Slitherine

quote:

ORIGINAL: Canoerebel
1. You don't "create" new units (with the exception of a few things that you mentioned, like barges and PT boats). The game has schedules for aircraft, ships, and ground units to appear. The buttons to click and view each of these schedules are displayed on the main "score/information" screen.

quote:

ORIGINAL: Canoerebel
2. You can replace lost aircraft and men. You do so by accessing the information screen for that squadron or unit. There are buttons you can click to draw reinforcements (or to turn off reinforcements, if you don't want them).

quote:

ORIGINAL: Canoerebel
3. Japan can research stuff - ships and types of aircraft that can expedite arrival in the game. You didn't ask about that, but I mention it just because it's related to your question.

quote:

ORIGINAL: Canoerebel
4. Finding out specific information about units takes a little bit of knowledge of the graphical user interface, but many things can be done. For instance, if you wanted to find every ground unit on the map set to "Rest" mode (kind of like your "idle" question), you could click on the Ground Unit tab on the main information screen. Then you would click to have the list of units display those by "mode." That allows you to quickly view every unit in "Rest" mode (and change the mode, if you wish). (Your idea of "idle" may be different, and I'm not sure you can find exactly what you're look for.) Similarly, you can do things with ships to find those that have high SYS damage, or aircraft squadrons with high fatigue pilots, and lots of other stuff. As stated, it takes a bit of getting used to the Graphical User Interface to learn how to do these things.

quote:

ORIGINAL: mullk

you don't. you can rebuild lost air and ground units but that's it. you have to use what you have. Their is no way to rebuild any kind of lost ship including barges and midget subs. Your total supply of subs and barges is in the ship availability screen in your intel report. ground and air units are rebuilt in their respective destroyed screen in the intel report as well.

quote:

ORIGINAL: crsutton

quote:

ORIGINAL: mullk

you don't. you can rebuild lost air and ground units but that's it. you have to use what you have. Their is no way to rebuild any kind of lost ship including barges and midget subs. Your total supply of subs and barges is in the ship availability screen in your intel report. ground and air units are rebuilt in their respective destroyed screen in the intel report as well.

Mullk is mostly correct here. You cannot rebuild a land unit that was scheduled to withdraw sometime later in the game. (Not sure about air units) And, some ground units, mostly from minor Allies, can't be recreated either. But otherwise almost all American, Commonwealth, and Chinese units can be rebuilt from scratch if you have the devices and squads in the pools.

quote:

ORIGINAL: bradfordkay

We are unable to build railroads or other major infrastructure in this game. Sorry. It was debated and decided to be too problematic with the game engine. Supplies travel along the various road types (and overland types)with different levels of "wastage" (a certain amount of supply not reaching the destination - this can represent the supplies used to actually transport the supply over the intervening terrain), so the trucks you are asking about are abstracted.

quote:

ORIGINAL: Anachro

As Japan, you have the ability to manipulate R&D to focus on specific planes. This isn't entirely useful with Player Defined Upgrades off. With PDU on, it can be used to transform your air forces. It's fun to figure out how R&D and air production works and then play around with various different possibilities.

You also have the ability to manipulate build rates for your ships. You can decide to postpone of halt indefinitely the production of, say, the Yamato or Musashi and use the additional build capacity gained to speed up production of carriers or other ships. Maybe you want to be a fun-loving person and get CV Shinano built and commissioned by '43. You can also make investments in your naval shipyards to improve your general build capacity. This costs valuable supplies though.

quote:

ORIGINAL: Anachro

Read this: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/17642556/Draft.pdf

It is a general economic primer for Japan, going into various areas. Regarding ship building, go to the Ship Yards section.

You cannot manipulate the introduction of additional land forces. You have your reinforcement and withdrawal schedule. That's it. What you can do, however, is use political points to buyout restricted units from China, Manchuria, or the Home Islands (or elsewhere) to be used freely wherever you need them. For example, taking an infantry division initially confined to the Soviet border and buying it out so you can use it in the South Pacific.

