Cribtop
Posts: 3890
Joined: 8/10/2008
From: Lone Star Nation
Status: offline
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Good responses and ideas, gents. I will respond to jmalter's excellent and thought provoking post first. Nemo, I will respond to yours later as I want to get a turn to CF before putting together a screenshot outlining Red Dragon.
quote:
ORIGINAL: jmalter
hi CT,
congrats on a well-executed Phase I, & thanks for sticking to your well-organized 'area of operations' style of AARing, which helps me pick up the thread whenever you add a post.
wrt your Ph I retrospective, are you satisfied w/ the speed w/ which you followed up your conquests w/ Engr, BF & HQ units? in any areas where you might feel slowed down, which ones were influenced by (retrospectively) needed or unnecessary caution, and which were caused solely by lack of naval transport? in Ph I, were any Fleet areas over-endowed w/ combat or trans assets, & did you transfer any elements between Fleet areas while Ph I was underway?
i'd also like to read a bit more economic news, now that you can begin to calculate based on expected SRA imports. since you've got PDU on, what changes are you making/contemplating in your stockpiling / R&D / production ?
best, jM
Thanks for the compliment re the style. It is a montage of the styles of many AARs I enjoyed, but most heavily leans on jrcar's AARs. My own thought process is top down a/k/a "N" thinking in Myers Briggs and this style suits how my brain works. I will say that the opposite thinking style a/k/a "S" in Myers Briggs clearly dominates Mr. Grigby's brain. Never in life have a seen a more "from the ground up piece by piece" game (individual clicks and a dice roll for everything, etc). Not that it isn't awesome, but my mousing hand gets tired sometimes!
Support troops. In general I had what I needed where I needed it with one exception - Burma. In my previous PBEM I failed to even get enough support elements to Thai bases to contest the skies over Rangoon. This game I dutifully built up Chiang Mai and Rahaeng and was all ready for an air battle over Rangoon that never really got going as CF pulled back to Mandalay after the first sweeps. Then I confronted what the real life IJA did - the lack of a rail connection between Thailand and Rangoon. It took weeks to slog forward support troops and I am only just now getting them to bases like Mandalay and Schwebo. Thus, I needed a second echelon of support troops that ideally should have advance with the lead elements of 15th Army in order to more rapidly get bases going. Because of CF's wholesale withdrawal from Burma, and his decision to move the AVG to China, I ended up not paying too dearly for this particular mistake. This was an "F" but fortunately Professor Cuttlefish didn't give the pop quiz. 
Elsewhere, my entire Phase I plan relied on getting LBA coverage up asap to protect each leap deeper into Allied lines (for example, I identified 3 separate phase lines in 16th Army AO and leapfrogged Air HQs and other support elements forward - Manado/Ternate to Makassar/Kendari/Ambon to Koepang/Denpasar). Support elements were integral to this plan and I thought we achieved the goals well.
Engineers were a bit of a problem as they always seemed to be the most cost effective combat elements to garrison the annoying 20 garrison level bases in Malaya, Java, etc. I suppose next time I could bring SNLFs or independent coys for the job but the former are needed in the Pacific and DEI and the latter are ideal for the often underestimated job of dot base cleanup. However, I brought the kitchen sink of engineers to Malaya and Java and, in combination with organic engineers in Divisions had enough to drop forts. The problem with forts at Singers was hordes of Allied engineers plus failure to bomb the airfield every day = forts repaired to about 1.5 each day, meaning each attack dropped to 1ish instead of 0. Once forts were 0 the siege ended in 3 or 4 days. So, I give myself a solid "B" with a little room to improve in this area.
As far as combat and merchant fleet allocation, this is where my OCD side helped greatly. I feel like my system of organizing the IJN into more or less stable fleets and squadrons helps in three ways: 1) I allocate assets with a great deal of thought to future needs on a 6 month time horizon; 2) I keep the TFs in being and pay minimal PPs to keep good admirals in charge; and 3) Cool names like "South Seas Fleet" make the AAR more fun to type and read. 
The merchants were admittedly piled from one hub to another en masse (e.g. Takao at first, then Cam Ranh Bay, no Singers), which is inelegant but effective. This allowed me to draw what I needed for any given mission. The big risk is port attack so if you hub, do so out of range of enemy air and even then under a good CAP! The invention of the Cribtop Lifeboat Doctrine would have really reduced losses of troops to sub and air attack had CF's subs hit anything (knocks wood), and I feel pretty snazzy for having come up with it. The LSDs and AKs were used at first in 25th Army AO for the Malaya invasions and then shifted to Truk for the Rabaul/NG/Solomons campaigns.
One area where I did probably over-allocate was 5th Fleet. So many Allied players have used the NOPAC axis for harassment attacks and/or have put SCTFs behind IJN lines (*cough* Canoerebel *cough*) that I really wanted a decent counter. I allocated 2 slow BBs, 3 older CLs and 6 crappy DDs, but that still may have been too much given the fact that CF was inactive in the north, preferring to use his SCTFs in the DEI and Bay of Bengal.
I've put far less of the economy into my AAR than intended primarily because I've used up my zots in a series of offline communications with other forum members to get the economy moving in the right direction. I'll try to remedy this as the end of the Phase I invasion daisy chain part of the game should in theory leave more time for this.
< Message edited by Cribtop -- 8/21/2011 7:46:10 PM >
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RE: Wait, I can't read Cuttlefish's new AAR? - Cribtop ... - 
Still, CF gains intel that a big troop convoy is in the Java Sea. 
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