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Oh Grey 
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Dec 7, 2015 18:40
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I'd like to claim the IJN Shinano as my lucky ship We're in it for the long game!
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Dec 8, 2015 03:27
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Comstar posted:I'd like to claim HMAS Canberra. Lets hope if she gets sunk it's by Japanese Torpedo's and not (probably) American ones. I'm fairly confident we won't see American torpedoes sinking anything for quite a while yet 
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Dec 9, 2015 10:25
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Yeah Grey really needs to hit Singers with everything he's got this time so we don't get held up there.
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Dec 10, 2015 04:29
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paradigmblue posted:There aren't too many goals that are off limits vs the AI, as if he accompanies his invasion force with the KB, the allies simply cannot contest the landing by sea. It's sometimes better as the Japanese player to take a string of bases allowing clear supply lines to their furthest away targets, and then back-fill the rest later. Diego Garcia or bust!
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Dec 10, 2015 05:45
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Yes, there are also special emergency reinforcements that are triggered when you cross a certain point of Australia, or land in New Zealand, or cross a certain point in India.
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Dec 10, 2015 09:50
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God, if Grey nails the Enterprise four days into the war ...
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Dec 10, 2015 18:50
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Shimrra Jamaane posted:What are some of the gamey strategies that you can do if you are really good at the game? Isn't it better as a JP player to not do Pearl Harbor and instead race the KB to the Philippines or something? You can try to hunt for the US carriers instead of doing a PH strike, since you know where they start. You can hit Pearl for multiple days, although this doesn't always turn out as well as you might think since CAP will be up on the second day and you don't get torpedoes in the harbor and pilot losses might not make it worth it. You can divert the KB to hit Manila instead of Pearl, and this is a hotly-debated topic as people weigh whether the BBs or the subs are more valuable to the Allies. You can try to land directly at Mersing to cut off Singers right away, since you know that there are few forces there. This might not be a good idea against a human. You can use China as a training ground for pilots, letting them rack up xp via unopposed bombing runs, then reassigning the pilots back to the front lines so that you can maintain a crack force. I think you might need some of the other player options to be enabled, and that this works better with the Hakko Ichiu scenario where the Japanese have more training squadrons. You can use strategic bombing on the Chinese cities to deny them of supply production. You can exploit the air combat engine's overemphasis on the power of dives by sweeping enemy airbases with fighters flying at maximum altitude to give them a large combat advantage. In general, the AI is not very good at concentrating its forces, and will send out task forces with penny-packet compositions. For the Allies, this makes the game fairly easy. The "Fortress Palembang" strategy for example will trip up the Japanese AI every time because it will never figure out that if you've turned Palembang into The Iron Cage of Sebastus IV, that it needs to hit it with everything it's got. It'll just keep sending small transport TFs to try and land troops, which your Vildebeests and Mitchells will rather easily sink, and the whole campaign will lock up. For the Japanese, this still makes the campaign an uphill battle because the sheer amount of resources available to the Allies will mean that it can and will eventually stumble upon creating a concentrated force, even by accident, and the paucity of your own forces will mean that you only really need to make one mistake before you get so many KB carriers that you'll be forced on the permanent defensive. As an aside, this is why the "Ironman" scenarios exist: if you give the Japanese AI a poo poo-ton of assets to play with, you extend the "fun part" of an Allied human player playing against them because the IJN remains a credible threat for so much longer even with the AI's less-than-stellar strategic planning.
