Slitherine

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ORIGINAL: Crackaces

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ORIGINAL: GreyJoy

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I have had this problem .. but moving one/two hex(es) at a time when it is important helps give the program some direction. So when specific waypoints are required I move to the waypoint .. WitPTracker tells me destination is reached .. then I set the next waypoint ... just a thought ..

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ORIGINAL: Erkki

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ORIGINAL: crsutton

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ORIGINAL: ADB123

Looking at those air losses, I'm a bit "suspicious"...

Did you guys change sides and not tell us?

Seriously, it's astounding how well you are playing now, and in contrast, how poorly Radar is playing now. You have adjusted to the Game very well, and Radar seems to be making more and more mistakes as the game progresses.

I think you underestimate Rader who in spite of some tactical mistakes still holds a very big advantage. He has eliminated China from the war which is "very big" in my book and holds a stranglehold on India that GJ will not break for some time to come. It is 10/43 in the game and Rader hold a virtual lock on all industry and oil in Asia. His economy is booming, there is no threat to his interior shipping lanes or oil supplies. His capital ships remain untouched and he has so far held GJ to a one front counter offensive. It seems like madness but yet I am beginning to see a method to his madness. I think his grand strategy has been near perfect so far.

I am not a JfB so I will have to let others chime in who know the Japanese side better but to me, for Japan the whole deal is about taking and holding resources as long as possible. It seems to me that Rader has about "run the table" here. And it looks to be some time before GJ will get a crack at taking those resources back.

Agreed. While Rader is wasting ridiculous numbers of planes and pilots to (often at least seemingly) little gain, he just might be able to do that with his current resources and available oil and HI. We must also remember the pilot pools available to Japanese in Scen 2 and that each pilot pulled from replacement pool reduces the HI cost... Looking at the planes hes using, he apparently has done little to no R&D on early and mid war planes. But he just introduced Ki-100 - 3/45 plane! From the looks of it Rader has and is planning to fight the war well into 1945 using KB with A7M Reppus and Army Ki-84, Ki-83, J7W, perhaps even jets.

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ORIGINAL: GreyJoy
I just discovered that my VRF squadrons are able to perform their missions!!!!

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ORIGINAL: House Stark

Greyjoy, you supposedly have some extremely long range recons. What sort of air forces does he keep around his main oil sources, such as Soerabaja and Palembang? I see you have a house rule about city bombing, but could your carrier forces do damage at 20,000 ft? If you at some point in the near future decide you won't need your carriers at the front for a month, this seems the only way you might do economic damage to him. Either by city attacking Palembang with hundreds of aircraft, or trying to nail some the port when a tanker TF is present. His Helens might ruin your subs, but with two day turns could your carriers "warp" into range west of Sumatra and strike, and then retreat before his LBA can catch up? It would probably be risky, and I'm not experienced enough to know if it could work. But one thing's for sure: Rader's strategy relies on masses of aircraft, so as soon as you do put a dent in his resource and fuel collection he's going to collapse faster or have to radically revamp his airframe usage strategy.

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ORIGINAL: jmalter

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ORIGINAL: GreyJoy
I just discovered that my VRF squadrons are able to perform their missions!!!!

yes, US VR (training) sqns can operate from CVEs, the trick is to keep their size down. Since the normal size is 48, split them into 3 sub-groups of 16, keeping 1 or 2 at a rear base. ya gotta keep the # of air-frames embarked on the CVE out of the red, else the planes won't fly missions (though they will fly-off to replace carrier losses, if they're in range & in a ReplTF).

ETA (edited to add):
poor performance of your SurfTF in the MilneBay night-fight (29 Nov) might have been caused by your mix of ships. you had BB, CA & CL in that TF, all w/ different gun capabilities. Nemo has posted (in this AAR, iirc) that this kind of mix prevents the TF from performing well. that one shouldn't include CL in a BB/CA TF, or vice-versa. Nemo's point was, organize SurTFs by grouping ships of similar max-gunfire range together, & avoid grouping ships w/ wildly dissimilar ranges. of course this don't apply to the escorting DDs, which you must include regardless, but i noticed that the BBs didn't get into the fight at all.

mebbe your were short on DDs when you put the TF together, but i think you'd've done better by leaving the CLs out of this TF.

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ORIGINAL: GreyJoy
About our performance at Milne Bay... i sincerly thought when building up' SCTFs the thing you had to keep in mind was speed of the ships... never thought about "gun cababilities"... Good to know!
But a SCTF composed only of CLs and DDs would have badly lost against his CAs...he has 20cm guns...while we our CLs only have the small 6inches... that's why i liked the idea of having multiple classes, so that every range of gunnery was well covered...was wrong again...good to know
Anyway, when i sent my CLs against his CAs the result hadn't been that good...i'll try something different

Once again...thanks!

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ORIGINAL: Itdepends

Where in the manual does it say how far you can overstack a carrier before flight ops are impacted? I assumed it was 110% as per the recovery of aircraft following the loss of a parent carrier.

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ORIGINAL: GreyJoy

He has indeed! But Rader isn't concerned about a/c losses. He knows he can trade 4 a/c of his own for every one of mine and still be able to stand...he's producing tons of modern a/c and all his strategy is based on this statement. I'm achieving a 2-1 exchange ratio...but it's never enough...he always have more fighters than me and, despite his pilots quality has clearly decreased, it's easy to get pilots with 70 Air skill and with his numbers he knows he can sustained more prolonged losses than me...and this strategy is sound and it's working

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Ensure the speeds of the various ships are compatible. IOW don't stick a 21 knot ship in with lots of ships doing 32 knots or they'll all move along at 32 knots

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ORIGINAL: Nemo121

I think the point is being missed here....

