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30 March 1944 Fast carriers raid the Western Carolines, sinking the destroyer Wakatake and patrol boat No. 31 (ex-destroyer Kiku) as well as a number of auxiliaries.
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Mar 30, 2018 23:59
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So, that many Hellcats and Helldivers operating off Casablanca-class escort carriers of all things seems... unusual to say the least. Does the game not model the significant difficulties of launching and landing those off flight decks that short, or is the AI just being reckless? Or is there a bigger flattop around?
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Mar 31, 2018 00:28
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Lord Koth posted:So, that many Hellcats and Helldivers operating off Casablanca-class escort carriers of all things seems... unusual to say the least. Does the game not model the significant difficulties of launching and landing those off flight decks that short, or is the AI just being reckless? Or is there a bigger flattop around? This is me guessing, I would think it would greatly increase operational chance for lost aircraft of that type
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Mar 31, 2018 00:50
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Holy poo poo. I saw 76 new posts and knew something must be up. Grey could lose the whole war here. Terrifying.
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Mar 31, 2018 02:15
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An allied player in this position can shut down Rabaul easily. It would not be a safe fleet base considering the surrounding bases they still have. Concentrate fleet carriers and keep them stocked with good planes and trained pilots and when Grey is opportunistic with the KB (or indeed any force) spring the trap. Even 1:1 CV trades will favor the allied player a great deal. Also take what fast battleships you have left and form bombardment task forces and just light up anything you see that the Japanese can't defend. What likely delays invasions would be finding the ground units. You would need to take a month or so to reorganize a decent invasion force from the hodge podge we currently see and then plan an axis of advance to get strategic bombers into range of Japan. As long as invasions have a decent number of landing ships (the AI has been using way too few) and actual troops instead of cooks and are led by massive bombardments and supported by CVEs (with the CVs hovering nearby ready to retaliate if Japanese ships sally forth), Japan doesn't have much chance of holding wherever you choose to concentrate. I think you're probably planning to nuke them at this point, so get B-29 bases. I would also consider a Burma advance, since troops have obviously been committed to the Pacific and to China.
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Mar 31, 2018 02:20
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David Corbett posted:Holy poo poo. I saw 76 new posts and knew something must be up. Grey could lose the whole war here. Terrifying.
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Mar 31, 2018 02:45
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This battle could be called...decisive.
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Mar 31, 2018 02:58
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TheDemon posted:What likely delays invasions would be finding the ground units. You would need to take a month or so to reorganize a decent invasion force from the hodge podge we currently see and then plan an axis of advance to get strategic bombers into range of Japan. As long as invasions have a decent number of landing ships (the AI has been using way too few) and actual troops instead of cooks and are led by massive bombardments and supported by CVEs (with the CVs hovering nearby ready to retaliate if Japanese ships sally forth), Japan doesn't have much chance of holding wherever you choose to concentrate. I think you're probably planning to nuke them at this point, so get B-29 bases. Part of the problem for an Allied player at this point would be how long it takes to get troops prepped for an invasion. You could physically collect the units you need in about a month even if they're back in the US, but you'd need a couple months after that to get them up to 100 planning.
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Mar 31, 2018 06:09
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Do you really need to bother with planning? The Allies have functionally infinite everything, just throw pixelmans and ships at the problem until it stops being a problem.
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Mar 31, 2018 06:15
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Planning helps a lot yes. You should ideally have your troops in planning for the next or even three invasions ahead before you even execute the first. On another note, it occurs that with Grey sortieing the battleship force to refuel the cruisers, and the enemy using so many CVEs, the end result is going to be battleships in sprint range of many CVEs, which are slower than they are.
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Mar 31, 2018 06:18
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So, that's either an uncomfortable number of torpedo bombers in Grey's BBs, or a bunch more CVEs getting shived during night combat, depending on who sees who first, right?
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Mar 31, 2018 06:54
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Aren't carriers supposed to have better visibility by virtue of having planes? On the other hand, the last two years of LP
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Mar 31, 2018 07:11
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Greyverse naval history books will be a joy to read what with future historians trying to figure out what the US navy was collectively smoking at the time.