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Dec 12, 2015 03:40
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The next 6 months will be crucial
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Dec 14, 2015 19:16
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Drone posted:I forget, wasn't there some tactic that a Japanese player used on some Matrix forums AAR of WITP where they pre-emptively attacked the Soviets to free up the garrison troops after cleaning them up? Do the Soviets get a Patton-style intervention event if the Japanese player advances too far into Siberia (Zhukov showing up to push Tito's poo poo in, I guess)? The two strategies I'm familiar with are: 1. The way the non-Admiral's Edition land combat model worked (specifically that you could overstack by a lot, land units moved relatively quickly and Japanese armor was probably overly strong by stats), it was possible for the Japanese to directly attack the Soviets at the start of the war, blitz them and have a decent chance of winning. This required a significant commitment of troops, but if you pulled it off, that removed an entire theater and scored a huge amount of points. This isn't really possible anymore in WITP:AE 2. The Soviets require a certain amount of Japanese AV to be garrisoned to prevent them from activating, but the geographically they don't have to be on the border, so I think there are some shenanigans you could pull off as far as reassigning units across the different Theater HQs to allow you to either use the "garrison units" in other combat areas while still having their AV count for Soviet activation requirements, or allow you to cycle units in and out of the garrison HQ. There are no "emergency reinforcements" triggered for the Soviets.
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Dec 16, 2015 08:39
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If Grey has backups, he could release saved games of the original Allied run at various points, so people could delve into it and trace things like the deployment, performance, experiences and battles of individual ship captains and pilots through the years.
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Dec 17, 2015 10:35
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SOLarian posted:Looks like the game is 50% off at Matrix Games right now. Decisions, decisions... Really the only decision you should be making is whether to play the Allies or Imperial Japan.
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Dec 17, 2015 16:03
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It was a gamey exploit in SH4 as well to just load those Mark 10s into your non-S-class fleet boat instead of the Mark 14s just so you'd have fish that'd explode reliably.
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Dec 18, 2015 10:01
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The Matrix AARs are almost unreadable because of the near complete and total lack of screenshots to give you any sort of perspective on what's happening.
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Dec 22, 2015 01:47
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YeOldeButchere posted:Ah yes, Imperial Japan's most effective tactic for getting rid of those meddlesome B29s: boarding them. Considering Japan's options and actual strategies for dealing with B-29s, you're more correct than you might think.
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Dec 25, 2015 03:33
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Rexim posted:Can someone explain why Rabaul is such a prize? I know it was important in real life, and seems to be important to Grey, so is it just a prime location? It can be upgraded to a large port and airbase. In Japanese hands, planes operating off Rabaul can hit both Port Moresby and Guadalcanal, and seizing either of those in turn will put Japanese planes in range of hitting shipping bound for Australia's east coast. From the Allied perspective, it can be tricky to approach and assault because your own planes won't have the range to suppress Rabaul, so any operations in the Solomon islands to contest moves towards Port Moresby and/or Guadalcanal will have to involve carriers if you want air cover. EDIT: In a broader sense, a fair number of the critical battles of WW2 in the Pacific were around these points where you couldn't just leapfrog from one land-based air umbrella to the other, since that would force the navies to come out and play. Midway is another example, as is Leyte Gulf. gradenko_2000 fucked around with this message at 04:59 on Dec 27, 2015 |
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Dec 27, 2015 04:54
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One of the best parts of Shattered Sword was when it talked about how the Japanese didn't have any doctrine for shore bombardment support of amphibious landings, nor did they have doctrine for air support of amphibious landings, and then any invasion of Midway would require the invaders to wade through a couple hundred yards of hip-deep water, at which point they'd find themselves on the business end of a US Armored unit.
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Dec 27, 2015 14:28
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Rexim posted:Do Liberty Ships make an appearance? What's their troop/cargo capacity compared to a typical liner? The first Liberty Ship to appear in the game is the John C Fremont on Mar 1 1942. The Liberty Ships are all standardized to 6520 tons and are considered xAKs, so purely for hauling cargo around. The Allies get: 66 in 1942 265 in 1943 185 in 1944 253 in 1945 up to the historical V-J Day on Sep 2 another 28 after that and a last one on Feb 15 1946 For a total of 798 modeled in-game. Historically this was just 30% of all Liberty Ships built, with the rest going to the ETO and other theaters.
