

https://steamuserimages-a.akamaihd.net/ugc/832454008718921171/BD0B59C4343843A4C6D9D32A4E6689035C3D4A84/

If you don't have that DLC you will have to think of some other opening move (hint kill yugoslavia when the game starts).

Taking that land from Germany makes him weaker but honestly he will squander those resources as the AI.


This is the same game when the Soviets declared war on me:

https://steamuserimages-a.akamaihd.net/ugc/832454175959951645/D21D2A69CBCDEA3D23985D298E26D76E8C3244AA/

In a stroke of tactical genius they started the great purge after declaring war.

[Boost Me;-) minimis]

Yeah was thinking about getting the dlc

[Caelus]

lol subs are OP....and very fast to build.... also they cant be detected easily and pretty much fire massive shot off before they even get seen if you have enough of them.... as germany i spammed subs and decimated every fleet in the game, i could build them faster and get them out into convoy hunting, where they prey on everything in the sea hunting everything down, every cargo and troo ptransport dead before they can do anything, destroyers can be hard on you, but you smash them too, battleships get rekt easy by subs too. subs are love, subs are life, dominate the sea with them, they are easy. unlike ships which are open targets ad get pot shotted by everything right away and die in the first few days of any war, while subs pretty much go the distance and last out the whole war and get replaced faster than they die

[Caelus]

subs are so easy and fast to build i pretty much run them in fleets of 30 to 40 and have like 10 fleets of that size all over the place. convoy raid but make it so they can attack everything, you will love it when you see the constant fleet battle updates and see the enemy lose all their battleships and cruisers in no time, if you set them to not engage you will miss out on the glory of sinking enemy capital ships in seconds ad enemy will have fleet forever. destroyers are the only problem but they can still kill destroyers too and subs build faster than them anyway so you replace subs faster than they do destroyers.... subs are glass cannons, but glass cannons that cannot be seen until they have fired off their killing blows XD lots of subs, mean lots of damage fired off before they detect you, meaning they most likely die when they detect you and cat do anything about it

[glythe]

When I play Germany I build a proper navy and I will eventually kill every other navy.

Also just my 2 cents but you're not using subs correctly. They work fine until people start getting anti sub things (naval doctrine research) and then they become total garbage without the 1944 model.

My plan with land base planed dominance also works for MP.

[p2]

build aircraft carriers and go for the carrier naval doctrines. you can easily beat their navy from there

[Caelus]

lol i kept subs version 2 (germany starting subs i think) and still use them by 1944 where im just about to war soviet union..... allies fleets got decimated by my subs... using them coorectly or not my subs destroyed everythig in their path..... maybe its because i ran them in fleets of 40 subs and spammed like 10 fleets of them! lmao but got rapid fleet battle updates and lets just say the allies lost all their fleets really fast and they got cut through like butter...... they managed to keep their convoys a while though, they must have had millions of those, im sure i killed millions of them XD probably cheat spawned tons of them after their navy forces all died

[Caelus]

now that i think on it.... i pretty much had naval dominance yet allies kept sending convoys and attempts at naval landings which always got killed by my subs..... it pretty much means the AI doesnt need fleet dominance to send naval ladings like we do, we get stopped if we dont have naval doinance of any sea in between landing zone, yet ai doesnt lol

[glythe]

You only need dominance for a fraction of a second and the convoy will move.

Ships dont have to be in position to provide intel.... I had ships off Mexico provide intel for South East asia the second they were ordered to be in that area (immediately after I unpaused). Once they started moving I was free to keep the fleet where it was currently located.

You can do the same for planes.

Also this tends to not work out for the AI's favor if you blow up the convoys.

[FishLime]

Basically, just get at least 4 carriers (top priority), sufficient escorts (i like using 30 DDs and 10-15 CLs), at least 4 BBs, and around 5-10 heavy cruisers. You also need fighters and naval bombers for your carriers (and for you're air force, if you would like).

When you go to war with the allies, make sure all you're ports are covered by infantry units (very important). A reserve force of a few armored or motorized divisions is also useful to fight off naval invasions. Also, make sure to not let the enemy take a port if the land, as they will often land on provinces without one. They will be an easy kill if they dont have the supply from a port.

My normal strategy for defeating the Allies in the Mediterranean is to capture all their coastal provinces so they cannot repair ships or escape to the Atlantic or Indian oceans. You're top priorities should be to take 1. Gibraltar (by naval invasion, pretty difficult if they defend it heavily) 2. Suez and Alexandria (attack from Libya) 3. Toulon (attack from northern Italy) 4. Corsica (attack from Sardinia) 5. Malta (by naval invasion) 6. Algeria (from Libya). You will also want to take the other minor ports in the area such as in Palestine, Lebanon, Tunisia, and Egypt.

After you complete all that, enemy surface ships will not be able to enter the sea and the poor buggers trapped in will be quite easy to pick off. You will need to keep some destroyers in the area to sink enemy subs, as they will try to sink your shipping.