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Mar 31, 2018 07:22
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Jobbo_Fett posted:Operational is damaged planes being lost for reasons, or maybe a fatigued pilot crashes by accident, etc. right, so the missing 25+ planes were lost in combat, and grey didn't lose a carrier anyway so... hmmm.
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Mar 31, 2018 07:28
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Danann posted:Greyverse naval history books will be a joy to read what with future historians trying to figure out what the US navy was collectively smoking at the time. One such book will posit that the entirety of the Pacific War took place inside of a video game.
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Mar 31, 2018 08:23
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Leperflesh posted:right, so the missing 25+ planes were lost in combat, and grey didn't lose a carrier anyway so... hmmm. The reports are not 100% accurate, but yeah, that was a large discrepancy. I'd not really noticed it.
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Mar 31, 2018 10:34
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Congrats on the CVE kills, good luck getting your fleets outof there! How much longer the refueling op going to take before you're falling back?
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Mar 31, 2018 12:42
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Crazycryodude posted:Do you really need to bother with planning? The Allies have functionally infinite everything, just throw pixelmans and ships at the problem until it stops being a problem. Yes. If a unit with low planning does an amphibious assault, it will take pretty heavy losses unloading over the beach, and will also perform much worse in combat. Even with the huge advantages the Allies have, this is a problem for two reasons: - You can only land so many men on a small atoll, meaning that you do need to worry about troops quality and can't just throw dudes at the problem. - You get a lot of combat divisions but not that many - like 2 dozen US divisions over the course of the game plus various ANZAC units, if we don't count the British and Indian divisions that probably will stay in SE Asia. Divisions take a long time to get back up to full strength if they get damaged. So, you do need to take care of these guys.
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Mar 31, 2018 14:27
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   Another troopship is torpedoed.  Our newest carrier arrives and makes her presence known.  Spitfires are still a pain.  The Allied bombers do their best to cancel the new threat.   High operational losses are new pilots flying of carriers. 
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Mar 31, 2018 18:18
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Grey Hunter posted:High operational losses are new pilots flying of carriers. In my head, it's because the new pilots are experiencing "first solo" and "first carrier landing" on the same sortie.
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Mar 31, 2018 19:21
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Does that mean we're basically Kamikazying our own carriers?
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Mar 31, 2018 21:47
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Deep Dish Fuckfest posted:Does that mean we're basically Kamikazying our own carriers? I'm not sure the pilots are good enough to pull that off
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Apr 1, 2018 02:51
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Mr. Despair posted:I'm not sure the pilots are good enough to pull that off Your defeatist attitude shames the emperor
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Apr 1, 2018 12:53
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Grey's newest recruit coming in to land: http://i.imgur.com/bV0XufI.jpg
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Apr 1, 2018 15:42
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  One of our supply convoys runs into one of theirs all the way up here. There is no fighting.  We sink an escort and cripple a LST.  Another Liberator bites the dust.   The refuel squadron has reached its target, but another CVE is in the area.  The Yubari is still dead in the water, and eats two torpedoes.  At Wake, we overwhelm and capture the American “invaders”.  We took a few hits, but we have refueled the Squadron.  I have merged them to maximise AA, and they will be heading home now.  With one little diversion....    It's been a mixed month, but with some late heavy hitting, things still look bad for the Allies – they have a lot of ground to make up!  They have started to advance, but it's far later than I made my own counter-offensive.  This one really hammers home the difference in real-estate held. They have lost thousands of men for a few small islands no one cares about, by this time, I had taken several major bases.  The rate of air losses seems to have levelled off a bit.  A new crop of aces is eclipsing the old.  We are straight up murdering them out there. The IJA has had an easy war of it so far.  And they have the Navy to tank for this. We sank 99 ships for the loss of 21 of our own.  The value of those ships differs as well – we lost 400 points worth this month, and killed 1,400! Overall, we started the month 4540 points away from winning, and ended the month 4499 points. So we are not making massive strides in that direction, but we are not being hammered either – we have a score difference of 27,000 points, and its going to take the Allies a long time to hammer their way through that!
