Don't listen to the Feindpropaganda.
US carriers are a lot of fun, except Langley... she can (and will often) go and die in a fire.
The US playstyle is basically more like Protoss rather than Zerg, so get ready to micromanage a lot.
Bad analogy. The Protoss are known for A+rmb in terms of micro. Deathball it (or at least, they still were, two expansions in). The zerg is a lot more microintensive.
And suprise suprise, the IJN CV line is a lot more micro intensive than the USN one.
The Langley is the best experience the USN CV line has to offer until the Essex. This line of carriers is plagued with really ****ty loadout options. With the exception of the Bogue, every carrier either has 1-1-1, 2-0-2 or 0-1-3 loadouts. So you either accept that you will do a small amount of damage with a small amount of fighter killing. Or you'll do nothing but fighter killing because the damage from two divebomber groups is laughable. Or you'll do nothing but damage and hope your CV opponent is also a USN running strike, or just a potato who doesn't care about your bombers or is too slow to react with his fighters. If he isn't, you're going to have a bad time.
USN fighter groups generally **** all over IJN ones. It's especially bad on the ranger and independence. If you run 1-1-1, your single fighter group is just a big bully to all IJN fighter squads.
Divebomber damage is a ****ing slotmachine, its horribly unfun to play with. Even a perfectly placed manual drop over the length of the whole ship can result in just 1-2 bomb hits. If you run strike, this is going to be happening a lot. Every game, again and again, you just pray rng throws you a bone. it frequently won't. Then, you'll be spending 2 minutes waiting for your, absurdly slow to rearm, bombers to get back in the air again.
It's really boring, the amount of active time vs passive time with the USN CV line is poorly balanced. Badly designed really. It's a lot of waiting around until you finally get to hit the lever of the slot machine again.
The IJN CV line has a lot more uptime, with 2-2-2, there's just much more to do and less waiting around.
Either way, wargaming absolutely hosed the CV economy and refuse to acknolwedge or fix it. With constant buffs to AA and repeated nerfs to CV's in one form or another, it's really just a good idea to not play CV at all. Wargaming seems to be trying really hard to get them out of the game after all.