As the allies, you can also buyout restricted units on the west coast to be used in your campaigns against Japan.

quote:

ORIGINAL: bradfordkay

We are unable to build railroads or other major infrastructure in this game. Sorry. It was debated and decided to be too problematic with the game engine. Supplies travel along the various road types (and overland types)with different levels of "wastage" (a certain amount of supply not reaching the destination - this can represent the supplies used to actually transport the supply over the intervening terrain), so the trucks you are asking about are abstracted.

quote:

ORIGINAL: LargeSlowTarget

WitP-AE is not an "arcade" or "fantasy" game like Hearts of Iron or Pacific Storm and the like where you can build your own Army, Navy and Air Forces.

In the standard AE scenarios you get the historic "Order of battle" with the ships, air groups and land units that did exist in real life - but not more than that.

As the Japanese player you have a limited control over the production, i.e. you can increase the output of plane and tank factories and speed-up the construction of ships, or stop factories and halt ship construction (the economy is relatively complicated - oil and resources being converted into fuel, supplies and heavy indistry points, which in turn can be used to expand a multitude of different factories and shipyards).

This will allow you to keep the existing air and ground units up to strength and to fill-out units in the reinforcement pipeline - but you cannot create new units at your discretion.

In this regard AE is more a historic simulation than a game.

However, there are "what if" scenarios available which give both side many more toys to play with, for example ships and planes which IRL did exist only on the drawing boards.

Still, you cannot create new "what if" toys, every unit available is there by scenario design.

quote:

ORIGINAL: Adolf Galland

AE is far from perfect and can be significantly improved.

quote:

ORIGINAL: Canoerebel

We Were Soldiers Once...and Young is the finest work of history I've ever read. 95% of nearly 1,000 comments on Amazon.com agree, giving the book 5 or 4 stars. Only 1% gave the book one star, meaning that there will always be people that see things differently. One critic of the book writes: "General Moore is throwing a lot of information at you and it relates the personal recollections of different participants...It is easy to get lost with who is speaking." Okay, the person isn't familiar with military jargon and how to keep straight units on a field of battle, so he or she didn't like the book. But for those of us able to follow the action....Wow!

Same thing with AE. There is a percentage of people who do not like micromanagement or complexity or abstraction or imperfection or hex-based games or strategy or the Pacific theater. So they exercise their prerogative not to buy the game. The odd thing is that some of them insist that we have to see things their way and, if we don't, that something's wrong with us. Very strange. (On the General forum today or yesterday, one AE critic commented that those of us who enjoy the game have "drunk the Kool Aid.")

" Gentlemen, you can't fight in here! This is the War Room. " President Muffley

quote:

ORIGINAL: Anachro


You cannot manipulate the introduction of additional land forces. You have your reinforcement and withdrawal schedule. That's it. What you can do, however, is use political points to buyout restricted units from China, Manchuria, or the Home Islands (or elsewhere) to be used freely wherever you need them. For example, taking an infantry division initially confined to the Soviet border and buying it out so you can use it in the South Pacific.

As the allies, you can also buyout restricted units on the west coast to be used in your campaigns against Japan.

quote:

ORIGINAL: Adolf Galland

quote:

ORIGINAL: LargeSlowTarget

WitP-AE is not an "arcade" or "fantasy" game like Hearts of Iron or Pacific Storm and the like where you can build your own Army, Navy and Air Forces.

In the standard AE scenarios you get the historic "Order of battle" with the ships, air groups and land units that did exist in real life - but not more than that.

As the Japanese player you have a limited control over the production, i.e. you can increase the output of plane and tank factories and speed-up the construction of ships, or stop factories and halt ship construction (the economy is relatively complicated - oil and resources being converted into fuel, supplies and heavy indistry points, which in turn can be used to expand a multitude of different factories and shipyards).

This will allow you to keep the existing air and ground units up to strength and to fill-out units in the reinforcement pipeline - but you cannot create new units at your discretion.

In this regard AE is more a historic simulation than a game.

However, there are "what if" scenarios available which give both side many more toys to play with, for example ships and planes which IRL did exist only on the drawing boards.

