castor troy
Posts: 14330
Joined: 8/23/2004
From: Austria
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quote:
ORIGINAL: FatR
quote:
ORIGINAL: castor troy
and only the Lightning, Corsair and the 18 Australian Sptifires are useful against the Japanese fighters.
I believe I should restate, that Hurricane IIc is superior to Japanese fighters. Its trump card is disparity in effective firepower. When a Hurry fires at a Tojo, that's a kill at least half of the time. When a Tojo fires at a Hurry, then maybe one time out of ten it can score an outright kill, instead of damage. And pilots in fighters forced to land due to damage rarely die or get wounded, compared to pilots whose fighters exploded in the sky. As a result, my Hurricane squadrons are ace schools.
And even Warhawks E can perform decently when defending their airfields, if given experienced pilots. As a result, in my game against ny59giants (now in September 1942) the airpower is now in balance: neither side managed to knock out a major airbase of the other for months, Japanese lead in A2A count by a significant margin, and in overall air score slightly, but Allied aviation now contributes much more to ground combat (well, outside of China and my remaining pockets in DEI).
Give me a Sentai of Tojos and I beat your two squadrons of Hurricanes at will. The Tojo can go HIGHER (most important factor), is far faster and has a better man rating. The gun value is good enough to down any Allied fighter if the Tojos get the dive and fire from behind. While you see one out of ten times a kill I would say the fire from behind achieves a kill every second burst. When not firing from behind (no matter for what side) you most times get damaged aircraft. But the dive for the Tojo (or Lightning as Allied example) most often results in the dive.
Warhawks? The E-model? Yeah, when the enemy is escorting bombers and the Warhawks are higher up then everything is fine. But I´m always talking about fighter vs fighter, aka "The sweep" and the P-40E is a dog in 12/41 as well as in 12/42 if there are any around (I still field hundreds of them in 12/42 due to lack of other fighters). Same goes for the K-model. While the stats look good, it´s a lost option as it can´t go higher than the E-model (29.000ft) which means EVERY Japanese fighter (even the early Zero model) can go higher and will dive on them, resulting in massacres.
And no, I´m not on the losing end in total aircraft lost, in fact, as the Allied player I´ve been in the lead in aircraft destroyed since mid 42 but that doesn´t change the fact that I do exactly what I´ve done in WITP as the Japanese player, staying away from Corsairs for example. In AE I stay away with my fighters from Tojos on sweep. I stay away from Oscars on sweep and I stay away from Zeroes on sweep. Doing this with aircraft that can´t go higher than their enemies. If I have fighters that can go higher then there´s no need to stay away. Edit the ceiling of my P-40E to 40.000ft and voila, it´s a Tojo killer, it´s a Zero killer and it´s an Oscar killer.
But you can adopt and that´s what both sides are doing in my PBEM. We don´t attack bases directly, but both are picking off leaking Cap exclusively. And both sides do this with sweeps at the fighters´ ceilings when we know that we´re going to face only enemy fighters that will be flying lower.
< Message edited by castor troy -- 5/31/2010 9:08:55 AM >
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Cancelling the Tony Program - 
I then have unescorted B-17s coming in under 10,000 to attack troops. I can outproduce the Allies, so I can win that battle and I need heavier flak concentrations to offset the low level bombers. This is my first game as Japan that has gone past 1 Feb 42, so I'm learning a lot of what "not" to do. 
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