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Apr 1, 2018 17:57
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Bikini Atoll! What're you doing going over there?
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Apr 1, 2018 19:09
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I'm amazed Yubari's still afloat after eating two torpedoes, as that specific light cruiser is barely larger than some destroyers. Are you going to be able to pull it out, or is the ship effectively lost but just hasn't sunk yet?
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Apr 1, 2018 19:14
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David Corbett posted:Bikini Atoll! What're you doing going over there? I think the large reaction range on the task force is sending them chasing things. I'll fix it when I notice tomorrow.
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Apr 1, 2018 19:22
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What Allied units were lost at Wake over the past few days? There are too many combat squads to just be base forces.
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Apr 1, 2018 19:42
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An infantry regiment IIRC.
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Apr 1, 2018 19:52
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Grey Hunter posted:An infantry regiment IIRC. drat, actual non-trivial combat formations are being driven back into the sea in 1944. That's not really surprising given the AI but an American amphibious assault collapsing in 1944 in real life is somehow more unlikely than the Japanese managing to win a carrier battle by that point in the war. zetamind2000 fucked around with this message at 20:00 on Apr 1, 2018 |
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Apr 1, 2018 19:55
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whitewhale posted:Grey's newest recruit coming in to land: Jet fuel can't melt steel beams... Aviation fuel can't beat steel belts? I wonder what really happened to all those allied craft lost to "kamikazes"
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Apr 1, 2018 23:12
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I wish I had followed the original allied thread, shame all the image links are dead. I know all the posts are on LParchive but it's not the same without the audience commentary.
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Apr 1, 2018 23:45
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Just read the thread until you hit an update, then read that update on the Archive. You get both that way.
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Apr 2, 2018 01:32
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RZApublican posted:drat, actual non-trivial combat formations are being driven back into the sea in 1944. That's not really surprising given the AI but an American amphibious assault collapsing in 1944 in real life is somehow more unlikely than the Japanese managing to win a carrier battle by that point in the war. And landing crafts (LCI, LST) which Grey was sinking with a quickness.
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Apr 2, 2018 02:23
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And another thing to consider; the US basically gets practically infinite 'x'AKs, AVs and all those other prefixes, but (admittedly this is from memory as I haven't touched the game in some time) they're never as good at naval invasions as the AKs/AVs/etc. that don't have the 'x' prefix. And more than once we've seen Grey's raiders or aircraft maul a load of the 'real' vessels capable of handling big numbers of troops safely. It won't win the war, for the 'practically infinite' reason, but it will really slow the Marines down if they have to perform island hopping with ships that aren't really designed for purpose or can't carry as many troops as a proper LST, or a liner (Grey, if you got the Enterprise, you are now honour-bound to find and kill the Queen E next time that liner shows up, just so you know, no pressure).
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Apr 2, 2018 11:42
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So is the Yubari not being scuttled presuming it's not gone down or does damage control look like they might keep it intact enough to get into port for repairs if it's detatched to head back to Rabaul?
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Apr 2, 2018 13:33
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  The Kido Butai turns back, and we hit another couple of CVE's! Our unskilled pilots take heavy losses again though!  It's a tense few minutes, but we maul the counter attack without taking a hit ourselves.  Our afternoon strike just bounces off the CAP, most likely supplied by the islands.  Owch, those were some drat costly strikes!  It does it job though, and there will be no CVE's chasing my battleships home!
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Apr 3, 2018 04:43
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So do you have any actual planes left in your air groups that can put a strike together? You still have ships, at the rate you're going you won't have pilots or planes for them.. Good luck with being able to put a lot of the replaceements on an extended training op to try and bring them back up to snuff. But, 2-3 dead CVE's and no major losses amongst your raiders - one damaged CL, couple destroyers isn't bad all things with how the op went. Good luck rebuilding your airgroups.
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Apr 3, 2018 05:18
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Who needs planes when the glorious battleship has been proven time and again to rule the waves?
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Apr 3, 2018 05:22
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