Here you can find different tips and hints about the Aircraft Carrier Survival game.
Tips and Hints
- When mousing over a mission you can recover, you can toggle squadrons to go between Deck and Hangar so they don’t necessarily go to the deck and you have to send them to the hangar.
- Similar mechanism to the above, you can toggle between Dive and Torpedo bombers to go on Recon and Identify missions right before clicking Prepare.
- Moving officers has a cool down. Select their location wisely. It may also be worth looking at their station ahead of moving them to determine if anything needs to change first. Some stations rarely change based on your preference, It is wise to determine them and change them early on them move the officer to prevent the need later.
- I personally find it nice having a couple fighter squads on deck nearly all time except for strikes. This prevents some lead time in specific missions where you can be attacked and have to send out 2-3 friendly cap missions all around the same time.
- Don’t forget to use the support vessel near the end of a game to replenish up to 2 lost squads of a given type. This can save a small amount of points each time that can be used for new escorts, officers, crew, etc.
- Pay attention to “war circumstances” after mission 4 in the campaign – if you play missions in a good order you can make some of them very easy thanks to the “war circumstances” bonuses.
- Complete optional objectives in missions – your admiral levels up twice as fast if you do them – more important than getting all the medals!
- If you know for sure there’s an enemy behind he “?” mark on the map you can use identify without having to recon it first. Much faster.
- If you start the mission undetected (dark eye icon) you can stay undetected for as long as you destroy all enemy scouts and avoid contact with the enemy. Undetected means enemy can’t attack you at all.
- You can destroy only carrier or an airstrip in bases to render an enemy fleet useless – without that they will not be able to attack you.
- Preparing a single unit of planes on the Essex takes exactly 8 minutes, also its always more clever to recover decks into the hangar instead of on Deck, since putting one group back down and pull another up takes almost 3-4x as long depending on how far back the group sits.
- It is possible to finish every single mission without losing a Squadron.
Bonus tip
Atlanta (Oakland), Independence (Type II), Chicopee (Type II) Sims and Fletcher (Type I) is the best Escort composition you can have. You could exchange the Chicopee for something else since I never used its ability cuz I dont lose planes, but the supplies capacity is nice.
That composition can help you with whatever you need. A free 3 Squadron mission (for example suicide attacks which dont count as lost squadron, or emergency CAP etc), Sims for scouting, Fletcher to defend against Submarine attacks when your planes are busy with other things and the Atlanta because it can give an incredible Defence buff that saved me numerous times when I had 13 Kamikaze follow after a 10 Plane group.
My personal favorite combo is Chika-pee Mk3 support with Independence Mk2. Chika actually divides the remaining cooldown of Independence by three, from 14 hours to 4 hours 40 minutes, so instead of one free 3 plane mission per day you can now spam 3-4 in one day’s time.
Even better, there is actually a bug in the escort ship abilities that if you pause the game and do identify missions before, you can spam every single three or less mission with one use of Free mission and using the Reduce Cooldown, you can clear every single escort ability on cooldown immediately, except the Chika’s own. Great way to send kamikaze identify missions on far-away targets, free CAPs and multiple three plane kamikaze-attacks simultaneously without using your own planes.
Also if you use the captain’s Enhanced Radar Order AND Scout Planes AND Sims Mk2 Radar Improvement AND Sub Mk1 Radar Boost simultaneously while parking in the middle-section of the map, you can clear half-monitor’s worth of area with single sweep and it is usually enough to find the positions of initial enemy fleets from start. Combined with Code Breakers order and you rarely if ever need the Recon Missions again, which is a huge reduction in need to launch and recover dive bombers during a mission.