9th? Nov

I have only 12 AP type troop ships available to me, with a total capacity shy of 20,000 men. I had thought that would be enough to maybe take Moresby and Milne bay at the same time but I don't think that would be possible. Part of me thinks I should go for Moresby straight away, but I really would like to take Milne so I can base dive bombers there and cut off his attempts to resupply and reinforce, which he might well do if I take Milne.

So, Milne it is, updated from Bluenose to OPERATION AUTUMN RAIN as a homage to the sucky weather we've had recently in the game. We'll be using the APs split into two waves, the first, the larger, will consist of hopefully two or three regiments, which I think might be overkill, with the second carrying more troops and support units, including an IJA egineer unit with air support to get the base up and running. It's not a huge airstrip, (size 1, so very small, in fact,) but It should be fine for my needs.

Support shipping will be three carrier divisions (CarDiv 1 and 2 will both have two fleet carriers, CarDiv 3 with the two CVLs,) one TF built around the Yamato, and at least two cruiser groups. There will also be DD's running ASW support and some DMS for minesweeping - not that I think there is much danger of that.

To the south, on a line between the southern tip of PNG and Oz, there will be 5 subs acting as picket.

If all goes well I'll bring forward my invasion of Moresby. I think that will be a larger battle and I wonder whether I actually have enough ships to pull it off.

I think I need at least two more hauls of fuel and the same amount of supply before I am happy with my resources. Some more fighters arrived at Truk last night but they will stay there for the time being and continue their training.

Elsewhere it's the usual story: bombers and mud. I just signed off on an order for 6 subs to return to Truk for repair either there or Osaka so that side of things is uppermost in my mind. I'm well down in sub numbers.

10th Nov

Checking over the carrier air groups it's annoying to note that the number of kates remains very low. Not much I can do about it, I guess. I am thinking of removing the strike aircraft of the two light carries and adding a couple of extra units of Zeroes two them. I don't envisage too much in the way of naval counter-attacks during the invasion but, if that is indeed what CCIP does, I think I have enough on the fleet carriers to deal with it.

My amphibious groups will consist of 7 Aps in the first wave and 5 in the second, with battleships, cruisers and destroyers providing embedded support for the landings. I'll soften them up with a big barrage before I go in, probably with the Yamato.

Just an aside, how do people use their seaplane carriers - the CS types? as part of carrier groups? I don't think you get anything like this from the Allied side.

Not much else. Mud and bombers, lads, mud and bombers.

11th Nov

Bombing continues, although today was notable for the fact I shot down more 4e bombers than I lost. I think we brought down about 4 today for 1 Zero. Excellent. On the downside I was filling out the pilots in one of my Zero squadrons and got a pilot with an experience of 11. 11! I've never seen a pilot quite a low as that before. May have to assign him to KP duties instead although I imagine he's likely to cut his head off whilst cleaning cutlery.

A word about ASW. I brought the subject up a while ago when I inquired about ASW aircraft. Well, one of my Alfs claim to have hit another Allied sub loitering near Rabaul. By my reckoning this is about the 12 or 13th that took a bomb from one of my ASW planes. In comparison, I think my ASW ships have possibly landed half that amount of DC hits on subs in two months.

Now, as I've said before, I don't know how much damage I'm doing to the subs. The message only appears in the ops report and you don't get a combat replay for it. But if his damage from my aircraft is at the same level that mine receive from his, then I reckon at least half of those subs are going to have to go back to base for longer than a few days. Of course, He has a shipyard back at Oz which is more than large enough to repair several subs at one. All of mine have to go all the way back to Osaka to repair major damage so CCIP still comes out at home.

ASW shipping certainly does work best when you have several groups mutually supporting each other under an umbrella of land based search aircraft, and, done correctly with experienced crew both in the air and at sea, it's not hard to see at least part of the reason why late war Japanese ASW can be so deadly in the game. There are other factors, as I've mentioned before, but this is a major factor.

Some more Vals arrived at Truk where they have been ordered to train. I plan to use at least two of these unattached groups on PNG once the invasions go in.

Take those reports with the same grain of salt as any other reports in WitP:AE. FOW is everywhere and in outrageous amounts. Hits on targets and downed aircraft are overclaimed just as heavily as in real life, and we know how accurate the task force sighting reports are...

In an Aleutian campaign I was extremly careful in believing reports on subs hit("Critical flooding", "Oil slick appears on the surface", etc), but even then I "overclaimed" heavily. I thought I'd sunk about ten subs in total, while the real number was two.

