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  I-155 takes a hit from an escort off Bengal.  Modern destroyers = possible carrier.  Sturgeon is harassing the convoy as they arrive at Milne Bay, but despite the shallow water the escorts are unable to find her.  They don’t let that disrupt the landing schedule though.  Let’s hope these commandos are the only troops here.  Yes. Yes please.  Six torpedoes and three hits. This is how it’s done folks. Note lack of escort   I-7 takes a rather smaller target.  I think what is happening here is he has hosed up his logistics and ended up with a need to ship fuel but no escorts available on the west coast. Therefore he is trying to use these poo poo yard patrols as escort as they do have ASW 1, but they can’t be directly integrated into a tanker TF because the game won’t let you. So he just has them following the tanker TF instead.  Still no aerial opposition at Darwin.  Balls, they do have Skyrockets flying over Port Moresby itself.  But they are down low!   That’s got to hurt! This turn he sent me a message about not setting his CAP low to catch Betties. It seems he took that a bit too far.  The Fulmar, strong contender for worst plane ever.  What exactly they were trying to do we will never know, because they all died before they could try to do it.  We come to mop up the stragglers at Port Moresby.  I don’t think there’s actually anything for the Betties to hit today, unless they can reach whatever that is down in the Coral Sea. But if there was they’d be safe to attack it now.  Today is the best possible day confirmed. The Palembang sweep arrives when it is supposed to!  Well not quite perfect, the sweep is late at Sabang. But there’s no CAP here either so whatever.  The Nells rough the runway up but don’t manage to hit the seaplane park sadly.  Nor does wave two. A nice amount of supply dump hits at least, not that supply is likely to be a critical factor here given the disparity in troop numbers.  How about Darwin?  Not so fantastic.  Only one supply hit at Palembang. With its ability to create 900 supplies a day this is probably a waste of time really.  A few Anns arrive at Batavia.  Maybe we should use them at Bandoeng instead, there’s probably less flak there. At least there was no CAP though.  Here comes the sweep just in case.  A second wave of Anns still doesn’t achieve much.  Definitely a waste of time.  I wonder if he’s given up on Darwin. I definitely get the impression the pressure we are applying to the flanks at the moment is causing serious strain on his airforce, to the point it has collapsed all the way from Darwin to Rangoon.  On the other hand this looks like he has finally learned to use the Scythe to its strength in sweeping.  We need those Billies here stat!  This is the kind of situation where the float Zero would excel. Unfortunately we only have like 4 built so far.  We catch some more Fulmars at least.  Kates from the CVLs provide a little ground support.  Not too bad.  The Liz didn’t fy at Ambon today but here are the battleships at least.  That should help quite a bit. Notice only enough ammo left for 5 return shots   Bugger, I’m sure they weren’t here yesterday. Hopefully that means they are in move mode and thus not able to fight properly. We could really do with not getting bogged down here.  They weren’t, but apparently that doesn’t matter. They retreated to Trincomalee too which is nice, so we won’t have to deal with them at Colombo.  This could be it at Ambon.  No quite yet it seems.   We chase them out of Tjilatjap anyway.  And Tandjoengselor, where for a wonder they surrender rather than trying to march all the way across Borneo.   The offensive is finally picking up momentum again, but with only 12 days left in the landing bonus it’s a bit late  We did well at Port Moresby, but those four Scythes undid it all at Jaffna. If it wasn’t for the evil Captain Pooface we could have had Billies all along!  That tanker is smaller than I had hoped, but still a tanker is a tanker.  This is surely the carriers coming out to play, but we should have time to finish up here and retreat to Rabaul.   If they go full speed overnight they could be well within range tomorrow, so we need to pack up and leave now. All the troops are ashore so that’s fine, supplies might be a little tight but we can trickle more in with xAKLs in the next week.  Assuming that they aren’t going full speed though (he has showed little sign of using full speed much so far) tomorrow they should be steaming north up the outside of the Great Barrier Reef. We have two submarines available in the area who will set themselves up to head south along the reef tomorrow.  The bulk of the forces will arrive at Dambulla tomorrow, meanwhile we are moving to surround Trincomalee and to push one hex closer to Colombo, since that is also jungle rough.  And of course we will be kicking them into the jungle here. Resistance is anticipated to be light.  We have caught up with them outside Singkawang, and will hit them again.  We move the CAP from Jaffna to our newly acquired airfield at Dambulla. Hopefully this will let us catch any bombers trying to interfere with the maneuvering troops without letting the Scythes sweeping Jaffna kill all of the Zeros. It means Ardmore Maur is on her own, but I’m not sure he really has enough bombers available just now to threaten her.  For now just the Lilies will bomb Palembang. As long as we can keep non zero airfield damage that’s all we need at the moment.  Now that I’m pretty sure there’ no more bombers in the area we are going to paradrop on Bengkalis to seize the oil.  Since he’s moved all the patrols out of Sabang, let’s have the Nells go back to providing tactical support. Maybe they can slow the retreat down enough that we can punch them one more time before they regroup at Sabang.  We are going to chase these tankers all the way into Pearl.  We are going to go and mine Palm Island. They won’t arrive here until well after the current spat is over, but all traffic into and out of Townsville has to go through here so you never know.
