Battlestations: Pacific/Defence of Guadalcanal

Primary Objectives Secondary Objectives Hidden Objectives
 * Sink all enemy landing ships.
 * Sink the retreating enemy fleet.
 * Do not let a single landing ship reach the shore.

The Defence of Guadalcanal is a base defence map involving the player managing a lot of air power and a few flying boats coupled with patrol boats. Since you'll want to have fighters in the air to interdict the enemy Higgins boats, most of your firepower will invariably come from your shipyard's flying boats - try to keep them alive.

The flying boats - the Mavis and its Emily upgrade - have received significant improvement since the last game. Most notably, both flying boats now have four hardpoints instead of two - meaning they can carry four torpedoes or four bombs. This notable shift in firepower will help against the enemy landing ships, but know that neither plane can take as much damage as, for example, an American B-17.

If you've done well recently, consider upgrading your Gekkos to Shindens, or your Mavises to Emilies. The Emilies can take a bit more punishment and are faster, but the Shindens can help you against the enemy's CAP. The choice is yours.

To the northeast of the shipyard you'll encounter the first enemy wave - led by the Northampton-class USS San Francisco, this landing group consists of a pair each of landing ships, LSTs, and destroyers. Providing CAP are a few squadrons of Buffalos. You can easily pull the teeth out of this task force's bite by sinking the landing ships with fighter machine guns. The LSTs can be targeted with machine gun fire as well, oddly enough. Continue launching fighters until the enemy CAP is no more - neither the LSTs nor the landing ships can be harmed with aircraft machine guns. Have your patrol boats charge in and fire their torpedoes in massive fans to ensure a hit. A single torpedo should be enough to sink an LST and two should knock out a landing ship.