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gradenko_2000 posted:Yeah Grey really needs to hit Singers with everything he's got this time so we don't get held up there. Yeah, if the allied player manages to get supplies in to Singapore, it can be tough to take. There are also allied transports that start the game en-route to Singapore full of troops - these shouldn't be allowed to reach their destination.One of the smart things that Saros did in our PBEM is quickly shut off my access to Singapore. If Grey moves aggressively to get air dominance, he can shut off all naval access to the DEI, which will help it topple faster. Since Grey is playing vs AI, he can afford to be much more aggressive. The AI won't concentrate it's carriers as well as a player will, which means that he can divide the KB early game and still be unchallenged in naval air power. For the Japanese player in 1941 early 1942, it's all about tempo. They have a limited window in which their amphibious bonus is active, but during that time they can set some ambitious goals for themselves. Right now Grey needs to make a list of what he wants to take, and then allocate the troops to take it. 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. There are a lot of bases in Borneo, New Guinea and the Celebes that, cut off, the allies can't do much with, and that the Japanese player can afford to bypass.
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Dec 10, 2015 05:28
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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 problem with attacking the Soviets in an AI game is that you can't completely defeat them, like you can the Australians, Dutch, or New Zealanders. In those cases, if you take the base hex that serves as their main reinforcement hub, they will no longer receive reinforcements. Because Soviet Union has an off-map hex that can't be moved into as the Japanese, which represents the Western half of the Soviet Union, all of the Soviet reinforcements will wind up piling up in this hex, and over time this will be enough Assault Value to push Japan back. The Soviet Union gets waves of reinforcements that turn their OOB into a nightmare for the Japanese player, with lots of heavy armor that is very difficult for the Japanese to deal with, as they have few units with good anti-vehicle numbers. In a PBEM game in which players are playing for an auto-victory, based on points, attacking the Soviets is more doable, but still risky. The Soviets don't get their first major reinforcements until the summer of 42, and their planes are uniformly terrible until 1943, with the exception of the Mig-3. This allows the Japanese player to potentially gain lots of victory points in the form of Soviet bases and destroyed Soviet units and planes, but if they don't get that 1943 auto-victory, they've made the situation much worse for themselves, as they've opened a front with a force that they can't actually take out of the game. Different mods handle this differently (In Focus Pacific, which Saros and I are playing (I'm really bad about updating my Let's Play thread, I'm sorry), the Soviets start activated, but Japan starts with an additional 6,000 AV in Manchuko), but because Grey is playing for the full 5 years, and isn't going for an autovictory, there's going to be no advantage for him to open the particular can of worms that is the Soviets before their automatic activation in late 45.
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Dec 16, 2015 11:00
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Drone posted:I've never once been able to either reinforce or evacuate Rabaul by sea in time before the Japanese invade. I usually just do the admittedly-gamey-but-still-valid tactic of sending some PBY Catalinas there and ferrying out little bits of the troops that are stationed there, to recombine them into the Australian 6th/8th Division (I forget which) at Moresby. You have some empty USN transports that are headed East in the Pacific at the start of the game. If you re-direct these APs straight to Rabaul, you can, along with some help from your PBYs, grab your units before the Japanese get there. Alternatively, you can split the TF up and grab both the detachments on Naru and Ocean Islands before the hammer falls.
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Dec 16, 2015 11:03
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Grey Hunter posted:
That's because you're sweeping at 1,000 feet - well in range of AA, and allowing the AI's CAP to dive on your sweeping fighters. Try sweeping next turn at 15k or higher. Also, Nates aren't the ideal sweeping plane. If you don't have any Zeroes that can sweep, use your Oscars IIbs.
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Dec 23, 2015 05:16
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Grey, every time you bomb Manilla, or any other hex, and don't see any damage, it is not fog of war. You just aren't hitting anything with those bombers. If you were hitting anything, you would get messages in the combat replay, even if they didn't show up in the FOW affected combat report. From what I can see you're not getting either, which means that all that bombing you are doing is ineffectual. The reason why has everything to do with the altitude that you're bombing at - it looked like 29,000 feet for Manilla - which is far too high to expect any damage. You have to drop your planes down to 15,000 or less to get any sort of reliable result. Yes, this means that you're exposing your planes to anti-aircraft fire, but at least they'll be hitting something. Currently, you're just incurring operations losses with no gain whatsoever.
