Slitherine

quote:

ORIGINAL: ChadS

I'm still trying to learn the game's systems, and want to know if my amphib landing in Jan '42 is typical for the US.

There's really no such thing as a "typical" Allied landing in January 1942 - usually the Allies are still a little busy falling back.

I decided to send some troops to Mili, and accompanied them with 2 CAs and 5 DDs. A carrier force was also nearby.

The Amphib group plowed right into the island, seemingly in the middle of the day. Almost all of the ships took some sort of damage, including 2 or 3 of the APs gaining "heavy fires." The report said there were 287 Coastal Guns (or perhaps shells?) fired.

Mili has a very good Coastal Defense unit. It's guns will usually put holes into anything smaller than a CA during an invasion if it hasn't been dealt with first. The best way to combat this is to put heavy warships (think BBs or CAs with several DDs) into the landing TF itself. A pre-invasion bombardment by BBs isn't a bad idea either. Nor is a pre-invasion strike by your carrier aircraft.

At the start of the next turn, the ships were heading back to Pearl, though were still in the Mili hex. I clicked them to unload troops/cargo. During the next turn, they did just that (but took more damage). I had also split off the CAs and 2 DDs to make a Bombardment TF, and that seemed to work fine, too. The island quickly fell.

When the island fell, it appeared that there were only 176 Japanese troops there.

This CD unit only has 9AV. You'll pay a substantial price for getting ashore (as you found out), but once you're there, the island should fall easily as long as your entire invasion force didn't sink before landing the troops (and provided Mili wasn't reinforced by another Japnaese unit or two before you invaded.

Ultimately, I'm curious if I did this roughly correctly? I'm also curious if there's a way to prevent the heavy damage to the APs before (or when) they reach the target hex. I feel like I missed something. I know that "Fast Transport" TFs will attempt to arrive at night. I figured that Amphibs would do something similar.

Your amphibs will hit the beach in whatever phase they reach the beach. If you aren't in a hurry (like you aren't expecting the KB to come and crush your entire invasion, or it's late war and you have plenty of air cover) it's a good idea to position your whole force either one hex away from an atoll, or in the same hex as an atoll (but set not to land) before finally issuing orders to land, allowing the force maximum time to offload troops and supplies before conducting the inevitable shock attack.

Thanks very much!

quote:

ORIGINAL: teseo tesei

generally speaking, it's better to hasve one single TF with all the units you want to desembark, or more than 1 TFs? another question: it's better to use minimal ships or it's better to have more ships, each with less soldiers upon?
Thanks
Paolo