3rd one here

Egan and CCIP should apply for a Matrixgames sponsorship given the amount of games their AARs sold :D

Thanks for bringing us along again Egan. I enjoyed the game, especially seeing the two perspectives in seperate threads, both being updated with your plans and reactions to each others moves.

It's been fun. I look forward to your next write up

Egan, it's been great. Loved your particular stance on Yamamoto, and the infamous sandwiches! Hope you do another AAR sometime. :salute:

Well, we'll see...:hmmm: Depending on what happens, George has first dibs on a full campaign. We might be playing a CMBN game in the near future which I might do an AAR for. Different pace I guess. The problem with WITP is that it can be very time consuming as I'm sure some of you know.

Yes, the sandwiches! You will all be pleased to know, Yamamoto received a fine selection of deli meat and bread on the last day of the campaign and is currently buttering some baguettes......

I'm currently rather drunk, following the drinking of a very expensive bottle of wine. Once I am sober I will start writing up my conclusions.

:yeah:

Conclusions Part 1

Points screen for comparison:

http://img217.imageshack.us/img217/4060/final2s.jpg

Firstly, CCIP is still ahead on points at the end. This is mainly due to him still holding Moresby which denies me a huge score. In this scenario, the Japanese player simply must take Moresby in order to win. Without that base, it's going to be a struggle to come out on top.

Also worth noting is the disparity in points totals from ships sunk with me on 1509 and George on 237. This is down to me sinking a good portion of his front line combat ships, mainly due to the massacre of his task force back on Christmas day. Two carriers went down that day, with a third the day before. On top of that I think he lost two Battleships, although I only had confirmation of one being sunk. He also lost 6 cruisers (Confirmed although I think I got a couple more,) and over a dozen destroyers. In comparison I didn't lose a single capital ships. Zuikaku took some damage, but not enough to even halt flight ops, and I had a single cruiser that had to return to Osaka for repairs. The bulk of my combat ship losses were my fast transports and a number of Destroyers, mostly lost to airstrikes during screwed up supply runs.

Air losses

http://img13.imageshack.us/img13/9463/air2my.jpg

Looking at the final totals, I am surprised by two things: That the number of Zero losses exceeds that of Betties, and that he lost over 100 B-17s during the campaign. I'm assuming the huge amount he lost to ops was due to flying the vast return legs with damage. As for the Zeroes, that goes to show the results of being ground down by literally hundreds of Bombing raids, particularly those being launched at night. There were also one or two raids by carriers which came off badly for me; in particular there was a bad one over Guadalcanal where I lost a lot of good pilots. That actually hurt me a lot because from that point on I was forced to fly very inexperienced pilots.

Also worth noting is this: Although CCIP flew almost twice the amount of sorties i did over the campaign, he lost only a bit under 150 more aircraft than I did. Wow.....

I don't know exactly how to account for that. Quite aside from the brittleness of my bombers I think a lack of experienced pilots hurt me, and that's my fault because I stupidly didn't prioritize training due to the mistaken belief that it wasn't essential in such a short scenario. In truth, I don't know how much I could have done. I had a fairly limited amount of air units and an even more limited amount of Air support. Lacking the sheer number of squadrons the Allies get means that I was unable to rotate units in and out of combat to the extent I would have liked. That meant training was limited and the ones in the front line were there for months at a time and on active duty almost permanently. Still, for all their faults they did OK.

Part 2. Final Thoughts

Well, firstly, I'd like to thank George for a fun game. it's a shame various real life commitments on both sides took their tool on the speed of turns and the eventual ending but that's life. it was still a blast and I think I learned a fair amount that I either had forgotten or hadn't known in the first place.

From my Japanese point of view, the game suffered from one thing in particular - my failure to understand quite how much of a handicap the Japanese supply situation can be in a fairly small scenario like this. For the last three months of the game I was basically existing hand to mouth in terms of fuel. Actual supply was never so much of an issue but I rarely had enough juice to do what I wanted. I further compounded this by launching a series of fuel-costly raids that, whilst useful in several ways (including, I think, forcing CCIP to cover his movements with carriers towards the end,) were rather wasteful. Having said that, the Yamato in action is a mother-beautiful thing and it was always totally worth it...:D

Basically, the situation was that I had originally planned to invade Moresbly by mid-November after taking Milne. According to George, he was in the process of abandoning Milne anyway but I don't have any doubt that the number of troops in shipped into that base would have taken most opposition out anyway. As the fuel situation worsened I kept having to the invasion off, which became rather frustrating. still, thems the breaks.

I also made a mistake when i came to ship conversions. It took me valuable time to realise that Ships could be converted to APs without shipyards. This was a very silly oversight that was rectified to late.

I think the Japanese position also suffers from several other issues, some practical and one - an important one- meta-gaming problem.

