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Mike Fisher -> RE: Australia & New Zealand Map (3/20/2008 2:10:48 AM)
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good work on the maps - they look terrific. harry and patrice asked me to have a look and make any comments i might have. i am starting with Australia of course! i hope i find the time to look at them all.
and i give comments only as a punter, so take them or not as you please, i have not been involved with WiF maps for many years. so please forgive me if i am not aware of current policy on what is in or out . . .
on rockhampton, it is not right that being inland it was not a port. the fitzroy was a navigable river allowing rockhampton to function as a port from the mid 19thC, mostly supplies in and cattle out - until the river silted up and the port was transferred to the river mouth (port alma), a process completed in the 1960s. see http://www.rockhampton.qld.gov.au/rccnet/showarticle.aspx?id=9630. there were 70,000 US troops stationed there in WW2 and it was a trans-shipment point to north and south. Rockhampton was a larger port than Mackay and Cairns though. if you have townsville, cairns and mackay you should have rockhampton.
also there is the broader issue of the Great Barrier Reef; someone mentioned earlier that there is no inhibition in WiF to amphibious invasions into any coastal hex, so this may be an irrelevant aside - although i do recall a rule that you must be able to invade into a coastal hex from a full ocean hex - but it would have been difficult for the Japanese to make and sustain large landings through the reef. in HOI2 for example there are no invasion beaches at all along Queensland's east coast which means in that game you can't invade across the reef. this is a matter of judgment; assuming control of Moresby, the historical IJA invasion plan of Australia was to slip regimental/brigade sized groups through the reef to build up a bridgehead, the IJN plan (Yamamoto) was to avoid the reef entirely and dump five divisions straight on Sydney, a plan the Army was rather less keen on. typically each plan assigns the greater risk to the other service, the army requiring the navy to risk the reef and the navy demanding the army risk five divisions in a distant amphibious assault into a city. not surprisingly, no agreement was reached.
so, summarising, if double layers of coastal hexes block invasions, there might be a case for representing the reef with coastal hexes. any gaps could represent the known channels.
one curiosity about Australia being recently colonised and relatively sparsely settled, is there are some excellent virgin anchorages, similar to Rabaul, that the Australian government defended with port defences (emplaced coastal batteries) for fear that the Japanese might occupy them for use as a harbor. Port Stephens near Newcastle (the Pt Stephens batteries were integrated into the Newcastle defence system), Jervis Bay and Twofold Bay (Eden) in southern NSW are three that spring to mind. In WW2 Jervis Bay, a RAN base, had coastal batteries, and Twofold was used as a naval port, i am not sure about coastal batteries there, couldn't find any references in a quick google search. anyway this is all local colour, you don't need to respond to it.
the only other change i would suggest is the Mt Kosciusko alpine hexside, i think it should be one hex to the west; it is too close to the coast where it is. it should be slightly to the east of a line drawn from Canberra to Melbourne. The Snowy River should probably also lose its furthest inland hex-edge.
its all looking great. i am really looking forward to the game!
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