welp, ive had the most obnoxious carrier battle vs multiple fleets today.
i have 430 planes on my carriers in the fleet,
They begin naval bombing/torpedoing 2 cruisers and 2 light cruisers..... and all my planes found no way to kill them.
The light cruisers are apparently able to out run and out maneuver dive bombers (at 100 ft!!!), and torpedo bombers at 1000 ft!
I even had some zero's at 5000 ft trying to bomb them and out of this entire day of battle...
I used up HALF of my torpedo's on my fleet, and acheived no hits with them. My Dive bombers acheived 2 hits on a cruiser. 2 hits out of so many bombers.
I am so mad right now, since i have to now either raid with bombs on passing fleets or go all the way back home for 12 days and get more supplies :/ rage.
These pilots are some of the best in my empire (80 exp, and lots of dive bomber and naval exp) So im saddened.
Dive bombers dive bomb only when their ingress altitude is set 10,000-15,000. Below or above that and they will "glide bomb". Below 6,000ft they will use the LowN skill, or "skip-bomb", not many pilots have that skill if you dont train them!
Torpedo bombers always bomb at 200ft no matter what ingress altitude - but depending on the altitude they need more time to set up the attack, but high ingress alt might help escorting fighters.
Torpedoes against
light cruisers or anything smaller = bad idea! unless you can surprise them. Those ships aren't much slower than the torpedoes and they're maneuverable, you need lots of attacks or lots of luck. Dive bombers work better, good D3A pilots I have have over 50% hit ratio. Once they've hit enough they'll get slowed down and take hits even more, including torpedoes.
edit: the EXP rating is the general experience of the pilot. It is
not used in combat! High exp means the pilot is less likely to kaputt/crash/never be heard of again, he is more likely to survive flying a damaged machine home, more likely to find the target(esp in bad weather) etc.