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Jan 2, 2016 03:52
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Grey Hunter posted:
It's now my headcanon that all your work over the last decade has been building up to this one joke. shalafi4 posted:ok I'm used to a lot of the weirder ship designations but what on earth is a KV? KV is a corvette, typically a warship smaller than a frigate, but larger than a coastal patrol or fast attack craft. Corvettes range between 500 to 2000 tons. The HMS Thyme specifically part of the Flower-class of 940 ton corvettes, notable for being figuratively press-ganged into being ocean-going guardians for escort-starved convoys during the Battle of the Atlantic despite their diminutive size.
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Jan 3, 2016 02:54
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YodaTFK posted:It's probably been explained before but can someone explain the difference between the xAKL and AKL and other cargo ships? I seem to remember stuff about potential upgrades but I'm not clear on it. The x means you're not supposed to use them in any military capacity, just hauling freight into established ports.
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Jan 4, 2016 04:35
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lenoon posted:Is there going to be an admiral's edition style reworking of WITW at some point? I'm not sure what the exact order of releases will be, but the series is going to come down to: War in the East 2.0, using the WITW engine North Africa/The Mediterranean 1940-1943, using the WITW engine (not sure if WITW's Torch expansion invalidates this) The West Front 1940: Case Yellow, Case Red and a hypothetical Operation Sealion (and maybe Weserubung), using the WITW engine Something to link all of these together into one game Drone posted:If I remember right, Admirals Edition for WITP started as basically a user-created mod for the original game that was so popular and so ubiquitous that they just used it as a basis for a rerelease. I'm not sure about it being a mod, but Admiral's Edition was developed by fans that licensed the original game. WITP not-AE was by Gary Grigsby, WITP:AE is by some outfit calling themselves Henderson Field that thought WITP wasn't quite detailed enough. (the punchline is that there's a mod for WITP:AE called DaBabes which adds a shitton of researched smaller ships and craft because yet another group of people thought AE still wasn't quite detailed enough either)
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Jan 4, 2016 18:35
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Yorkshire Tea posted:Oh really? I would have assumed a Russian attack on a defensive Wehrmacht at its 1940 strength would have been goddamn awful for the Russians? (I understand an answer to this is offense was significantly stronger than defense in WW2 and if that's the answer, fair enough) The "Russia attacks Germany" scenario assumes war between the two either in 1942 or 1943. Russia was in the middle of a massive rearmament and reorganization in 1941 when the Germans attacked, and that's part of why Germany made as much as ground as they did. A year sooner and the Red Army wouldn't have been as gutted and disorganized. A year later and the reorganization would have already been completed. No German-first-strike at all and the reorganization completes anyway and Stalin goes first.
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Jan 8, 2016 15:27
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Rexim posted:In this game, does 1 'casualty' represent one man? That was probably a typo on Grey's part.
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Jan 8, 2016 17:41
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uncharacteristically
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SIGSEGV posted:Defiantly a typo. Speaking of casualties I wonder how the game calculates tropical diseases because I'm pretty sure it must because grognards are grognards. Troops in certain hex bands representing the tropics cannot recover disruption/fatigue
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Jan 8, 2016 19:04
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SIGSEGV posted:If you can't invade empty alaskan islands and have your soldiers freeze their dongs off after staying in landing craft for three hours while battleships shell a penguin colony then I'm not sure anyone would want to play this game. See, the thing is, in order to prevent heavy disruption and loss of life during amphibious landings, you need to set a base hex as a "Preparation Target", and then wait roughly 100 days for the Preparation stat to climb to 100, then execute your landing. But if it's a lovely Alaskan island in the middle of nowhere and you don't expect resistance, would really wait for full preparation? Can you wait for full preparation if you have to repeat the process a dozen times over? It then becomes tempting to land without full prep, which then causes casualties and disruption when you land, which simulates real life gently caress ups during these misadventures!
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Jan 9, 2016 04:08
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Grey Hunter posted:The Kido Butai jumps back into action hitting the President Coolaid hard. I know I said I was sending them back for repair, but that was a cunning plan to confuse the spies amongst you! In reality, I remembered I'd ordered a fresh wave of troops in – that's the transport up near Kota Barau – These guys are landing at Mersing and I need to provide support for them! Misspelling aside, that's a 21 000 ton liner. Good on you, Grey!
