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The Essex may have made port at Efate to try and pump out some of the water coming in the various holes those Vals punched in it so it can limp to a proper drydock. Once disbanded in a port base, they are no longer valid targets for Naval Attack missions. Therefore, you might do well to assign some of the KB's strike groups to a Port Attack primary mission targeting Efate. Note that when assigned Port Attack as a secondary mission, they'll only strike a port in range if they find no targets at sea, and as we've seen, the Allies have an endless supply of cargo ships to distract your pixel-pilots. Just remember to flip them back to the Naval Attack primary mission afterwards 
Slippery42 fucked around with this message at 08:23 on Aug 12, 2017 |
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Aug 12, 2017 08:21
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quote:The Kido Butai is heading back to Rabaul. Time to reload and go hunting again. When your troops have a -supply modifier, there's also probably not enough supply in hex to replenish your ships or their air groups. Hopefully there are some cargo ships on the way!
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Aug 13, 2017 18:58
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Calcutta's a pretty long trip for fighters, even from the forward bases in Burma, and those have been getting hit often enough that I'm not sure they're operational. One of the quirks of the game is that it sets every air group to max range by default, and because bombers almost always have a higher max range than fighters, that means they'll be outlasting their escorts unless you rein them in manually. In a game with so many fiddly details like WitP, it's really easy to forget to do this 100% of the time. The good news is there's a "set all groups at this base to these settings" button, so at least you don't have to reset the range one group at a time.
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Aug 28, 2017 08:22
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wedgekree posted:Does the game let you have any harbor defenses? Like at all? Because ow. And good luck if there's any way remotely to boost merchant production or ASW Destroyers. You're gonna need 'em. You can set an ASW task force to patrol only a harbor hex, a useful task for shorter-legged ships like SCs. Also, minefields are a thing that may help. Lay one in a friendly harbor, and it will last a while. Even longer if you have a ship classified as an ACM in port (disbanded, not in a TF) to tend to it.
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Sep 7, 2017 06:46
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You only need shipyard mode to repair major floatation/engine damage, so if a ship only has systems damage or minor flt/eng damage, pier side works just as well (if not more quickly) and requires no drydock space. Musashi and Hyuga can be moved there at this point, along with several lighter ships.
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Oct 28, 2017 22:24
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Triggerhappypilot posted:What are the conditions for activation of kamikaze missions? IIRC the allies have to have a base within a certain radius of the home islands, but I forget if they're also date restricted. Kamikazes trigger anytime after January 1, 1944 that the Allies hold a base within 15 hexes (traced by sea only) of Saigon, Tokyo, or one other base (somewhere on Formosa, I think?)
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Nov 10, 2017 07:37
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That strike wave from the fleet at Jaluit looked big enough to account for not one, but two fleet carriers. Are the KB's air groups in good enough shape to engage that?
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Nov 15, 2017 20:30
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Speaking of interesting AI strategy, I've been playing through this game again as the Allies. The AI sent Yamato and Ise within 300 miles of Pearl with no air cover, I guess to raid merchant shipping? I had a carrier that just finished refitting there whose Dauntlesses put several dents in the armor (the Avenger pilots had a bad day), but a couple of the victims from the original Pearl raid had just finished repairing, so I also sent them out to see what would happen in a gun battle... BB Yamato, Shell hits 48, heavy fires, heavy damage, and in the follow-up engagement BB Yamato, Shell hits 17 and is sunk All of my BBs survived to tell the tale 
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Dec 28, 2017 22:19
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RA Rx posted:Shot of your naval aviator top pilots if you have the time? IJN/IJA have separate pilot pools, as do the USAAF/USN/USMC and each individual Allied nation on the other side. I don't think there's any way to move them from one pool to the other. Also, managing pilots is the worst. An egregious example was when a USMC squadron upgraded to Avengers. I don't think there's any way to train them in torpedo bombing while they're in Vindicators/Dauntlesses, so their NavT skills were all in the 20-35 range when they upgraded. The AI chose the next week to sail 4 BBs into range of them. Out of 60ish sorties in decent weather, they scored, I think, 3 hits. A lot of British/Commonwealth squadrons upgrade from bombers to fighters in late '42, so you're stuck with terrible A2A pilots in them for a few weeks as you get them trained up. If you're grognardier than me, you might know how to shuffle the correct pilots in and out of rear-area groups running training missions, but the interface and documentation sure don't make it easy!