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Mar 18, 2021 21:35
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Man, it seems like you have really done a number on his Tankers. How much does this hurt the Allies/what does it mean for them? Less ability to run task forces around/difficulty supplying bases?
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Mar 18, 2021 22:04
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Guper posted:Man, it seems like you have really done a number on his Tankers. How much does this hurt the Allies/what does it mean for them? Less ability to run task forces around/difficulty supplying bases? The allies start with 69 tankers (TK) and 21 oilers (AO) total, though 6 of the AOs are tiny Dutch things with low range (3000nm), speed (12kn) and capacity (1500 tons). The allies get about 150 new TKs and about 50 AOs during the war, mostly medium to large, as well as every single Liberty and Victory ship (hundreds) being able to load 500 tons of liquid cargo along with supplies and/or troops (don't load fuel and troops at the same time, please). So every 10 liberty ships crossing the Pacific with supplies equals one medium tankers worth of "extra" fuel cargo. You can load xAKs with just fuel too, but it's not very economical, a Liberty ship can only load about 3000 tons of fuel in the cargo spaces, but with enough ships it works. So hurting their tankers means they can't have ample fuel everywhere, but "just" most places, it's probably not enough to prevent them from doing what they really want to do, but it means that they might not be able to respond to what you do. As in, with no tanker losses they'll quickly be able to stockpile enough fuel in forward bases in every area to refuel a carrier TF on zero notice, so if a target of opportunity pops up they can run in at full speed without worrying about running dry. With severe tanker losses they might only be able to pre-position fuel for their own planned operations, and not for contigencies. Port sizes also come into play, fuel needs trans-shipment from major regional hubs like PH/Colombo/Sydney/Noumea, and that means using smaller tankers, lose too many and you'll have to use xAKs. I mean, this is Midway Eastern Island, in-game this would probably be port size 2 or thereabouts, with a max TF size of 12k tons, and max ship-size of 9k tons. You just can't put a tanker TF of 6 huge tankers direct from LA in there and expect anything to happen, you'll need smaller convoys with smaller ships arriving more often. 
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Mar 19, 2021 00:00
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Man you must be over the moon about how well things are going now compared to your incessant bad luck earlier!
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Mar 19, 2021 00:01
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the Japanese sub campaign scoring these kills is just one of these "putting in the work" things where it's not flashy and it chugs along in the background but is essential to the war he's got strong fundamentals, folks!
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Mar 19, 2021 00:32
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I mean for not being flashy those subs have sunk a fleet carrier and a battlecruiser in the first 3-4 months of the war. Up until Indomitable got blasted the subs were debatably ahead of the KB in effectiveness.
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Mar 19, 2021 00:46
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  So far we have sunk around 20 tankers, mostly large. Also two oilers, one small Dutch one and one large USN one. Pecos starts at Manilla though, so as an essentially guaranteed kill she doesn't really count. Certainly not game ending, but he can't be very happy about that either.
