@wittmann:
As regards the Super Battleship, if you want a 5 to hit, I think it would have to be 24 to buy and no rerolls.
The Light Cruiser makes sense, but I think you should not allow it ASW capability.
Research if they had the capability by all means.
Perhaps Marc might know.
As far as I know, cruisers (light or otherwise) had no special ASW capabilities. To chase highly maneuverable submerged subs and drop depth charges on them, you need something that’s fast (linear speed) and agile (small tactical radius, i.e. can turn sharply). Destroyers were very fast and quite agile. Cruisers were fast, but less agile than destroyers owing to their lager size and greater weight of armour (destroyers had none, hence their nickname “tin cans”). Corvettes were relatively slow, but surprisingly maneuverable.
Regarding the Yamato and Montana classes, note that the projected Montanas only had 16" guns, whereas the Yamatos has 18.1-inchers. The Montanas fitted well into the traditional U.S. concept of battleship design, which favoured strong armour protection and great hitting power at the expense of speed, whereas the Iowas class battleships were, because of their emphasis on high speed, real oddballs among US dreadnoughts. The concept of the Yamatos as national advantages for Japan in an interesting idea that can be argued both ways. The “battleship school” within the IJN regarded them as Japan’s super-secret ultimate weapons, and this is one reason why they were kept out of action for most of the war, the idea being that they should be saved for the mythical “all-out decisive battle” for which they’d been conceived. The IJN’s “aviation school”, on the other hand, considered them to be white elephants on which too much steel, manpower and oil had been wasted. If we compare how much value Japan got out of Yamato and Musashi versus how much it got out of its six first-line fleet carriers (the ones which attacked Pearl Harbor), I’d say that Japan would indeed have been better off leaving the Yamato class on the drawing board and building two or three additional fleet carriers instead.