I like 1-2-2-7 better as stats. They weren’t as capable as full-sized destroyers, but they weren’t entirely neglibible on the attack. (History reference note: the counter-attack of the DE’s in the Battle off Samar at Leyte Gulf was very effective and helped save the whole Taffy 3 Task Unit; though in a strategic-level AA game, this would still be a defensive situation, it nonetheless illustrates the capabilities of the type. If I recall correctly, I think at least one even successfully torpedoed a Japanese Heavy Cruiser, and one, the Samual B. Roberts if memory serves, was given a Presidential Unit Citation and was declared “the Destroyer Escort that fought like a battleship.”)
On speed, if you want to experiment with having two speed classes of ships, I went go with a DE, CVE, Old BB, sub, and transport speed of 1 for the small board we were using in my school’s recent tournament, and it worked pretty well overall. (Yes, it did slow down the action a bit, for the US player especially, which was me by the time it became accute, but added a realistic dimension and a good reason to have separate fast and slow task forces, just like in the real world.) On a bigger board, I’ll try speeding up the fast ships to a 3 instead and see how it works…
As far as pieces… My personal opinion is that the differences in appearance between the different AH destroyer types isn’t enough (and isn’t really accurate anyway, as all of the types available are really DD’s. I recomend Xeno Games destroyers, TT “cruisers” or “Enemy on the Horizon” destroyers. I used the latter, which fit in well with the classic pieces that I used for transports, subs, old BB’s, and CVE’s. (This way, all the “slow” ships had a distinct look that were easily recognizable from a distance.) “Enemy on the Horizon” might be a little hard to find, though; I spent some time on ebay hunting down a couple of copies. EotH also has great pieces that I still use for my heavy artillery and airborne units, btw…
I think that until at least all of the 5 major powers have all these options for all 7 of these categories available from HBG and/or FMG, I’m going to continue to use this classic-EotH combo piece set for these 7 types of units, because it really works well!