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Feb 1, 2016 19:00
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Grey Hunter posted:I have to hope this is what I'm doing to Bataan, we're just to high to see the results. Bomb height has nothing to do with whether you see results from that bombing in your combat replay. If you're not seeing the results, there simply aren't any. You've got to drop those planes down below 15,000 ft, preferably lower. Otherwise, all you're doing is fatiguing your pilots and putting stress on your airframes that lead to ops losses for absolutely no gain.
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Feb 7, 2016 19:08
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Jobbo_Fett posted:Attacking a naval base is very different from attacking soldiers in the jungle. Fred has a good point though - airfields and/or clear terrain allow you to still get results at higher altitudes.
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Feb 8, 2016 18:40
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Fuligin posted:How sophisticated is the AI in WitP? Does it actually have some level of strategic planning, or is it more just shuffling troops and ships around until it breaks you by force of production numbers? The AI is not sophisticated at all. It runs off a series of scripts that are pretty inflexible. For example, if you turn an objective that the AI is scripted to take into a death-trap, instead of increasing the forces required to take it, or simply go around it, the AI will just feed forces into that objective piecemeal. The best way to play the AI as the allies is simply to let it take everything it wants through mid 42 so that it can achieve it's historical gains, and only then begin to fight back. For the Japanese, you don't have to worry about breaking the Allied AI as much, but it still won't "react" in the way we would expect a modern AI would.
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Feb 14, 2016 20:12
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Leperflesh posted:Hey Grey Hunter, can you occasionally show us this screen? Please don't post screenshots from Saros's LP(or mine) in this thread - we both read this one, and I'm sure Saros would agree that we'd rather not see the opponent's information, as it could potentially give one of us an unfair advantage. Edit: In the interest of fairness, here's my report from the same day. You can see how each player's information differs due to the fog of war. 
paradigmblue fucked around with this message at 03:29 on Feb 24, 2016 |
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Feb 24, 2016 02:26
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Dreamsicle posted:I'm referring to this mod. I saw it in paradigmblue's focus pacific mod and I was wondering if people who have used it can feel any difference. I didn't want to hijack Grey's thread with Focus Pacific talk, so I replied to you in my thread.
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Feb 28, 2016 20:36
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gradenko_2000 posted:Is the Surcouf modeled in this game? Has a player ever managed to do something cool with it, like maybe beat the Tone in a gun duel? It's in Focus Pacific. I've never had much success with it, but that could very well be because I'm terrible rather than be a reflection of its usefulness.
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Apr 10, 2016 07:49
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MrMojok posted:If anyone has it handy, can you link me to Grey's playthrough as the US, please? I thought I had saved it, now cannot find it. Here you go
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Jun 14, 2016 00:22
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Grey Hunter posted:
:Tries to bomb cruisers from 14,000 feet: :Complains about not hitting anything:
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Jun 16, 2016 19:02
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Dreamsicle posted:Ok so, how the hell do you defend Akyab? I have 4 Divisions there and I can't get supplies shipped there since my cargo doesn't unload there. I don't know why your cargo wouldn't unload there - make sure that you have the port built up. You can also try changing your cargo TFs to amphibious if you think the port is your bottleneck. What's the port level currently? Alternatively just drop the cargo at Chittagong and ensure you have Akyab set to draw supplies. Turn stockpile on so no supplies head the opposite direction.
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Jun 17, 2016 06:11
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Dreamsicle posted:Oh, I can't believe I never saw that. What does the (Max:150) mean though? That's the maximum the base can draw a turn. If you can drop at Akyab directly it will be a faster process. I still can't figure out why you can't offload supplies at Akyab - what's your port level there? In addition to port levels, moving a unit with Naval Support there will increase your load/offload speeds as well.
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Jun 17, 2016 20:59
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Dreamsicle posted:It was zero. That's what I meant by "never saw that" Oh, gotcha. For now, change your cargo TFs to Amphibious TFs to drop the supply at Akyab, and get some additional engineers in there to build up the port level.