I have yet to lose a sub to an ASW aircraft, but plenty have been badly damaged, so I reckon the damage his subs take is probably much the same but, yeah, you can't read too much into it. I don't think I've sunk any but I'm fairly certain several are out for a bit.

12/13 Nov

A B-24 naval strike goes after one of my ASW TFs one hex north of Rabaul! Ouch. So, my prime base is in strike range....Lucky for me, B-24s seem to go down easier than B-17s, and I have a very large CAP over the base.

In fact, the number of heavy bombers seems to be increasing I'm not happy to say.

14th Nov

The first raid on Rabaul. B-24s smash a single Babs at the airfield as my CAP fail to fly in anything like a decent amount. I've reworked them so maybe we'll get more up next time. I'm glad the raid was quite small, and we did manage to shoot down at least 2 of them, but I've suddenly become aware how little flak I have.

I'm also aware how overstacked the airfield is and began moving squadrons else where. The problem is, I am not exactly swamped with viable locations: Kavieng, Buna and Lae are really my only options. As for moving ships in case he tries a port raid, I'm even worse off. My really important ships, the carriers, can't really go anywhere else as they are recovering aircraft and need Rabaul for this. (not even Truk has anywhere near enough supply as almost everything it receives is going south.)

15th Nov

Liberators arrive over Rabaul again and bomb the port.

The carriers are not too badly hit with the exception of Ryujo (30 system damage,) and everything else is still operational. I'm annoyed, mostly with myself. Almost all shipping is pulling out and heading to various ports. The carriers are going back to Truk for the moment.

According to the Aircraft Lost page, CCIP paid a high price in B-24s, losing 14 of them to about 4 zeroes. I've bumped the CAP levels up even more, and I can't really fault their performance if they really did take down 14 bombers, but it's an unpleasant development. Loading the troop ships is going to be fun.

Also, CCIP is moving a lot of shipping around suddenly. There are several task forces moving between New Caledonia and Guadalcanal, and a couple more down by Noumea.

Something I've been wondering, and the last bomber attack reminded me of it; can you tell bombers, when attacking a fixed target to go for certain facilities, such as fuel storage, airfield buildings, shipyard repair stuff, etc? And how much control do you have over when attacks are launched?

IE: if I had a whole bunch of bombers, like three times as many as CCIP hit Rabaul with, could I have them with different TOTs over the course of a day, and have the first wave hit the airfield, with the next going after the ships, and the last the fuel tanks, or whatever?

Bombers can be directed on Ground, Port, Naval or Airfield strikes, but what they actually hit can't be controlled. For example, bombers on a port strike will hit the dock facilities, shipyards, supply and fuel storage or - as happened against my carriers - ships at anchor, but you don't get any say over exactly what you will hit. I imagine there is a scale of importance with the biggest ships being the most important and supply being at the bottom (I think.)

If you did fly a huge formation, the chances are that, if you didn't get mauled by CAP or flak, you would probably pound everything in sight. As ever with the air algorithms, getting all those bombers on to the target at the same time is subject to all sorts of stuff to do with weather, coordinations, crew experience and so on. Nothing in WiTP is ever easy...:DL

16th/17th Nov

CCIP seems to have suspended strikes against Rabaul, thank goodness. Mind you, there is nothing worth bombing there at the moment. My CVs are almost back at Truk. Ryujo, with 30 SYS damage and 10 FLOOD is probably going to remain here. Zuikaku is...ok...I think. (15 minor SYS and 10 FLOOD - She's ok for what I have planned I think.)

Everything else is OK. It was just unfortunate that the carriers took the most hits. It leaves me with a dilemma, though, because I now have almost enough fuel and supplies to launch my invasion except I have no ships at Rabaul...oy....This is what I get for hanging around so much and waiting for my build up to be complete. I'm still trying to work out exactly where his strikes came from. Townsville, perhaps? I think B-24Ds have a max range of 20 hexes which would mean they would probably have to come from Cooktown, wouldn't they? Unless he based some at Moresby or Milne, which I don't think he did.

OK, My plan is to give it a couple of days to give the carriers a one over at Truk and then get everything down to Kavieng whilst I get the transports into load up. After that I'll get a move on to Milne and we'll see what happens. Subs are already moving into position.

I'm less confident than I was before two turns ago but I'm still reasonably happy. Milne should be easy enough, I think, But I fear torpedo and dive bombers. It will be interesting to see what CCIP counters with.

