Swrod fish
 

Just watch the swordfish you get a long period with no FAA Carrier Bomber replacements dont waste them Vildebeestes are good but the Swordfish you need later so dont waste them unless the payoff is good !!!

(yes same Andy Mac)

Well, it's too late for some of them...:), but the two squadrons I have on board the RN carriers remain untouched and with good quality pilots on board. Indomitable should reach Colombo in a day or two and meet up with Hermes and the rest of the fleet. I had originally planned to use them further south if and when an opportunity to hit some shipping presented itself but I'm leaning towards getting them hooked up with the USN carriers that will shortly be moving down to SWPac.

I think there are many early war aircraft that shouldn't be overlooked by the Allies. Even the Dutch bombers in the DEI have given a good account of themselves so far, even if they aren't as reliable as the early torpedo bombers. Mind you, I've had relative freedom in the region so far due to Juha's air cover being rather on the sparse side. Now that he has taken Kendari and Mandano I expect that will change pretty quickly.

Still no word from Happy Times. He doesn't even seem to have been on the boards since late last Thursday night. I'm sure he's alright; as I said before he was having Internet problems. He's been great at letting me know when he's been unavailable so I'm sure he'll be back whenever it's possible for him.
I just wish I hadn't been so keen to send him my last turn. I could have probably done it very thoroughly indeed! :)

I'll fire him off an email tomorrow and check up on him. Juha has been a great opponent so far. He's a really friendly, down to earth guy, and I'm really enjoying the challenge he's throwing out. For a relative new comer to the game he's certainly playing an interesting one.

We'll get back on it the moment he returns - hopefully. My own machine had a bit of a weird-out when it refused to launch windows and then went into it's repair mode, although it seems fine on the reboot. Anyone know what might have caused it? It's failed to load windows a couple of times but has never done this attempt at repairs thing before. I keep meaning to strip it down and change some stuff, reformat and so on but with a bit of luck everything's cool.

The shipping reinforcement schedule is set in stone for the Allies. The Japanese have more leeway; they can halt production of ship or accelerate them but i don't think they can actually commision anything new.

I don't think you can avoid going to war with America. I guess you theoretically could go through every single unit and have them avoid attacking any US targets but the game isn't rely designed to do
that sort of thing. The allied nations all count as one . Make for a pretty boring game i would imagine.

Submarines

In my last full camaign, I had great success with my subs up until the spring of 44 when Japanese ASW went into it's infamous overdrive period. I was losing such a huge number of boats that I was seriously in danger of having none left by the time 1945 rolled around. As a result of that I pulled them all back port, carried out repairs on the huge amount of damam ge a lot of them had picked up and waited until I launched my nexte major operation.

Now, the Japanese ASW effort was one thing, and it never really affected the devestation my subs wrought upon the enemy until I found myself unable to operate them without them being sunk. But when a new beta patch became available in December, promising some changes to submarines, I decided to upgrade.

Seeing as how I was very much in the 'end game' by that point I didn't think it would do much harm and mostly it didn't. One of the things that seemed to change was that my subs seemed to start missing targets again and even the number of duds went back up. Annoying as it was I just put this down to an unintended result of applying a beta patch to a running game and tried not to worry about it.

When we started the current game Juha and I agreed to continue using this patch rather than the latest beta version that is doing the rounds just now. AS regular readers will know, I have become frustrasted by the total lack of skill shown by any of my submarine commanders. There have been many duds so far, and that is eprfectly within the game, but there have also been a huge number of misses from across all available boats be they Fleet, S class or Dutch and it has reminded me of those little oddities from my last game.

Now, it's still very early and I'm still in the process of swapping commanders over to better men but I am still slightly suspicious of my lack of success with subs so far. As I said, I am not crying over duds or crappy commanders - those things are part of the game - but I am becoming a little wary of changes to the subs since I applied the patch back in December and I will be keeping a very close eye on the situation once we start playing again. Basically I'm worried the performance of my subs has something to do with the beta patch i am using rather than either my or my subs lack of skill. Well, at least partly. :)

Interestingly, in my test Japanese game against the AI, I see the things working perhaps a little too well; MY fleet of Japanese boats has murdered it's way across the Pacific so far, taking out battleships, carriers and cruisers with equal relish. The Allied subs under AI control have also proved to be better than their equivalents in the PBEM game.