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Jan 9, 2016 18:39
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My paternal grandfather had just finished medical school when the war happened, and he acted as medic for a guerrilla as they operated in and around Manila during the occupation. He didn't talk about any specifics much, except for how out of a med school graduating class of 22, only him and three others got to see the end of the war. lenoon posted:Edit: the real crime here is people somehow believing that the Catalina was the best floatplane of the war and not the majestic Sunderland. Obviously the best floatplane is the Emily, made out of the finest folded Japanese steel.
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Jan 10, 2016 02:08
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TildeATH posted:Who was the guy that said we should have had flying boat bombers instead of aircraft carriers? Was there any truth to his claims? There's really no way this can be true. You can't run a logistical operation afloat like you can on land. A carrier isn't just a place to launch planes from, it's an entire airport.
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Jan 10, 2016 05:34
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Is this also the guy that keeps insisting the M103 is named the Longstreet?
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Jan 10, 2016 05:58
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Acebuckeye13 posted:that was all on Halsey for failing to cover the San Bernardino strait. Halsey didn't cover the San Bernardino straight because he thought it was already covered by a detachment from Oldendorf's fleet. With hindsight we know that that detachment was just hypothetical/speculative rather than an actual order that was carried out, but such a miscommunication need not have come about if MacArthur's pissing contest with Nimitz didn't unnecessarily complicate the comms set-up during the invasion.
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Jan 14, 2016 09:31
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Lord Koth posted:The dive bombers managed to arrive and attack the Kido Butai just as the carriers were reloading their aircraft, which is by far their most vulnerable point of carrier operations since all the ammunition and fuel actually has to be out on deck, which was something US carriers generally managed to luck out in avoiding. I just wanted to make a small callback to Shattered Sword real quick: the American dive bombers "got through" because the IJN carriers ran out of CAP. The IJN carriers ran out of CAP because the multiple American attacks throughout the day kept coming in dribs and drabs, which meant that Nagumo had to keep choosing between launching more CAP, recovering the CAP that was Winchester, and launching a naval strike with his own bombers. And he kept choosing the first two options. Which meant that contrary to popular belief, the bombers weren't on-deck at all - the flight deck was busy working with the Zeros for precisely the same reasons that allowed Dick Best to score his hits in the first place! And I don't mean to say that the big picture is wrong: the Americans did catch a lucky break, and the Americans did catch the carriers in the middle of flight operations, and the confluence of factors that lead up to the moment of the fatal hits on the Kaga and Akagi were due to the clusterfuck that was Yamamoto's "will they won't they" strategy combined with multiple points of doctrinal failure, but the bombers were below decks.
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Jan 17, 2016 16:29
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Night10194 posted:I need to know more about IJN torpedoes. I've heard they had a tendency to blow up the boat they were on but did a great job in general. IJN torpedoes were, from a technical perspective, really really good. They had longer range than their contemporaries, they didn't leave a bubble trail like steam-powered torpedoes, and they didn't suffer from the detonator teething problems that plagued American and German torpedoes. Unfortunately, they were also "wasted" on IJN submarine doctrine that meant they weren't attacking the merchant marine actively, and the mother boats weren't as good as the US fleet boats or the German U-boats, and the price of that technical accomplishment was a reliance on oxygen-power which made the torpedoes very vulnerable to unintended detonations. On the surface side, the Japanese held a belief (with some historical justification) that superior night training would carry the day, but they were eventually overcome by the Allied use of radar.
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Jan 18, 2016 09:17
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In no particular order: * You have binoculars with exceptionally large apertures to maximize the amount of light that they can gather * You weed out your night spotters to those that have the best possible night vision (to the extent of human genetics) * You fire your guns in salvos instead of continuously so your spotters can protect their night-vision * You develop flash-less gunpowder, again to protect the night-vision of your spotters * You develop star shells with as great a range and as great an illuminating power as possible, so you can lob them over the enemy ships to light them up without being so close as to give you away at the same time Night fighting was seen as a way to eat at the anticipated numerical superiority of the Americans, as they wouldn't be able to bring an overwhelming number of ships to bear when they're in a knife fight at close range. Torpedoes were also seen as being synergistic with this view, as you could fire a spread of torps from long range, the Americans would never see them coming because it was too dark, and they'd take even more losses before the battle gets joined inside the phone booth of darkness.