Yes Rader is throwing planes and pilots away right now but don't think that's his only option. He can, with just three months notice, begin graduating crops of 70 Skill pilots. I'm sure he has a plan to transition to a lower HI-cost airward strategy when the time comes.

Right now though his maths is simple: Instead of building 600 fighters a month at a cost of 21,600 HI per month ( or 720 HI per day ) he is building perhaps 3,000 fighters per month at a cost of 108,000 HI per month ( 3,600 per day ). It looks like a huge investment but by the time you factor in all of the Indian HI he has captured AND the huge savings in pilot training HI cost due to his running the pools down to zero and you'll find that, actually, this strategy actually makes quite a bit of economic sense. He is leveraging his HI to compensate for his perceived inability to train quality pilots as quickly as the Allies can train them.

As to GJ becoming better. Absolutely he has but let's not go overboard here. GJ is better but he is singularly failing to bring concurrent pressure to bear in multiple different theatres and so he is falling farther and farther behind the timeline he needs to be following in order to reach the Home Islands by mid-45. The excessive focus on the Solomons and aircraft losses is causing operational-level issues to cloud the greater strategic assessment which should be going on.

Rader has clearly adopted a delaying strategy using his most renewable asset to keep GJ at bay for as long as possible before collapsing his perimeter in a planned manner before GJ can cause it to collapse ( this is a function of his greater experience and GJ's relative inability to advance quickly due to inexperience ). Given that Rader is undoubtedly building the IJN up to full capacity using the additional HI he has to play with he stands a good chance of being able to conduct this sort of delaying action in the face of GJ's inexperience with amphibious operations and GJ's apparent inability to bring concurrent pressure to bear in multiple different theatres.


The strategic layer is unfolding very much to Rader's advantage. The excessive focus on the operational layer is stultifying and gifting Rader ever more gains for his overall strategy.


CR,
I think Rader would love to have GJ focus on the airwar as you say. It would be entirely the wrong focus. If this were being played against me I'd be trying to fake my opponent ( GJ ) into precisely this sort of focus on the air war in order to prevent him conducting a root and branch re-analysis of the strategic situation. Why? Focusing on and optimising his conduct of the air war won't win him the overall war while a thorough re-analysis of the strategic situation could just free things up.


GJ,
With SC TFs you need to do the following:
1. Ensure the speeds of the various ships are compatible. IOW don't stick a 21 knot ship in with lots of ships doing 32 knots or they'll all move along at 21 knots.

2. Ensure you have compatible gun ranges and penetrations vs the expected opposition. There's no point having a mix of calibres each with utterly different best ranges. Have one or at most two ranges at which your TF can bring its main guns to bear and then ensure all ships co-ordinate around those ranges.

E.g. for a BB TF that means having the BBs have the same max range for their guns and the DDs escorting having roughly the same max range for theirs. If you have too few BBs then ensure the CAs have roughly the same max range. The IJN is very good for this as their 8 inch guns and BB guns have quite similar ranges while the USN and RN are abysmal for this.

3. Decide on the mission.
Are you going in for torpedo strikes? If so then there's probably little point, as Allies, bringing along CAs and CLs. If you want to get in and out quickly without getting clobbered in a long-range gun duel ( which will become more possible if you send along CAs and CLs who will try to actually stick around and fight a gun battle after the torpedoes are launched ) you may wish to go in with nothing but DDs.

4. Look at TF size. Smaller TFs are more likely to slip in and out of range without becoming decisively engaged. In some circumstances you want this.

Conventional wisdom is that in 1944 and 1945 the IJN cannot go toe to toe with the Allied fleets but I believe there are AARs showing how carefully composed and phased TFs can achieve results out of all proportion to their size. In one 1945 scenario the IJN TFs achieved a 20:1 kill rate ( and an even more favourable exchange rate in terms of tonnage ) during a series of naval battles.

So, while luck plays a part you can do a lot to have luck favour you. Some players actively do that and I'd wager that those players often achieve much better results than they would otherwise do.

I would suggest that if you want to learn how naval battles work and how to do better at them that you might want to search out AARs in which players consistently achieved favourable results and then either examine those battles and draw your own conclusions or ask those players what they took into account in order to get those results.


Edited to put in the correct ship speed for a slowed down TF. Thanks Crackaces.

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ORIGINAL: obvert

Whether Rader is a top tier player or not is beyond my capability to judge, but he has shown in the two games I've read about a certain kind of strategic thinking. I believe that Rader is convinced it's possible for Japan to not only take the game into 1945-46, but to win it there. He is never concerned with auto-victory, and uses tactics to exchange material for time, as Nemo suggests. He also seems very willing to take chances for the purpose of creating complexity and new challenges for his opponents in order to gain time, which in this stage of this game have often appeared to many to be a series of careless mistakes. Many of his recent moves haven't turned out well, but I would certainly take over his position right now. He's also aware that GJ has lost a lot of material himself, and so he can actually attrit the Allies a bit, especially in APs.

It seems he's not only using masses of planes, but stalling until the late war planes are available, which based on his recent use of the Ki-100 might be soon. If I were a betting man I would say jets would come into play sometime in 45.

Another front would spread him out and make him treat the air war differently. It's got to happen sometime. But the real threat is hitting the economy, which starts by hitting in the SRA. If GJ could keep the Solomons going without his CVs, and go hit the Nicobars with a quick invasion, the whole game changes dramatically.