What ever happens in the game, I'm glad to have had a glimpse of what the Japanese are capable of. Several things threw me out, but I think I'm getting a handle on them. It's strange to feel like a noob again after playing the game for a long time. It's also interesting to play against a human for this long. Who knows what the game against Happy Times would have taught me - Juha was shaping up to be a pretty aggressive player, and I think we would have ended up with a major naval confrontation quite quickly. I've been impressed with how quickly CCIP has got a lot of mechanics down and he's really only made the one mistake and even then a single dice roll could have put me in the same position. He's a bright guy. Me, I mostly enjoy moving my carriers around whilst making airplane noises! :D

Oh, the other news today is some ASW ships finally managed to land more than a single depth charge on a US sub - they got 4 blows on Flying Fish. Worryingly, Flying Fish is my current ride in SH4 - Typical!

Turns might be a bit irregular over the next few days (until Monday, probably,) as I have a few things on I need to see to.

Gotcha. The idea I had was less about sending one 100+ bomber raid and more, say, three 30-40 bomber raids from separate airfields (to avoid command and control issues? I remember ya'll talking about how those apply to carriers but not sure if they're an issue with ground bases) timed to arrive at different times during the day and hitting different targets.

Say you wanna bomb Rabaul, and you have 120 bombers for example...could you have the bombers from airfield A hit the airfields at dawn, strike B hit the port facilities at midday and strike C hit the ground facilities at dusk?

The idea, I guess, being to stage them far enough apart that if one's late, it doesn't matter so much, cuz there's a long enough gap that even a delayed operation still probably happened, at least, and the first strike may've hammered their aircraft a bit, making it easier on the next two waves.

I am just thinking out loud for no good reason. I don't even have the game.:up:

Not possible, as Egan said. You can set which squadrons to use, and for each squadron which hex to target and whether to bomb the airfield, port or ground troops. Other than that it's all up to the dice rolls. It's not given that all planes from a squadron fly, when they fly, or that they actually find the target. Flying from bases close-by to targets close-by at similar altitudes increases the likelihood of unified strike packages, but again nothing's certain. Air ops are extremely abstracted.

Damn. Was considering getting the game and was hoping for a bit more tactical control. Setting up multi-layered attacks was something I always enjoyed on Harpoon, for instance, and while this game seems to throw more realistic snafus and such at you, it'd pique my interest even more if such things were possible.

Being able to set it up as I mentioned with an 'all go or none go' condition (so you don't end up sending one strike alone) would be very cool.

The way naval air strikes seem to be handled would drive me crazy.;)

The way a couple of things are handled will probably drive you crazy - as they do the rest of us - but don't let them put you off. You aren't likely to ever see a game like this again. They don't make them like this anymore. Hell, they never really made them like this.

Buy it. You will not regret it. I promise you that. Well, once your living on the street in a box after blowing all your time on it you might regret it but as long as you have a lap top...right? :DL

I was going to write more but i'm skiving at work just now and should probably go and hide somewhere. I have a turn awaiting me at home. CCIP has been very patient over the last few days and I'll try to get one back to him tonight, but I think it will be Monday before things are back to normal patterns.

18th Nov

The carriers arrived back at Truk during the night and were disbanded into anchorage. The on site engineers tutted and hummed at Ryujo for a while before deciding she wouldn't be much use in any forthcoming surface actions, and the difficult decision was taken to send her back to Japan for repairs. With an expected return time of 288 days she is out of the campaign.

Likewise, they went over Zuikaku with a fine tooth comb and declared her seaworthy - but only just. Given that her return time from Japan was 388 days, Combined Fleet decided it just wouldn't be terribly Samurai to let a bit of flooding get into the way of sinking things so we'll keep her around. In terms of operational problems, she's lost about 3 knots off her top speed but flight ops should be ok. Truk has two repair ships but no floating dry dock so I can't really fix the flooding. She seems stable enough, though, but at the first sign of any trouble I'll get her to a port ASAP.

Wewak plays home to my first Sendai (See? I'm learning the terms!) of medium bombers - Lillies in this case. Brilliantly, I have no air support at this base aside from a float plane tender. I can't remember whether or not tenders lend their support to land based units or not but I'll keep them here for a day or two with orders to bomb the airfield at Moresby.

All the shipping which i scrambled to Wewak (including all the APs) are on their way to Kaveing. It's time to get moving on the invasion.