I'm not really meaning any of this to come across as a rant but I just wanted to get something off my chest a bit. Being that much more interested in the sub war than in other elements it's a part of the game that I'm most interested to see pan out.

I must admit I've never run into the infamous Japanese ASW overdrive. But that's probably because in my game against the Japanese AI, I had overrun Hokkaido and most of northern Japan by November 1943 and the Japanese merchant marine and any escorts it had was virtually gone. The 2nd Marine Division was parked just one hex outside of Tokyo by then. I decided to call the game at that point. Needless to say Japanese production was at rock bottom and the country was isolated from any resources from the outside world. If I recall correctly, the only Japanese carrier still afloat was the Kaga at Truk. And she had no fuel.

http://pyxis.homestead.com/Japan-Overrun.jpg

I don't think there is any difference between the AI and player to be honest. I think a lot of it is probably in my imagination. Still, I'll keep an eye on it. I'm just amazed by what my Japanese subs in my other game are achieving, though. I think both Uncommon Valor and the original WiTP had an option to enable realistic Japanese Sub Doctirne (You know, warships are the primary target rather than merchies,) and I think it would have been nice to still have the option. The thing to point out is that Juha's subs have sunk less than mine in the current PBEM so, from that point of view at least, things are about equal.

I've lost track of how many attack my subs have carried out but the torpedo hit rate - taking into account both duds and misses - does seem rather low. However, as I have to remind myself the Dutch subs have generally done not too bad with three light cruisers and several other ships sunk but aside from Seawolf I don't think a single fleet boat has hit anything, and Seawolf's one victory was in a surface action.

Looking at tracker, I see three ships sunk by 53 cm W1 torpedo - the Dutch -a solitary MK 10 - S-boat I think? and one 21 inch MK 12 which i'm not sure about. Is it US or British? There should be another two or three torpedo kills there I think but FOW had not let them be confirmed. A couple of these are torpedo boat kills and there are another couple of kills from surface actions.

we are almost at the two month mark and I really did expect more sub based kills. Interestingly, I notice there are two or three threads about dud rates over at Matrix just now.

The fact that my Japanese subs are doing really well leads me to think that my failures in the PBEM are the result of poor commanders (low aggression should lead to more misses I think,) poor torpedoes and a general lack of merchant convoy so far. We'll see where we are in another month or two.

I found out later that Hokkaido is a weak point with the AI script. An exploit that should be avoided if you want a challenging game. As it stands now once Japanese carrier power has been dealt with, you can invade there pretty easily from Dutch Harbor in the Aleutians, overrun the island which historically was poorly garrisoned from 1941-43 in a month or so and then turn it into a major launching pad for the invasion of Honshu. It's a dandy bomber base too. This should never happen with a human playing as Japan.

Hooray! Happy Times has reappeared! It seems he went away for a couple of days which then got extended to a week and even though he thought he'd sent me an email he had saved it to 'drafts' by mistake.

I've done the same thing before; I just got back in contact with my regular Combat Mission: Strike Force PBEM partner after realizing I'd sent my last turn to his old email address. He's been kind of busy for the last six months so we never even noticed...

Anyway, we'll hopefully get back on it soon.


Torpx: I can sort of use tracker (or even the ships sunk tab in game) to tell me what ordnance sunk a particular ship but I can't tell who sank it except from my notes. If I get the time I'll go through them and see if I can compile a 'tonnage' list.

As for the AI: I have found the AI to be pretty good, in actual fact. It won't challenge a player like a human will but it still makes for a fun game even for more experienced players. There are a number of scripts for the AI to choose from so it isn't limited to the same moves over and over again. It tends to work better if the player himself tries to stick to a more historical course of action and it doesn't really respond well if you try all sorts of crazy things.

Generally, though, it's pretty impressive. I enjoy playing the AI and recommend it for more than simple 'training'. You can get a great game out of it.

In a bid to get my war-brains working again I thought I'd post about strategy.

Since the start of the game I have been considering a more or less historical island hopping campaign across CenPac with the goal of taking the air bases on Saipan, Tinnian and Guam. From there I'll fly B-29 raids against Japanese industry in the Home Islands and hopefully gather some rather nice, fat victory points. You can get a lot of these from a good strategic bombing campaign and it also has the nice effect of damaging Japan's ability to wage war.