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Dec 30, 2017 21:52
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Donkringel posted:Those rebased planes are doing fairly good work. Is there a downside to having that many planes on the islands right now? It can, but for a big, built up base like Rabaul, it's not likely. According to the game manual, airfields can only operate a number of planes equal to (50 engines * airfield level) without penalties. That's right, 1, 2, and 4 engine planes are all counted differently. An air HQ unit adds its command radius (usually something like 5 for Allied HQs, not sure about Japanese) to the base's airfield size. Also, you need to have enough Aviation Support devices at the base (usually equal to 1/plane), otherwise your planes won't repair quickly enough. I think once you have 250 Av Sup, that's all you need to keep any number of planes maintained at that base. As a historically important base for Japan, I suspect Grey has it maxed out.
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Jan 7, 2018 20:33
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Woodchip posted:Australia loves to burn fuel, doesn't it. Can turning stockpiling on stop my fuel depots from turning into supply? The way I handle it is actually to completely turn off heavy industry production because it eats through your fuel. Australia's light industry (which only burns resources) is plenty to keep everything there running, and the Allies can more than afford the loss of heavy industry points. To do this, select a base with heavy industry (just check Australia's bigger cities), and you should see a bunch of factory-looking icons at the bottom of the screen. Find the one that says "select x heavy industry", and you should see the toggle to turn production off in that window. Even then, I found myself fuel-starved in Australia in my most recent run because some random TF I had sitting in Cape Town derped out and decided to take up all the dock space, making my tanker convoys take weeks rather than days to load.
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Jan 13, 2018 20:42
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Regarding pilot quality, one important thing to keep in mind is that's only initial quality. Training can fix a lot. The Allies get a couple very green squadrons in early '42, and I don't even move them to the front until most of the pilots get their xp and main skill from the <30 they start at to around 50. It doesn't take that long, either. At 100% training, you can expect a point in each every day or two. Probably won't help the groups at airbases being bombed incessantly, but carrier pilots should have no problem getting some practice in as their ships repair, refit, etc. I don't think training missions can get them to pre-war Kido Butai levels of experience, but they should get good enough to not be free points whenever they run into a pair of Spitfires.
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Mar 30, 2018 18:59
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Ships also occasionally run aground, hit rocks, etc. during landing operations. Because of course that's modeled. Oftentimes when this happens, it will end up with >50 flt damage which puts it square in "heavy damage" territory.
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Apr 18, 2018 05:41
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wedgekree posted:So how bad is the damage from a torp hit on the Essex likely to be? Laid up for a couple of weeks on whatever nearest island has Seabees setup on it for field repairs? Back to Sydney? In my last playthrough as the Allies, one of my Yorktowns got hit by a Betty's torpedo and came away with only a few points of damage, none of it flagged "major". Repairs over the course of a day or two at a forward port covered most of the non-major damage. By contrast, in one of my earlier playthroughs, half a dozen Swordfish attacked a TF with Musashi in it. I was thinking "oh cool, maybe I'll get lucky and force it out of theater for a month or two" and just skipped the combat playback. Got to the report: "BB Musashi, Torpedo hits 2, and is sunk". In short, damage rolls are highly variable. Ship and sub-borne torpedoes have a bit more oomph than the aerials from my anecdotes, so against a state-of-the-art capital ship like Essex, I'd wager it dealt around 20 major damage. Something like that would keep her offline for 4-6 weeks if the AI sends her to Pearl for repairs. If the AI lives dangerously, that's not enough damage to stop air ops, so it might simply continue its sortie despite the damage.
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May 1, 2018 06:55
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The launch-capability of an Allied CV is 90, CVL is 33, and CVE is 27. I'm pretty sure that the game engine (surprisingly) doesn't care that heavier planes like Hellcats couldn't normally fly off of CVEs. Add 20 fighters on CAP and 5 bombers on search/ASW patrols, and we're probably looking at either 3 CVL/CVEs or 1 CV and 1 lighter ship, both partially depleted before the raid. From GH's screenshot, the KB has 97 fighters, 92 dive bombers, and 79 torpedo bombers. Even with the qualitative difference between planes/pilots at this point in the war, I like those odds. Good luck!
