esteban
Posts: 618
Joined: 7/21/2004 Status: offline
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OK, I am going to take a midpoint here. I generally agree with Frag, that the Japanese player shouldn't have complete control of his upgrade path: 1. The biggest reason is that the Allies have no control over their aircraft industry, and I am not sure that their R&D facilities even advance aircraft replacement delivery. For the Japanese to have full control becomes a balance question. 2. "Cost free" upgrades are probably not historic. There are political factions at work, and there will be some people who will be championing production of Oscar 2s. However: 1. I don't like the determinism argument I see Frag using. If Japan is doomed to be overrun, regardless of how well they do short of an early automatic victory, then that reduces the incentive to play Japan, if you know that in 1945, no matter how well you did protecting your industry and resource/oil deliveries, you are going to have to send up substandard aircraft against F4U1Ds. If you do better than historically in aspects of the game, you should enjoy the benefits of such. 2. It's disingenuous to say that Japan is going to necessarily be producing 1900 aircraft a month, more than they can afford to produce engines for. Are you going to keep all your starting A6M2, A6M3, A5M4 and A6M5 factories producing variants of the zero flat out, as you progress through the family? No, you will probably start and stop production of the various AXM models at various points, because you have largish pools built up. Besides, even if your various squadrons are eviscerated, and you are producing flat out, where are you going to get the pilots to rebuild the squadrons properly? It's suicide to send pilots with less than 50-60 experience out to fly missions. It's better to rebuild these units with the poor quality replacement pilots that you have, and then train them back up to a reasonable level before recommitting them. If you send a bunch of 20/30/40 exp pilots into battle: A) they are going to get slaughtered B) If they don't, they won't hit anything C) you lose the resources/industry you put into the planes D) feed the allies VPs E) you only further complicate your pilot replacement situation, because you have to go overdraw the replacement pool again to generate another poor quality replacement class to replace the one you just sent off before you should have. Pilots is the real constraint on the Japanese air units, not aircraft. So, I would suggest: 1. I like Beanies idea of making aircraft R&D a general expenditure, not aircraft specific. That way the Japanese player cannot target certain aircraft that he ahistorically knows to be good. You can put a lot into R&D, but you might see a bunch of that going into models of a more dubious nature than the Reppu. 2. Ahistorical upgrades be allowed, but with one or more of the following limits: A) a hefty PP cost per plane upgraded, to represent overcoming the organizational resistance to getting new models out into the field. B) A certain amount of "free" upgrades per quarter/year or such. C) That you can only do free upgrades when the sum of your pool+max A/C number in existing planned and deployed squadrons hits a certain multiple of the max A/C number. And as you free upgrade new squadrons, their presence further increases this number you need to hit before you can get another free squadron upgrade. Another point: Maybe in the real war the ability to knock out Japanese industry was questionable, but not in WiTP. B-29s start showing up in late 1943. And there have been lots of documented cases of them generating several thousands of victory points per month once they get in range. If you had B-29s strategic bombing as per history, starting in October 44, at that pace the Japanese home islands would be UTTERLY devoid of resource centers, oil, manpower centers and all industry/shipyards by about February, 1945. But thats ok, because most Japanese players can quite probably reduce China to poverty by strategic bombing their resource and oil centers after the Japanese clear the SRA.
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