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Jun 18, 2016 16:31
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i81icu812 posted:what happens if you land in LA? Do you really destroy all the airplane factories? Yes. Aircraft factories lose their production and switch to generic aircraft factories for the Japanese. However, if the allies re-capture the factories, they all are converted to vehicle factories (which don't do anything for the allies). In any case, Japanese capture of Allied aircraft factories destroys that aircraft production for the allies for good, leaving them with only the replacement rate for that airframe.
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Jun 25, 2016 04:16
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Dreamsicle posted:So I just began my invasion of Rabaul and this happened Land some engineers, if you have any. You'll need them to break down those forts. In the meantime, you need to disrupt his troops as much as possible. Artillery is useful for this, but if you don't have any handy already landed on transports, you'll want to cycle in bombardment task forces. Bombing is also good. I see you don't have any armor here either. The hard AV from armor makes a big difference in assaults, especially since Japan doesn't have great anti-armor. You don't need a lot, but any time you launch an invasion, try to have at least one small armor unit with your landing force. What month/year is it in your game? That will make a huge difference. If I remember correctly, Rabaul is good defensive terrain, so you may have better luck with surface bombardments than air attack. You're also suffering from fatigue, so let your troops sit for a bit before they attack again. In any case, you can't take the base with what you have now. If your troops are well supplied, leave them and let the defenders try to counter attack - which I think they'll have a hard time doing in the terrain - and dump reinforcements in when you can. Bring a couple more divisions, a combat engineering regiment and some armor, season with regular bombardments, and you should be good to go. To help keep those bombardments going, dump a ton of supply in a nearby base that you control - within 3-4 hexes ideally - and disband some of your big AEs there. They can help reload your ships between bombardment runs so you can bombard daily. Be sure to set the float planes on your bombarding battleships to night recon of the base so they can spot for the bombardment TF.
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Jul 1, 2016 08:11
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Jobbo_Fett posted:The Ki-44 Tojo aka the P-40E's worst nightmare.
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Jul 5, 2016 00:54
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PittTheElder posted:2 Allied ships sighted near Yokahama/Yokusuka? Reports in light blue are pretty much always bullshit, usually the result of paranoid recon/naval search pilots.
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Jul 16, 2016 16:30
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Grey Hunter posted:
Why aren't you sweeping his CAP with high-altitude Zeroes? Next time you want to bomb that base, sweep for a couple turns to wear down his CAP, then LRCAP the base that you're going to bomb to ensure that you have fighter support to protect your bombers for all of your bombing runs. Use your Zeroes for LRCAP and sweeps and your Oscars as escorts. Ensure those Oscars are set to within 2,000 ft elevation of your bombers for better coordination, and ensure that they are only set to 40% CAP or less so that you get a good number flying with those bombers. Make sure that the Oscars also have their range set appropriately so that they can fly to the hex that your bombers are targeting.
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Jul 28, 2016 05:21
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Don't you have fighters at Akyab? Order some to LRCAP Chittagong to protect those transports.
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Aug 20, 2016 04:04
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Hey Grey, don't you have any Nicks to provide Anti-Bomber CAP? They are one of your best tools right now at killing four engine bombers.
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May 10, 2017 23:13
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Drone posted:Yep. I don't know the specific because this game can be super esoteric, but (in the early-mid war at least) the Allies are pretty much required to have no more than 2 carriers per TG. The Japanese have different rules iirc. The penalty is just a coordination penalty, so that your strikes arrive in many parts instead of a cohesive strike. However, it's often worth it to take the coordination penalty and operate your carriers in one TF anyway, the penalty doesn't apply to your CAP and the coordination penalty is chance based, which means that you can still sometimes get a good result in 42 despite the penalty.
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May 13, 2017 17:22
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wedgekree posted:Ouch on the pilots. Are there ways to boost pilot training/experience in general or is this pretty common at this phase of the game ven when doing well? Standard practice is to have a group of squadrons in Manchuria or the Home Islands that he has set to 100% Training on escort duty to train up their air skill to 70 before putting the fighter pilots on the front lines. Whether Grey is doing this or not I don't know.
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Jun 4, 2017 08:47
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