how much boat in a fleet?

[Kanjejou]

is there and optimal fleet size?

30-60-120-400ships?

what ratio 1-2-4-8 1-5-25-125 ect...

[Songbird]

The naval game is too dynamic to discribe it properly.

But in terms of composition 2-3 screens per capital ship has proven to be a sweet spot.

[Kagemin]

You need at least 3 screening ships (destroyers and light cruisers) per capital ship, and you should never have more than 4 carriers in one fleet (stacking penalty).
Other than that there's not too much I think, depends on your doctrines and overall fleet sizes.

[Kanjejou]

so i cant stack 20 capital ship +120 screening ship without any malus

[equinox1911]

Where do you guys get the number of screens to capitals from?
I doubt anyone has done the testing on that bc it is pretty much impossible to do.

From my testing i could only conclude that speed seems to be the most important stat [except for CVs. Another note is that CAs are not worth the investment.

[equinox1911]

Originally posted by Kanjejou:

so i cant stack 20 capital ship +120 screening ship without any malus

Nope as far as is known there is no stacking penalty per se like in hoi 3 and even then doomstacks were the way to go.
The only limitation that seems to be true is that there is a limit to the planes that can join a fight but i am not even sold on that because most people cite 4 carriers as the max but carriers can vary from ~40 planes to over 100.

[Kagemin]

For one there's the tooltip in-game, and then it's all written in the files. As with all the Paradox games the defines.lua (00_defines) has pretty much all the modifiers in it, if you want to easily moddable.

Some of the relevant lines for example:

BEST_CAPITALS_TO_SCREENS_RATIO = 0.25, - capitals / screens ratio used for creating FEX groups in naval combat
CARRIER_STACK_PENALTY = 4, - The most efficient is 4 carriers in combat. 5+ brings the penalty to the amount of wings in battle.
CARRIER_STACK_PENALTY_EFFECT = 0.2, - Each carrier above the optimal amount decreases the amount of airplanes being able to takeoff by such %.

[equinox1911]

Ye, the problem with some of the sections of the defines file is that we do not know what they mean.
For example what is a FEX group and though there is a value to create them the game strifes for is this really the best or would lets say a 100% capital ship FEX perform better.

Even the carrier max amount is not really clear without extensive tests...
There is the max carrier value then we have a value for how many planes can lift of from a carrier and after that we have:

SEA_AIR_COMBAT_MAX_WINGS_ON_STACK = 200, -- how many attacker planes can enter naval comabt per wave

But what is a freaking wave?

The problem analysing hoi4 naval battles is that they are too rare and have a HUGE portion of luck and in addition to that much of the mechanics are unclear for now.