wdolson
Posts: 10398
Joined: 6/28/2006
From: Near Portland, OR
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quote:
ORIGINAL: spence
One might infer from this that maybe 4E bombers are not so highly overrated as some would have us all believe.
In game terms, the problems with 4 engine bombers is not their individual effectiveness, but the numbers employed. The Allies cycled units off the front on a fairly regular basis. The game allows you to keep units at the front for much longer than in real life. The game also allows you to strip rear areas and move everything up to the front.
Both sides always kept a fair bit of their assets held back in rear areas. A large number of Allied units never were on the front lines. A large number more were only on the front lines for a short time and then relegated to back waters.
The political point cost for switching from a restricted headquarters should go up the more units you change. In real life, the West Coast commander would have raised hell if field commanders were given all his bomber force. The real political repercusions of that would have probably gone all the way to Roosevelt. Many West Coast units, especially after the first few months of the war, were units going through training and should be represented with low experience.
Another factor is that units don't get disbanded. Many units that appear in the game early in the war are disbanded by the middle of the war. In many cases, the pilots in those units were dispersed to new units coming into the theater. In the game, you have these units until the end of the war.
By early 1943 in the game, the Allied played has at their disposal air power that real life commanders only dreamed of. 4 engine bombers and B-25 were both extremely effective at their roles. The reason the Japanese weren't pounded flat by them is that there weren't enough of them to go around.
The game engine is broken when it comes to skip bombing. In the real world, fairly inexperienced crews were able to sink virtually anything smaller than a cruiser with this technique at very low cost. The 10 .50 machine guns (14 on the 8 gun nose version) the B-25 was able to put on the target on the run in was devestating to flak.
There were never more than a couple of B-25 squadrons in any one place at any one time. Even still, the cost of reinforcing New Guinea got too high due to the B-25s.
4 engine bombers were even harder to come by. The logistical costs of keeping the big planes flying kept them based on larger, well prepared bases after the early war chaos died down. Until the B-29 raids on Japan, a raid on a base with more than 20 heavy bombers was very rare.
The biggest thing to note about the Saipan base was that it was the first time during the war in the Pacific that a large number of heavy bombers had been concentrated in one place at one time. At least the first time the Pacific saw concentrations similar to what was normal in Europe.
On the WitP wish list, I suggested (or at least I think I suggested), a mechanism of withdrawl like the British ship withdrawl for Allied air formations. If you want to keep them, you have to pay political points. Some of these withdrawn units may return later (representing units that were rebuilt in the US), others might just disappear. This would keep Allied air power from becoming too overwhelming.
Bill
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WitP AE - Test team lead, programmer  |
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Herman Essay on Pacific War Operations - 
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