I've never really tried this approach before, and from what I can gather elsewhere the majority of Allied players tend to go through the DEI/Philippines in a bid to cut Japans supply of oil at the source. I've done this in the past and it's a good way to play. The big disadvantage is that against a decent Japanese player the Allies are going to be facing a maelstrom of naval bombers and a huge amount of interlocking fighter cover from the myriad of big airfields in that region. It can be done but it's hard going. Taking the Pacific islands is easier in this regard as the Japanese shouldn't have quite as much interdependency with regards to air power. I won't have as much either but it should be mitigated to a large degree by my carriers. I'll have about 10 fleet carriers, a couple of light carriers and a bunch of escort carriers by the time things kick off in earnest and should be able to bring over whelming force to any operation.

The biggest problem is that I won't have anywhere near enough ships with amphibious capability until mid 43, and that's a long way away in the future. The other problem is that this is a best case scenario; I don't know what Juha is likely to do (although I have my suspicions,) and for quite a while to come my only real choice is to react to his moves rather than initiate my own. From the looks of it he is going to be moving into the Solomons fairly soon so I envision I'll be embarking on a pretty historical set of moves of my own by the Autumn.

I have thought for a while that Juha may try to take Australia, or even try to strangle any supply to the region. In both cases I think he has to take a number of objectives to ensure that reinforcements and supply take far longer than normal to arrive. Perth, Noumea, Suva and possibly Northern New Zealand would be the ones I would go for in order to force Allied convoys into far longer routes that had to be heavily protected. As a result of this, my own operations have to be carried out in order to keep Australia open for business. this will occupy most of my thinking for a while.

In India and Burma I would like to push forward whenever I get the chance. Whether it will be in 42 or 43 I don't know. The commonwealth tends to reach a critical mass in this part of the world by mid 43 and I would like to get as far as Bangkok for a start or maybe even Saigon. I think this is doable - very much so - and it may hopefully tie up a large amount of Japanese divisions and stop them from being used in other locations. Once I get into a good position I mean to cut south and head into Malaya.

Something else I have only really realised is that although Japan starts the game with the ability to use all xAK and xAP type ships as if they had amphibious capability, that bonus runs out at the end of march so if he's going to go for my jugular quickly, he'll most likely do so in the next two months. After that the scale and speed of his invasions should be cut back quite dramatically.

I guess we'll see how much any of this translates into the actual war. The best laid plans and all that....

In my GC as allies using the latest official patch (the fifth) I am having what I would consider decent luck with my subs. I even had one of the Dutch subs sink a BB I had wounded in a Surface battle earlier as it went back to the base just south east of the PIs. My s boats are doing better than my fleetboats but even still I am having luck.

The only real problem with my GC? Well two actually, I had all 5 of my carriers in or around Darwin messing with his invasion fleets in mid Jan, and was doing really well to, by conservative estimates I had destroyed 80% of atleast two invasion fleets. But I thought the super CVTF would be able to rearm at Darwin. No such luck and as I slowly made its way into Sydney, Jap took port Mo.

I was willing to play through what I would consider a strategic blunder, so I played through Feb. On Feb 22 I found out that I can load troops on ships other than AP.... Before I thought my troops could only be loaded and moved via AP but that isn't the case. I am fairly certain I learned that I this thread.

Not only that but I feel like I was kickin butt in China. But somethin funny happened along the way. The game doesn't feel quite so overwhelming as it did. I'm finally able to look at the map and grasp it. Info screen make more sense, and again I just do not get the feeling of bieng lost.

For those reading and wanting to try the game but fear the scale. I honestly can say that once you invest a bit of time in it, the game becomes increasingly familiar. I bought the game around the time this thread started and used it as a reference and tool. Not to mention it is just down right bloody addicting!

I though the Civ series had the "just one more turn" syndrome. This game, takes that and puts it straight to crack cocaine, lol.

Soon as a get a new motherboard I'm gonna load up another GC and take it to the Japs!

Also while I'm at it, do you have suggestions on good art mods? I'm looking for something that changes the most from stock/vanilla. I had found one a while back but lost it.

Nvm found it, it was Big Bs shipyard.