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Jan 18, 2016 15:32
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Drone posted:I don't think that's how limericks work, Grey, but bless you for trying.  Shave!
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Jan 18, 2016 23:55
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Mans posted:does the game emulate the different qualities of torpedoes in any meaningful sense? 1. Yes. Every type of projectile has a "dud rate", and the Mark 14 specifically has it set to 90%, which slowly improves over time (I can't recall the exact rate off-hand). There's a realism setting to toggle whether this is strictly followed. 2. Yes. There's a realism setting that changes how radically you can reconfigure your squadrons and how much faster you can push aircraft research with concerted efforts.
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Jan 19, 2016 03:14
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I don't even really think it's an overstatement. All other torps in the game have a dud rate of about 10%, but for the Mark 14s, they'd run something like 10-20 feet deeper than what you set them at, so it's not just capturing the dud rate of the magnetic detonators going off prematurely, or the dud rate of the magnetic detonators refusing to go off because they can't "detect" the hull of the ship they're under, or the dud rate of the contact detonators not going off if they hit a ship at right angles to the hull, it's also capturing the "dud rate" of the torpedo sailing underneath the ship completely
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Jan 19, 2016 04:08
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Both the Germans and the Americans had acoustic-homing torpedoes developed and in-use by 1943, but they were relatively slow things: anywhere from half to a third as fast as "regular" torpedoes of the day to allow the acoustic sensors to hear their targets, but if you were going to shoot at 10 knot or slower merchantmen anyway then it's not too bad. The Japanese tried to acquire some of this technology from the Germans via their inter-oceanic submarine transfers, but I couldn't find if the I-52 actually got to deliver those parts, or if they were able to apply it to their own torpedoes.
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Jan 19, 2016 12:20
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That's right - if you haven't won yet after using two atomic bombs and fire off a third, your "victory level" moves down one notch, even if it was the third that takes you over the finish line. Every succeeding atomic bomb after that costs another notch. Operation Downfall was supposed to use multiple atomic bombs to clear the beaches of defenders, and you can't really do that in this game because A. you won't have enough bombs to do it B. the bombs, as modeled, won't deal enough damage to ground troops for it to be worth it C. it's going to completely tank your victory level Drone posted:Come to think of it, has there ever been an LP or AAR where the Allies invaded the Home Islands? I know Grey took Hokkaido in his Allied LP. I've seen at least one AAR before where the Allied player against the Japanese AI landed on the Home Islands and took Tokyo by force. Casualties were in the simulated hundreds of thousands. The player went out of their way to not "win" the game before that happened, though. In most cases you're going to trigger the victory condition by points before you ever need to touch the Home Islands, and any scenario where the Japanese player is good enough to drag the war past Sep 1945 is probably going to be one where the Allies are in no good position to invade Honshu anyway. I suppose Grey's game could have gone on longer if he didn't use the A-bomb, but in a parallel of "firebombings are just as bad as nukes", he would have destroyed enough industry via conventional munitions to score the points needed win even without needing a land invasion.
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Jan 21, 2016 11:04
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How do you even have saved game corruption? I've been playing a game with goon ElBrak for a year (?) now and if a file goes bad wouldn't you just pick up from the previous turn, which you'd have archived over the hundreds and hundreds of back-and-forth emails? Understandable for Grey Hunter playing single-player, but in a PBEM? C'mon.
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Jan 21, 2016 14:48
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Mikl posted:Then the Japanese player "lost" the savegame, the turn was replayed, and the battleship/cruiser force was fine and the landings were repelled (from the thread: "about 6000 AV was moved to Aomori almost overnight before the attack"). Holy poo poo where do you get off being that much of a cheating dick.
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Jan 21, 2016 15:28
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