LargeSlowTarget
Posts: 4443
Joined: 9/23/2000 From: Hessen, Germany - now living in France Status: offline
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quote:
Original: Alfred It is only the mindset of those JFB players who believe that somehow they are entitled to, in a game which is supposed to faithfully reproduce the historical factors, to achieve an absolute victory of an equal magnitude to that achieved by the historical Allies in August 1945. quote:
Original: InfiniteMonkey The lure for the Japanese player is to do better than his historical counterparts. The Japanese player never believes they will win, they just hope to survive beyond VJ day. The truest way for the Japanese player to do that is to never attack the US at all. In other words, the best course of action for most Japanese players in the face of continuous AFB whining is simply not to play WitP:AE. quote:
Alfred hit it on the nose....GP No, InfiniteMonkey hit it on the nose... 1. Japanese has absolute certainty that the Soviets will not launch a surprise attack on her before August 1945. OTOH the Allies have the absolute certainty that the Soviets will declare war in August 1945. Japan and the Soviets had signed a non-aggression pact, which was to remain in force until April 1946. This allowed the Japanese to reduce the Kwangtung Army. It was "plundered" as a source of reinforcements to be sent elsewhere, units were reduced to peacetime strength and the "excess" wartime strength personnel transferred out of theater, some units lost entire battalions or even regiments transferred out of theater as cadre for new units. The 1945 Kwangtung Army was a hollow shell compared to 1941. So why blame the JFBs for doing something in the game which has been done by the Japanese IRL ?!? 2. Aircraft do not consume AVGAS. Was it an availability problem (not enough production) or more a distribution problem for Japan (lack of tankers / losses in transit)? As it is, the tanker issue goes for both sides. The Allies can also use all tankers exclusively to ship fuel for the fleet and thus speed-up naval ops, not having to worry about tanker capacity needed to ship the prodigious quantities of avgas the Allied 4E monsters needed to fly. 3. The magical highway which allows the auto movement of oil/fuel/resources all the way from Singapore to Port Arthur (or even Korea). How many JFBs actually (want to) achieve this? It is neither a common occurrence nor a standard strategy. In fact, it is hard to achieve and requires a considerable investment of forces and supplies. Plus it is relatively easy for the Allies to cut that route, forcing the Japanese to keep sizeable garrisons and mobile reserves. 4. The initial Japanese amphibious landing bonus. Can be seen to represent the extensive pre-war planning for the initial operations. 5. Accelerated ship construction. Difficult to afford for Japan and comes with a cost. Number of ship construction points is limited and yard expansion is expensive. Plus I faintly remember a Dev comment about Allied shipbuilding being considered "accelerated" by design from Dec 7th 1941 on. 6. Unified Central Command Certainly true for Japan, but also true to an extent for the Allies which had a fair amount of dissent, dabbling and plotting over strategies, timing, force allocation etc. - esp. in the CBI. As players, we are the supreme commander with powers to impose our will on all factions. 7. Air unit size Matter of HR negotiation. In my PBEM with IdahoNYer we have limited resizing to six dedicated training groups per side which are not allowed to be used in combat, plus the FP groups. It does not make sense to overdo resizing - the Japanese economy may be able to produce the necessary airframes, but the number of pilots is fixed, and it is easy to run the trainee pool dry. 8. Absence of electronics Improvements like VT fuze and radar gunnery are handled "under the hood". However, what seems to be lacking is a "reliability factor" for the search radar devices in the game, esp. for the notoriously unreliable Japanese radar. The list could go on and on, with examples for both sides of perceived or real advantages / disadvantages which should or should not be in the game. However, I'm pretty sure the number of games where Japan does better than history is much smaller than the number of games where the Allies do better than history. Fact is, unless player skills are very unequal, the Allies will win no matter what - which is perfectly ok. The Allied players will get so much stuff they don't even know what to do with it all. The Japanese will be increasingly outgunned, outbombed, outbombarded, outnumbered, outproduced, outmaneuvered, out of supplies and out of options. The only thing they can hope to achieve is to outblunder the Allies. So I have little sympathy for AFB whining about this or that unhistorical (dis)advantage - they should be glad about the additional challenge offered .
< Message edited by LargeSlowTarget -- 1/3/2018 12:10:26 PM >
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