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May 6, 2018 21:55
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I'm not sure where the threshold is exactly for "heavy damage", but I saw a ship showing 36 SYS and 32 FLT damage the next turn not get that tag in the combat report. Suffice to say, those two bombs did work, and Yorktown almost certainly can't launch tomorrow (I think somewhere around 50 combined SYS/FLT damage prevents air operations). However, its air groups probably rebased to Wasp. With no indications of mass ditching in the intelligence report via piles of operational losses, Wasp is almost certainly still capable of launching. The question is how bad she's actually hurt and what (if any) penalty her air ops will take tomorrow.
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May 8, 2018 08:54
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Bold Robot posted:This is a good point that might be lost on some readers: Big land combats can take a long time to process, like "did the game crash" levels of long. The actual processing of the turn - 99% of what is shown in this LP - usually takes like 10-15 minutes depending on how much you skip and how much stuff is going on. I've had combats with about 100k troops take what feels like a minute or so to process. Chungking has 500k troops so it probably does take a long-rear end time to process. I just skip straight to the combat report for land combats. There might be pertinent info displayed during the combat animation, but I doubt anyone other than the devs know what any of it means. As for actually processing the combat, I don't recall ever needing more than a few seconds for any combat to play out, even with the PC I had 7 or 8 years ago. That includes combats where thousands of AV worth of troops clash. Did you set any of those performance switches when launching the game (-cpu#, -dd_sw)? If not, those may help (documentation is tucked away in a readme file in the game's directory). For the peanut gallery, the game engine was built to run on ancient hardware. Its recommended system requirements include a "1 Ghz CPU" (minimum is a 600 Mhz Pentium II). In short, it's one of those programs where binding its affinity to a single core helps avoid a performance hit because modern technology confuses it.
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May 18, 2018 08:05
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approach is understandable.
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A few mechanics notes: Destroyed units in Chungking respawn after 30 days, but they do so at 1/3 strength. Repairing a single point of industry damage costs 1000 supply. Aside from limiting the city's ability to produce more supply, bombing industry will burn what's there very quickly as well if the AI decides to repair it. Consider setting a LRCAP over the city to intercept any air transports. Not sure if the AI's savvy enough to try this, but if they are, hey, free plane kills! As others have said, bomb the airfield to burn supply and prevent their engineers from restoring forts. If you have a spare squadron of recon planes, have them fly daily missions over the city. The "detection level" of a hex factors into your dice rolls during combat, so anything to increase it will help. Finally, the manual alludes to a "daily allotment of supply" in certain bases, including Chungking. That could explain why we aren't seeing a supply (-) modifier in the combat report. The manual doesn't say how much supply's generated there, because of course not.
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May 20, 2018 10:10
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gradenko_2000 posted:Bombardment only uses a fraction of the units involved - those that can bombard, obviously, so the AV is always going to be much lower than what you'd have in an attack. It only uses a fraction of the units involved for calculating how much damage is done by each side, but I'm pretty sure everything in the hex on both sides are counted for the assault value displayed in the combat report whenever any attack is launched. Unless forced otherwise (by river crossing or atoll landing), I almost always bombard before launching a deliberate/shock attack and mentally calculate the terrain bonus to decide whether or not if a real attack on a subsequent turn would be a good idea or if I need to wait for more pixeltruppen to take the hex. Someone on Matrix's AAR forum once described a bombardment attack as "lobbing some intelligence shells", and I find it a rather suitable description. Grey suffered a combined total of around 7000 squads destroyed/disabled, so if you go by the assumption that 1 combat squad = 1 AV, going from 12000ish to 5000ish makes sense. The good news is most of those are disabled, so give them some time to recover and they'll be back in 5 figures.
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May 21, 2018 05:39
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wedgekree posted:HOw long will it take to get the flight grousp of the KB up to full strength of the air wings? And your pilots holding out well as far as replacement pools? For the airframes, those production screenshots indicate that he makes 185 Jill torpedo bombers and 89 Judy dive bombers per month, along with zergtastic amounts of Zeroes. So assuming groups flying those planes out of land bases don't suck up too many replacements, he can completely refill the KB's airgroups with roughly a single month's production. As for pilots, I've always played as the Allies and have never faced a shortage of pilots. I'm not sure what Japan's flight school graduates look like exp/skill-wise, but it takes Allied pilots about a month to train from the 30ish they have fresh out of school to a more respectable 50ish.
