Lowpe
Posts: 22133
Joined: 2/25/2013 Status: offline
|
quote:
ORIGINAL: Lokasenna quote:
ORIGINAL: JocMeister quote:
ORIGINAL: BBfanboy I agree China is a huge mess, but everyone seems to want to rationalize and build lines of defence in good terrain, which gives the IJA clear targets to concentrate on. I have been thinking (after hints from Alfred) that maybe the key to China is not to clean up the mess but to make it worse! The Chinese advantage is huge numbers of units and relatively low supply requirements for their low-tech units. Perhaps the war of maneuver that Alfred suggested is a guerilla war, where Chinese units scatter shotgun-style everywhere - so many places the IJA cannot concentrate to hit them all. Go after every rail and road junction in the south, take every undefended town and airfield, find isolated IJA units and surround them before they can bring up help. Unit get destroyed? When they re-spawn just send them back into the fray in the south. It will be chaotic and bloody but a lot of fun and may give Nick fits! I think Alfreds lack of PBEM experience is showing at times. While something like that might work against the AI doing it against a human would be a short lived affair. A scattered Chinese army can neither defend them self nor be a threat against even lightly guarded Japanese location. Not to mention the fact that the Japanese can move way faster then any Chinese units using better interior lines. All the Japanese would have to do is to let loose the air force and defend a few key position while they cut the main Chinese artery (Lanchow-Chungking). By the time the Chinese closed on anything important they would have been reduced to rubble from the air, completely out of supply and unable to overcome even the smallest Japanese garrison. It would certainly be fun to watch something like that but it would fail miserably. I agree. It's something that can work for a while, but it is simply a stalling maneuver. You can harass the Japanese, but a good Japanese player on the ground will just wipe out the units and then prevent them from getting behind the lines again. So you've basically got the units that start behind the lines already, and nothing more. Against one of my short-lived opponents a while back I was able to recapture Ichang, siege Canton (he took the 104th to Hong Kong), and take the N-city southeast of Changsha. I had also captured the S-city northeast of Wuchang (Sinyang?). The Allies tried this late in my game...it was like whack a mole. What it did do was motivate me to take Chungking, prior to this strategy I had planned on simply stopping after taking the Changsha Industrial triangle, but all those pesky corps running around and trying to cut supply lines forced me to pay attention to China. And the heck of it was, it didn't really slow supplies getting forward. Might have increased the spoilage (wastage) but you never see that reported. I like Obvert's defense, but he enjoyed a lack of Japanese air commitment early on. I would also like to try Mr. Kanes bomber/transport theory as well.
|