Still, you cannot create new "what if" toys, every unit available is there by scenario design.

For a good Japanese player who has his war economy and resource import / oil import under control, this is unrealistic.

The Japanese in the ww2 barely managed to transport their resources to Japan. But if this is a Japanese player in the large scale, this is hardly appreciated by the game.

Modern weapons could indeed be produced in large quantities in Japan and distributed to Japanese divisions. Only this was not due to a lack of resources. And many supply ships are also not at the destination.
For a japan which is played according to historical model and can hardly import resources the historical direction can be correct. But nevertheless not for a Japan what its resources from asien without large problems can skim.


AE is far from perfect and can be significantly improved.

quote:

ORIGINAL: Chris H

quote:

ORIGINAL: Anachro


You cannot manipulate the introduction of additional land forces. You have your reinforcement and withdrawal schedule. That's it. What you can do, however, is use political points to buyout restricted units from China, Manchuria, or the Home Islands (or elsewhere) to be used freely wherever you need them. For example, taking an infantry division initially confined to the Soviet border and buying it out so you can use it in the South Pacific.

As the allies, you can also buyout restricted units on the west coast to be used in your campaigns against Japan.

You will find that restricted units cannot be loaded onto ships nor can they fly to bases that are not under the same command. They can however use land transport. For this reason restricted units in Asia can move anywhere in Asia but it is generally thought of as gamey. To move any restricted unit out of it's area to another (say China to India or vica virca) you should pay political points to do so.

quote:

ORIGINAL: pavel01

quote:

ORIGINAL: Chris H

quote:

ORIGINAL: Anachro


You cannot manipulate the introduction of additional land forces. You have your reinforcement and withdrawal schedule. That's it. What you can do, however, is use political points to buyout restricted units from China, Manchuria, or the Home Islands (or elsewhere) to be used freely wherever you need them. For example, taking an infantry division initially confined to the Soviet border and buying it out so you can use it in the South Pacific.

As the allies, you can also buyout restricted units on the west coast to be used in your campaigns against Japan.

You will find that restricted units cannot be loaded onto ships nor can they fly to bases that are not under the same command. They can however use land transport. For this reason restricted units in Asia can move anywhere in Asia but it is generally thought of as gamey. To move any restricted unit out of it's area to another (say China to India or vica virca) you should pay political points to do so.

Still, being able to use those restricted units in Asia can "free up" Japanese units to be moved to the islands....

Japan, to my viewing, has a serious manpower problem with so many Bases to control and so few soldiers to do it....

quote:

ORIGINAL: pavel01

quote:

ORIGINAL: crsutton

quote:

ORIGINAL: mullk

you don't. you can rebuild lost air and ground units but that's it. you have to use what you have. Their is no way to rebuild any kind of lost ship including barges and midget subs. Your total supply of subs and barges is in the ship availability screen in your intel report. ground and air units are rebuilt in their respective destroyed screen in the intel report as well.

Mullk is mostly correct here. You cannot rebuild a land unit that was scheduled to withdraw sometime later in the game. (Not sure about air units) And, some ground units, mostly from minor Allies, can't be recreated either. But otherwise almost all American, Commonwealth, and Chinese units can be rebuilt from scratch if you have the devices and squads in the pools.

American, Commonwealth, and Chinese units ? Not Japanese ?

Or, if I disband (is that the same as withdraw ?) some Japanese existing units to the "Pool" then I can use them to create some "other" units ?

For example, say that I want more engineers, can I disband (withdraw ?) some land combat units to the Pool and then use that Pool to create those more engineers which I want ?

quote:

ORIGINAL: Canoerebel

Same thing with AE. There is a percentage of people who do not like micromanagement or complexity or abstraction or imperfection or hex-based games or strategy or the Pacific theater. So they exercise their prerogative not to buy the game. The odd thing is that some of them insist that we have to see things their way and, if we don't, that something's wrong with us. Very strange. (On the General forum today or yesterday, one AE critic commented that those of us who enjoy the game have "drunk the Kool Aid.")