Best air unit

OK. Obvious distinction that I missed there.  Thanks!

Do you mean a landing in Caucasus? Or landings around the med in general?

Neither should really be a big problem, Caucasus should be covered (over land) by taking (and retaking) Ukraine (and W.Russia) as Russia. Land your planes in Caucasus and build enough units there to be sure.
Landings in Africa / Middle East are abit of a pain, but should be fixable in a few turns with some US help (and those are germans not going to Russia)

thank you for your answers, this helps alot

@templarjr:

Thanks! I searched for hours and never found that. This was exactly what I needed.

Anything to help out a fellow AA42 player.

I voted the DD, it is the backbone of every defensive or mixed fleet.

The CC imho is the least usefull unit, but still has some use in large fleets. The question always is, why buy a CC and a DD with 20 IPC when the same money can get you a BB. Well, the answer is fleet volume.
When playing Dice, you can get lucky or unlucky. But, no matter how lucky you get, one BB will only get you one hit (in att or def) while one CC and one DD, if you are lucky, will get you two hits. So, for every second BB I buy, I prefer adding some pure volume in my fleets by bying a DD and a CC.

Another equivalent is to buy 2 SS and one DD, but when def is a primary concern and volume is needed, 2 SS are no more than fodder, given the attacker will have a DD (or else his air hits won t be assigned on the SS, and they will be useless even for fodder…).

The optimum setup for a mixed fleet (for example a US2 pacific fleet aiming for south pacific in US3) is 4 SS, 3 DD, 1 CC, 2 AC loaded, 1 BB, 2 TT (carrying 4 inf). Total IPC cost 82 (buy US1 2 AC, DD, SS, US2 1 ftr, 1 TT+1 inf, 2 SS, DD).

There is no “best” land unit. There are land units with different uses.

-When you want to defend actively, you want mostly infantry while having some attack units (which one depends on the kind of front that you are defending) to stop your opponent from going forward with a big stack.
-When you are all-out defense you want only infantry.
-When you are attacking you want a mix of attacking units and infantry, yes an attack as a bigger win% with the right mix of inf/tanks then with just tanks (there was a very nice post earlier explaining this for people who’d doubt).
-When you are all-out attacking well yes you’d want only tanks the only right scenario for that is blitzing Russia early with Germany and it necessites some prerequisites to be a fine option (in my own opinion, I know a good player who doesn’t agree with me there, depends on the play style I guess)

So in a nutshell, the most needed unit is definitely the infantry, but I wouldn’t say it is the “best” unit because it seems too much of a specific case question (although if you’d tell me that you’ll give me 20 bucks just to shut up and answer the question, I’d go with infantry).

Ah yes, pretty black and white, missed it.  Thanks!