What do I mean by 'Meta-gaming'? Well, it's to do with points. I think Guadalcanal scenario should have a focus on Guadalcanal, but the victory point set up in this scenario doesn't really do that. Although there are a goodly number of points for taking Lunga, there aren't enough to make it a justifiable concern for a Japanese player who wants to win, where as Moresby confers a huge total on the Imperial player.

In short, it feels rather imbalanced and rather strange for a scenario that is based around the one island. Tassaforonga is worth virtually nothing to either side. If anyone has been wondering why my entire operation was aimed at PNG rather than the Solomons, this is why. Outside of playing for the sake of historical realism, there is no reason to go there once you are booted out other than trying to stop the Allied player from using the area as a base for his bombers, but even then I'm not sure the airstrips can really be built up enough to support big 4e aircraft - although I say that without having recently checked the numbers so I might well be wrong.

Practical issues are these: Viable Japanese airbases are lacking and too far away for the aircraft available to have a tremendous effect. There are bases closer to the action but even if they are taken there aren't enough engineers to build them up to a useful size within the time frame. It took me almost 5 months for Shortlands to reach level one. And even if I could build them up, there is virtually no air support to keep aircraft flying outside of using float plane tenders to operate stuff like Jakes, which are OK but tend to get eaten alive by any half trained Allied pilot.

Aircraft are another concern, but I'll keep this short as I've said a lot about this already. Zeroes are great fighters - wonderful and fast and agile, but by the turn of the year they are beginning to be outflown by a whole host of Allied aircraft. They have OK range, but tend to suck when dragged down by drop tanks (I never did find out whether drop tanks affect the aircraft in this way, but it certainly feels like it.) Japanese recon aircraft are almost non existent and the ones they do have are almost incapable of flying more than 4 hexes without running out of fuel.

In terms of operational successes, though, I think I came out on top. The massacre of the Allied carriers has a tremendous effect on the game - I just wish I had had enough fuel to really pounce on it afterwards. However, it also showed how important factors like luck and the weather can be. I benefited from it because I had my own carriers out at sea at the crucial period. They had been heading towards the Slot when Betties hit Sara and I think the decision I made to get them over towards PNG was the best I made in the game. I never expected to find all of his flat tops, though. That rocked...:DL

George also asked me why I hadn't been more aggressive on the ground in PNG and I had to think about that for a while. He raised a point, asking why I had not done more on the Kokoda trail and, to be honest, this was quite an example of my muddied thinking on several levels. I should have landed troops at Buna and moved them inwards, although I find the idea of attacking over the Owen Stanleys with several full divisions worth of troops to be a bit gamey. I could never have kept them supplied, though. Fact is that while I did consider it on several occasions I became overly invested in the idea of a seaborne invasion of Moresby. The moral here is this: Make your plans but remain flexible. Don't set anything in stone. Ever.

Anyway. I'm all talked out. Thanks to everyone who read and chipped in over the last six months. I've had an enormous amount of fun. Hopefully, at some point, I'll get the strength to actually start another campaign and maybe even do an AAR to go along with it. For the time being, I'm off with Yamamoto to distribute cheese and pickle sarnies to the handful of Betty pilots who lived long enough to sink some Aks and avoid the Cold Collation. Cheers all.

:salute:

Thanks for sharing this AAR (and thanks to CCIP as well), finally joined the site so I could give my appreciation. I've played this scenario against the AI, I can see I have a lot to learn to take on other people! Hats off to both of you!

Welcome to Subsim!

The AI is pretty good and will give even an experienced player a fun game as long as he sticks to a more or less historical approach, but there really isn't anything like playing another human to sharpen up your skills.

Well, this is mainly because he took Lunga and I never took Moresby. For those of you who don't play the game I should point out an interesting fact about the point system: Bases will be worth different totals depending on who holds them. Eg: I get more points for holding Moresby than George does for holding it. In fact, I'm not sure, but I think even if I hadn't lost Lunga I would still have needed to take Moresby to win. I think it's supposed to reflect real world strategic goals or something.

Had the game lasted longer it might (would) have been different but, well, thems the breaks. :)

The owner retains the base until the enemy takes it, as far as I know, even if it is abandoned. As far as I'm aware, bases only flip when they are in close proximity to a base held by the enemy and are very small. You see this most often in small atolls in the pacific, or some of the tiny dot hexes in the Solomons. I don't believe you would see Oosthaven flip, for example, if it was empty and you held Batavia. It's also somewhat random, in my experience.

Don't remember it being a problem in the past. well, aside from the usual utterly sucky supply situation in China. Once you lose that link to Burma and the allied supply it gets bad quickly. The sheer number of mouths to feed, the lousy supply network, the tiny amount of supplies that are created...it all adds up quickly.

Is it something new, do you think, or is it something you might only have noticed now you're looking? I know from experience how easy it is to over look something in that theater just because of everything else going on elsewhere, and the sheer hideousness of the Chinese situation.