Mike Solli
Posts: 15792
Joined: 10/18/2000
From: the flight deck of the Zuikaku
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Wow, talk about an open question.
Here are some views (I won't go so far as to say advise) on the subject, which by the way, is near and dear to my heart. My oldest PBEM is only in June 1942, and I've changed how I manage my oil/resources.
First of all, have a plan. I track my resource/oil levels monthly on a spreadsheet I developed. It's on Spooky's website, or give a holler and I'll email it to you. From there I decide where to ship the stuff. My goal is to have a 6 month supply of oil and resources at each region (currently at about 5 months for the largest regions). A region is defined as an area that is linked by rail that includes HI and manpower (that uses oil/resources).
I won't go into my initial thoughts on moving resources and oil. Here's what I do now:
Oil: AOs are strictly for refueling ships. I don't use them to carry oil (not even sure if they can carry oil, but I suspect they can). That leaves TKs. Now, don't disband TF2. It's a replenishment fleet with TKs (that normally can't be placed into a replenishment fleet). That more than doubles your replenishment capability (128k to 80k for your AOs).
You should have plenty of TKs to move oil. Take care of them though. I've lost 1 so far and don't want to lose more. There are a limited number of oil sources: Palembang, Balikpapan, Tarakan, Brunei, Miri, Ambonia, Batavia, Soerabaja and Rangoon come to mind. You start the war with a lot of extra oil in China/Manchuria. Do not move any from there. They need oil each month. Same with Japan (all 3 regions), Formosa, French Indochina, Malaya, and Hong Kong. Use my spreadsheet to see how much you have in the region and how much you need each month. One other thing. You can move oil with AKs. It's inefficient, but it's possible. Use it in a pinch. I've done it once in the 6 game months I've played so far. Plan from there. Simple? Yeah, right.
Resources: Basically, do the same thing as you do with oil, sort of. You have 7k and 3.5k AKs. You can not use APs to move resources. I base the AK size to the port size I'm using. You only pull 200 points per port level. It'll take 35 days to fill a 7k AK at a level 1 port. That's too much of a target for me. I use 3.5k AKs in small ports. Also, I increase the port levels to their max level in the important resource or oil producing ports.
So, how do I get it to it's destination? Without going into detail (too many spys around) , I typically move the oil/resource to "collection bases" and then move it from there to the destination. If the destination is close to the origination port, it goes directly.
This last part is my most recent innovation. How do you manage the ships? It drove me crazy that I had empty APs heading to Japan and empty AKs heading away from Japan all the time. I now keep a reserve of APs in Japan for "excursions". I use AKs to transport reinforcement ground units from Japan to the SRA. Is it inefficient? You bet. But it's much better than empty AKs moving out and empty APs moving in all the time. After the ground unit is dropped off at it's destination, the AKs move to pick up resources to move back to where they are needed. My APs (other than the reserve) are allocated to each HQ for missions. Unfortunately, unless an area needs fuel, TKs move out of Japan empty. One possibility is to move TKs full of fuel to the Central Pacific and then move the empty TKs to the SRA to pick up oil. I'm not sure if it is efficient or not to do it that way. Gotta do more testing.
Hope this helped a bit.
< Message edited by Mike Solli -- 4/4/2006 10:46:20 PM >
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How do you like to arrange your Japanese convoy system? - 
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