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Jun 2, 2018 06:21
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Bold Robot posted:Question for people who are good at this game. As the Allies, I've got a bunch of troops in Singapore, but I don't think they will be able to take the city. I've got a few divisions of reinforcements I want to send in, but I'm concerned about the river crossing into Singapore. If the reinforcements cross into the city, they will have to do a shock attack, even if I have some friendly troops there already, right? If so, does the attack get rolled as just the new units attacking (in which case they would be outnumbered by a lot) or will the units already in the hex join the fight (still not ideal, but better than getting the reinforcements slaughtered)? If you already have troops who have crossed the river into Singapore, you own that hex side. Crossing a river hex side that you own shouldn't trigger any further shock attacks. There's a hotkey that will highlight ownership of hex sides (I think it's W). This is also useful when you're trying to encircle a force and destroy it rather than force retreats. When a unit does a forced shock attack across a river hex side that you don't own yet, I'm pretty sure only the unit doing the crossing will attack automatically. Of course, because it's WitP's UI, you'll see all of your AV in the hex in the combat report.
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Jul 28, 2018 06:24
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If you're not averse to gaming the AI, one option is to simply march a significant chunk of your AV (roughly half) out of the hex. The AI will think it has the advantage and attack into your remaining troops. However, because you're benefiting from those sweet defender bonuses now, you should hold no problem and inflict a lot of casualties. Do this a few times, and you might trim down the garrison enough to be able to win.
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Aug 19, 2018 23:39
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How many planes are currently deployed in the Marianas? We've only seen about 50 planes in all, which is only about half the capacity of a single Essex or Yorktown. Not much they can do while outnumbered 4 to 1. There are lots of things that are easy to forget to check in a rear-area that's now the front line: airfield size (did you build up Guam since conquering it or is it below size 4?), amount of aviation support in the hex (do you have at least 1 per plane?), supply in the hex (are you at the magic value of 20k to take replacement planes?), and whether any group is short on pilots (because the game doesn't refill these automatically for some reason). If there are Betties around, are they supplied with torpedoes?
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Sep 5, 2018 22:10
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Grey Hunter posted:True, but remember this screenshot is from the 1st, so that's 5 planes built on the first day of the month, not the whole month. I think that's what barman was pointing out. 2 Betties got delivered in a single turn, so you would expect to get around 2 * 30, or 60 total, over the course of a month. Thing is, the number in your "Production Rate" column says that you should be making over 400 of that model over the course of a month. Another way to look at it: Compare the Betty production to the Tojo production one row down in that screenshot. Your factories can churn out roughly 400 of each model per month according to the "Production Rate" column. If all's well, you should see roughly equal numbers of those planes being delivered each turn. According to the "This Turn" column, 11 Tojos and 2 Betties were actually delivered. That indicates something's holding up your production on the Betties, and quite significantly. As a disclaimer, I've never had the courage to try and decipher the production system by actually playing as Japan, so I could be reading the interface completely wrong 
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Oct 2, 2018 07:13
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SavageGentleman posted:This is seriously part of the game? Jesus, playing this must be a pain in the rear end! It's available, but it's generally only used when you're trying to play very optimally (typically against a fellow human). You can leave search arcs blank and be perfectly fine most of the time. I forget if the AI sends available planes on search/ASW patrol in randomly determined directions or if it searches the whole area with a penalty if you leave the arcs blank. Personally, I don't set arcs because doing so can involve a metric fuckton of clicking if you do it for more than a handful of squadrons. Adjusting a single base's search groups to avoid areas in frontline areas where Allies have fighters based is a decent and not-too-burdensome option. The other is to reduce all Betties' range to match that of the longest-legged fighters set to escort missions. Unfortunately, the fighters available to Japan that can keep up with their Allied counterparts don't quite have the range of the Zero. Speaking of fighter range, you might be delightfully horrified to learn that you have to order individual squadrons whether or not to equip drop tanks 
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Oct 20, 2018 01:21
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| # ¿ May 18, 2024 04:08 |
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My bet is that the AI will base the nuke-trained bomber group in Vladivostok (once Soviets activate) and have MiG-3s escort the Enola Gay on its critical mission to eliminate Tokyo Bay Fortress.
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Jan 15, 2019 09:34
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