jwilkerson
Posts: 10525
Joined: 9/15/2002 From: Kansas Status: offline
|
quote:
ORIGINAL: el cid again quote:
ORIGINAL: Brady Japanese Enginear units: From WiTP my isues with Japanese enginear units werre prety much that thye did not realy seam to mimic what I come to understand they were suposed to look like at all, buy my impreshions were based on infermation I got from OOB's in books about the various island campagines, and from reading the Handbook on The Japanese Army (the war department book), which I know is a dated referance work, and some other sources. The impreshion I had was that some Japanese enginear units were very large in size manpower wise, and would break off chunks to use to tackle a given construction task, a core or brain power unit would supervise a large labor force, this labor force would consist of what ever troops were in the area, or be drawn from a labor force that was specificaly created for that end, such as an Okinawan labor unit, or a Korean labor unit. These labor units (regements) would also fight, or they did on Okinawa and on other islands, and provided a manpower pool for replacements,they were typicaly not armed, the labor regements, but as a mater of course for these battles were aloted arms and made use of weapons that came to have no owner when used as replacements. Some Japanese Specialised units like road construction or airfield construction had inhearent enginearing vehicals, rolers, road graders, tractor's,Trucks, cement mixers exc...which were totaly absent from the stock game . There were very different kinds of engineers in Japanese formations. Broadly speaking, these break into two categories: engineers organic to other LCUs and "independent" engineer "regiments" (battalions). There were officially five kinds of these - given designations from the Japanese syllabic alphabet - but by 1941 only three seem to have existed in IJA - although there was also a JAAF version and a IJN version. The organic units were platoons or companies of either assault engineers or pioneers or construction engineers to do something useful to the larger unit: build fortifications or repair airfields, etc. The independent engineers were - and two of these seem to be in the game OBs - general engineer regiments, road construction engineer regiments, and railroad engineer regiments (not in the game). The general engineer regiments also had a variation: one regiment was "electric" - and fitted with numbers of both wire and radio controlled micro AFVs used for demolition work. These formations had some vehicles and specialized vehicles - such as bulldozers - trucks - tiny 12 inch gage rail lines easily laid and requiring no motive power (manpower was used - and US Marines used one on Guadalcanal they nicknamed "the toonerville trolly"). But they were very short of labor and were not able to work effectively unless they had labor provided from outside the regiment: these might be prisoners, civilian conscripts, civilian hirees, other military units, or various labor elements - usually associated with logistics / shipping work. The engineer regiments had the specialists and a LIMITED amount of labor and vehicles - and would be more effective if they had more. I simulate this by providing them with TOO FEW support elements - so if they are in a hex with more support - the regiments build faster. Yup, Sid is helping to explain my earlier statement that the IER just don't fit nicely into the existing code base. Expanding the scope a bit further, neither road construction, bridging nor shipping engineers have any direct modeling in the game. And stock models these respectively as regular construction engineers, assault engineers or absent from the game.
_____________________________
AE Project Lead New Game Project Lead
|