Slitherine

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ORIGINAL: esteban

Oh, another little chore that the Japanese player has to do in production (besides increasing his woefully undersized armament production by at least 3X, and increasing vehicle production by 50% or more, and tuning his air production so he isn't doing things like producing a ton of Nates he will never use) is to build up his naval ship yards so he can actually achieve on-schedule delivery of everything his navy has in the pipeline.

To date, I haven't seen a need to expand Japan's merchant shipyards, but frankly I am not looking that closely. But everything else going on in the Japanese production arena needs somewhere between significant and a-ton-of attention.

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ORIGINAL: irrelevant
On the other hand, if the Japanese player halts construction on Shinano, that saves him enough shipbuilding points (193,680) to, say, accelerate the first 4 Unryus. Another good source of shipbuilding points is the coastal submarine program; foregoing just one of the RO boats will give you an additional 6250 points to play with; there are 33 of them in the program, you do the math. Do you really need the Oyodo and the Aganos? There's another 40,000 points. And so on....

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ORIGINAL: Mogami

Hi, Each shipyard (Naval or Merchant) produces a certain number of build points per day if the yard gets enough heavy industry points to operate.
Accelerating a ship uses twice as many and does twice as much towards movig the ship to completion. (It advances 2 days instead of 1) If the yard has more ships in production then points some of them will not advance. So if you acceleralte a ship there is a good chance you will at some point begin delaying others. You can also halt ships to save points for use on others.


The Allied player cannot effect the arrival of his ships. All Allied ships are already considered to be under accelerated build programs.

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ORIGINAL: irrelevant

Forgoing Shinano allows you to do many other things. OTOH, if you leave production untouched, IIRC you are losing ground from the first day and will soon run into problems if you do not either expand Naval shipyards or convert Merchies to Naval. I have a detailed analysis of this on my PC at (ahem) the office; I'll post something about this in the morning. Shinano is definitely so much dead weight however.

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ORIGINAL: 2ndACR

By cancelling Shinano on turn 1, I have been able to get the CVL Shoho, the 2 small CV's (can not remember their names) and am 30 days out from getting the next 2 CVE's and the date is July 4, 1942.

All of those ships have been accelerated until they reach 10 days out. I err on the side of caution on this one.

Never did a count to see what is left over. But IMO the Shinano is worthless. I would rather have 1-2 extra Shokaku class CV's.

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ORIGINAL: irrelevant

Forgoing Shinano allows you to do many other things. OTOH, if you leave production untouched, IIRC you are losing ground from the first day and will soon run into problems if you do not either expand Naval shipyards or convert Merchies to Naval. I have a detailed analysis of this on my PC at (ahem) the office; I'll post something about this in the morning. Shinano is definitely so much dead weight however.

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ORIGINAL: Tanaka

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ORIGINAL: 2ndACR

By cancelling Shinano on turn 1, I have been able to get the CVL Shoho, the 2 small CV's (can not remember their names) and am 30 days out from getting the next 2 CVE's and the date is July 4, 1942.

All of those ships have been accelerated until they reach 10 days out. I err on the side of caution on this one.

Never did a count to see what is left over. But IMO the Shinano is worthless. I would rather have 1-2 extra Shokaku class CV's.

why accelerated until 10 days out?

• as I said, you can stop Shinano. Her merits aside, she gobbles up 180 points every day until her arrival on 11/17/44. That's 15% of the shipbuilding budget for a ship that is essentially worthless.
  
• you can expand shipyards. I rejected this out of hand as too expensive, both of supplies to pay for the expansion as well as of HI to pay for the shipbuilding. But should you elect to do this, the real trick there is how much to expand, and timing of the expansion. Of course you need more points right away, and expanding shipyards takes time.
  
• you can convert merchant shipyards. You have 1000 points worth of them at the start, and only 510 points worth of merchies burning. But that is before you convert AKs to AE, AR, AS, AV, and MLE. Those guys cost an additional 20 points a day each. Only you know how many of those you are going to make, so only you know whether you have leftover merchie capacity or not.
  

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Surely you're joking! If you do nothing to the Japanese production, doesn't it run at the historical rate?

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ORIGINAL: irrelevant

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Surely you're joking! If you do nothing to the Japanese production, doesn't it run at the historical rate?

Historical rate? I have no idea. Is the arrival schedule in the game historical? I never looked at it that way. All I know is that the arrival schedule in the game is unattainable without taking action of some kind.

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Translation please? Did you mean the best arrival schedule?

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ORIGINAL: irrelevant

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Translation please? Did you mean the best arrival schedule?

No, I mean the arrival schedule that you see when you look at the ship arrivals through the info screen. The arrival schedule leaving all ships on "normal". There aren't enough naval shipyard points to make it happen this way. Either you make changes or the game will make them for you by means of not advancing (I believe) the most expensive ship(s) on days when there aren't enough points. So day 1, need 1260, have 1174. So, Yamato does not advance today. But you only spend 1080, so 94 go into the bank. Day 2, need 1260, have 1174+94=1268, hooray, all projects advance! Day 3, need 1271 (another Yugumo just started burning points), have 1174+8=1182, oops, Yamato slips another day, but 89 points go into the bank....

I never tested to find out for sure which ship(s) production would slip; I just resolved never to be in that position, that I would be the one to choose what did not get built, rather than allow the game to do it for me.

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Musashi will not be finished before january 1943...

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ORIGINAL: Hornblower

If Japan is being played/managed by the AI, does it make any adjustments to the historical ship builds, or does it build what was built when it was built? I guess i am asking is the AI "smart" enought to focus points to say CV's and DE's by dropping various other projects?

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ORIGINAL: irrelevant

With no shipyard changes, Japan gets 1174 naval shipyard points per day. On 12/7/41 the following have reached the stage of construction that requires the expenditure of shipyard points in order for them to advance towards completion: 4CV, 2CVL, 2BB, 1DD, 12SS requiring a total expenditure of 1260 points per day. From the start there is a deficit that can be handled in various ways.

• as I said, you can stop Shinano. Her merits aside, she gobbles up 180 points every day until her arrival on 11/17/44. That's 15% of the shipbuilding budget for a ship that is essentially worthless.
  
• you can expand shipyards. I rejected this out of hand as too expensive, both of supplies to pay for the expansion as well as of HI to pay for the shipbuilding. But should you elect to do this, the real trick there is how much to expand, and timing of the expansion. Of course you need more points right away, and expanding shipyards takes time.
  
• you can convert merchant shipyards. You have 1000 points worth of them at the start, and only 510 points worth of merchies burning. But that is before you convert AKs to AE, AR, AS, AV, and MLE. Those guys cost an additional 18 points a day each. Only you know how many of those you are going to make, so only you know whether you have leftover merchie capacity or not.
  

The other thing to keep in mind is that this is the situation at the start. It is not static but can and does change on a daily basis as some ships arrive and others reach the point where they start burning shipyard points. For example, the expenditure required for merchant ship construction on Jan 3, 1944 is 2612 points. That's pretty rich for your 1000 point per day budget. Fortunately for you, by then you are likely to have excess naval shipbuilding capacity that you can convert to merchant construction. The only question then is whether you have the HI to build all those ships (and of course, whether you still actually need any of them!). The only way to really be able to plan your shipbuilding is to build a day by day construction plan for the entire war including all possible ships, and then start tweaking it. I have done this, and would be happy to share it, but the files are huge. The one for warships is 23 megs, the one for merchies is 37 megs.