jwilkerson
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Joined: 9/15/2002
From: Kansas
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ORIGINAL: niceguy2005
quote:
ORIGINAL: jwilkerson
But bottom line I go back to what I did myself. Practice, practice, practice before you use in a real game. I took the May '42 campaign start and put both carrier forces out near Kwajalein with oilers and escorts, etc. and then saved .. and then ran lilerally hundreds of h2h carrier battles trying various combinations. Then I was finally ready to use the technique. Otherwise, your trying the technique first time in a PBEM and if you make a mistake you've impacted your game. Not something I wanna do. I believe in the "You Fight Like You Train" school of thought!
I agree with this and it is now safe for me to divulge a bit more. What follows could be viewed as an informal operational report.
This was in essence a practice invasion, probably the last one the allies get. I was landing on Nanomea Atoll, which recon showed to be unoccupied and it was. Still, I brought a large invasion force because I was outside effective LBA range . I wanted to drop everything on the atoll at once and scoot to safety. The base is now self contained and can support itself until its own AF is up and running.
I had two transport TFs and one cargo TF landing an infantry regiment, base force and seabees unit. Escorting I had 5 carriers in 3 TFs. One CV TF (Hornet) was constantly lagging on the cruise from Fiji...crew must have had one heck of a hangover. 
I ended up having to halt the invasion at a gathering point about 240 miles from the beach to get eveyone together. It cost me in the sense that my armada ( ) was spotted by seaplanes...this potentially gave the enemy at least one more day to react. The enemy either couldn't or didn't want to engage though.
From that point the armada closed on the atoll and unloaded with only one problem. Although all transport TFs started unloading at the same time, the amount unloaded varied considerably. Most of the Inf Rgt made it ashore, but few of their supplies did. This was despite there being a seperate TF unloading supplies that turn. For some inexplicable reason only 70 supply points made it ashore. I wonder if this is because the supply convoy, which had a range of 4 had to travel 4 hexes that day to reach the beach, in essence arriving after the other transports.
Unloading still took 3 days...I think I didn't use enough transports. Upon completeing the unloading all TFs seem to take off seperately for home port and one TF left early before it finished unloading all its troops. Was the armada broke up, there was no getting it back together again. I had to move the TF that still had troops on board back to the atoll and Yorktown decided to tag along...and hit a mine.
To unload more supply faster you need the supply TF to be 1 hex away from the landing hex at the end of the prior turn. All the first wave TFs should be one hex away from the landing hex at the end of the prior turn. This is especially true if you're invading an atoll because you have a forced shock attack at the end of the first unloading turn. And if you're going up against Kwaj with a level-9 fort and a reinforced division, you need all 5 (or so) reinforced divisions and 1000s of supply points to unload in the first turn or else your divisions will all be toast. You don't have three days or even two days to unload when attacking a defended Atoll. The first day is critical. Yes you can bring more in. But the first day needs to see your forces survive with enough strength that they are still assets and not liabilities.
For this type of invasion I would run 2-3 armadas. One for the first wave, one for the followup waves and one for the indepdent naval covering force, if there is one. And by this I mean the FCTF. I would definitely suggest practicing attacks against heavily defended Atolls. Maybe take the '43 campaign start and either use the editor or play a month in h2h mode to get a place like Tarawa or Kwajalein setup as well as setting up your invasion force. Then save and then try the attack several times. Once you can make it happen, then toss in a big KB to make it more complex. But landings against heavily defended Atolls can be very tough. Andy has estimated it could take 1-2 DOZEN divisions to take one that is very heavily defended. And one has to question whether that is even worth it. But if I was gonna do it, I'd wanna practice it.
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