elxaime
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Some thoughts for additional Pacific Theater events:
Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere (GEACPS): Available from August 1940
The Empire of Japan forces its puppet regimes (the Reorganized National Government of the Republic of China, the State of Burma, the Provisional Government of Free India, the Second Philippine Republic, the Kingdom of Thailand, the Kingdom of Kampuchea, the Empire of Vietnam and the Kingdom of Laos) to strengthen their political and economic cooperation with Japan against the "western colonialist powers." The scripts would allow a decision to join the GEACPS for each nation once that nation had been conquered or allied itself with Japan. The impact of joining would be a one-time award of MMP to Japan for each country (pro-rated to the size of the economy of the nation joining) to represent the pillage and exploitation by the Japanese military (which used the GEACPS, despite the political propanganda, solely to further Japan's military interests). A strength 1 pro-Japan local garrison would also appear in the capital, if held, to represent local nationalist forces supported by the Japanese army. However the downside would be that pro-Allied partisan activity hexes would be triggered by another decision once Allied forces occupied a "trigger" (e.g. holding a nearby city or cities) to represent pro-Allied partisan movements.
COMMENT: to my mind, the vanilla Global War could use some additional scripts to represent the various occupied countries. This would present Japan with some options: ruthlessly exploit for short-term gain or build trust and political stability over the long term? The model would be some of the FWII decisions dealing with how Germany can treat Vichy
Imperial Rule Assistance Association: available from October 1940, this decision allows Japan to evolve a "statist" ruling political party aimed at removing the sectionalism in the politics and economics in the Empire of Japan to create a totalitarian one-party state in order to maximize the efficiency of Japan's total war effort. This results in a one time MPP and morale gain, but if this option is chosen, the more liberal options to create GEACPS become unavailable.
Kido Butai: This allows the Axis player, in lieu of manually-controlled operations, to implement scripted initial Japanese military operations in parts of the Pacific during a limited time frame (December, 1941 - March 1942) similar to how Germany can treat the Norway and Denmark campaigns. The upside is a basic level of achievement, although some randomness can be built in to allow greater or higher levels of success for each operation. The downside is that Japan would forgo more ambitious or creative attacks, as the prerequisites for the events firing would be spending some MPP and keeping key units off-map for a specific time to simulate their use in the scripted campaigns. COMMENT: I have found that, with historical hindsight, the Allies can too easily thwart early Japanese expansion. I am thinking the scripts would be:
- Pearl Harbor/Wake Island Attack
- Dutch East Indies Attack
- Malaya/Thailand Attack
- Aleutians attack
KMT and Chinese Warlords: Most of the Nationalist government forces in China were actually a cobbled together shifting alliance of former warlords. The central authority was weak throughout the war and additional allied assistance was often bled off through epic levels of official corruption. In the vanilla game, China, aside from the CCP forces and their associated units and rules, is represented in a standard fashion when the reality was far from that. There are several ways to go, but maybe the best approach is to consult how games like World in Flames handled China. One approach might be to break China into several components, with most starting neutral and entering pursuant to diplomatic choices and scripts.
South Pacific Mandate: This was a League of Nations mandate given to the Empire of Japan following World War I that included the regions around Palau, the Northern Mariana Islands, Federated States of Micronesia, and Marshall Islands. While the terms of the mandate required Japan not to fortify the islands, these terms were ambiguous and poorly-defined. From 1921 the Japanese military began making plans so that rapid military deployment to the islands would be possible in case of war. During the 1930s, the Imperial Japanese Navy began construction of airfields, fortifications, ports, and other military projects in the islands controlled under the mandate, viewing the islands as "unsinkable aircraft carriers." To reflect an increased commitment to these areas, scripts can be added to place Japanese fortifications, troops and aircraft on these areas pre-war.
Kwantung Army: by the beginning of 1939, the Japanese Kwantung Army in Manchuria was well-established as a semi-rogue force with significant influence in Japanese politics and military strategy. The Kwantung Army was a stronghold of the radical "Imperial Way Faction", and many of its senior leaders overtly advocated political change in Japan through the violent overthrow of the civilian government to bring about a Shōwa Restoration, with a reorganization of society and the economy along totalitarian state fascist lines. However, as the war went on, they were more or less brought under control and by 1945, when the USSR invaded, most of the best Kwantung troops had been sent to other theaters and replaced by lower quality forces. You might consider some scripts to allow the Axis player some options on how to treat this theater. In the vanilla game, the Axis always strips this region immediately.
Disease: some of the areas in the CBI-Pacific theater were some of the most pestilence-ridden on earth. You may want to add, for some regions, periodic random losses similar to Russian winter effects, exempting troops native to those regions.
Australia/New Zealand: Not sure what changes or events are needed here, but it feels like Australia/New Zealand aren't fully developed as allies compared to their real WW2 contributions in the Pacific theater.
Oil: likewise, it seems like the oil issue isn't fully developed. FWII has some considerations for Germany on access to oil. Likewise, Japan relied on imports of oil to function. Some of this is reflected in MPPs from conquered lands. But you may want to delve further, as lack of oil was what spurred some of the late war Japanese air and naval suicide strategies. For the allies, the oil convoys to Australia were essential to building that area up for offensives and kick-starting the war economy there (as any player of WITP can attest)
< Message edited by elxaime -- 4/8/2019 10:55:58 PM >
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