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Mar 19, 2021 00:47
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  We start the night with I-165 getting a hit on a large freighter.  Pity it’s only one hit, but there’s a good chance she’s going down and if not she should at least be forced back to Colombo.  Tonight is a good night.  Escort your tankers folks.  The battleships outbound to Ceylon are challenged by a very brave PT boat.  The destroyers take a few shots but they all miss.  This is the problem with coastal airfields, and why Dambulla is so important. Thankfully there shouldn’t be much here for them to damage.  We can live with that.  TM-17 seems to be trying to make a break for, Africa?  Thunderstorms today at Darwin.  So we don’t hit much.  The Liz are out in force at Ambon though.  On and on it goes.  A wave of Nells perform poorly at Darwin.  Despite being based at the same Airfield, the Anns have managed to not coordinate with the sweep.  More thunderstorms, flak and panicking pilots ensure we hit nothing.  A second wave gets utterly butchered.  The Sallies score a couple hits at Darwin  We dodge the sweeping Scythes nicely. Just you fuckers wait till the Billies get here!  They are harassing us with trainers as we march on Batavia.  I wasn’t sure he was going to do this, but they are going to bomb us at Dambulla it seems.  We knock a few fighters down, before the bombers get through, but in the mountainous jungle they don't hit anything.  The sweep finally arrives at Bandoeng.  One or maybe two Wahawks for probably 10+ Anns is not a good trade.  No CAP at Batavia.  A second sweep over Jaffna also punches fog.  I should probably send these guys to Jaffna or somewhere else useful.  We are bombing the Indians as they try to retreat to Sabang.  Did you know that low altitude bombing in clear hexes can be quite effective?  So is wave two.  Lilies keep the pressure on to at least prevent fort buildup at Palembang.  This shouldn’t be too hard.  And indeed it wasn’t.  We are back to nothing at all at Ambon.  We kick the Singkawang garrison hard, but they refuse to surrender, opting to retreat to that dot hex in the middle of Borneo there.  Even the oil field workers won’t surrender.   Quiet mostly.  loving delayed sweeps!  Not nearly as exciting a tanker as yesterday  How kind, they had almost built the first level of airfield for us!  Today Fuso returns to service, after the first Ambon disaster. Well I suppose we haven’t really had any other Ambon disasters, just Ambon mediocores.  So too do Mogami and Kumano at Hong Kong. Today is a very repairey day apparently.   No hint of where the carriers might be. They are “supposed” to be right beside RO-63 here, but if they were she should have detection levels. Still, we will enact our plan just in case.  We bring another set of Zeros in to Dambulla. The Scythe is range six, which is just enough to sweep Jaffna from Madras, but if he wants to seep Dambulla he is going to have to bring them back onto Ceylon, and thus expose them to bombardments and or the airfield being overrun.  We are going to do a large paradrop on Padang - I suspect it is being used as a seaplane base to spy on our stuff around Singapore.  The AA from Singapore has arrived at Pisnauloke after his last raid. I turn them straight around and send them back to Singapore  The idea of fighting over Burma or Thailand now seems quaint somehow.  I have no idea if this will really work, or even if the carriers are going to come in range, but we are going to try setting the Betties to go in high. This should mean we can set the escort to be high too, which might give them a chance to fight through a carriers CAP.  Inorder to hopefully increase the chances of this we are going to engage in some blatant provocation with the CVLs, trusting to CAP and a poo poo ton of DP guns to keep us safe. We will set it up so that it looks like the CVLs are providing LRCAP over a second convoy to Milne Bay whilst staying safely in bluewater, but in fact they will be running 100% CAP over themselves, and inorder to get within range of striking the CVLs he will have to bring his carriers within drop tank Zero and thus escorted Betty range of Rabaul. As with most convoluted witp planes, the most likely outcome is nothing at all of course.  We are going to sweep Port Blair a bit. He has search planes there it would be nice to bomb, since at the moment he can see everything we have coming and going to Ceylon.  Without the KB to cover them our ships moving to and from Ceylon are very vulnerable if he should be cheeky with whatever RN carriers he has functional at the moment. This should at least give us a day’s warning of any shenanigans though.
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Mar 19, 2021 19:39
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So what're the stats on these Billies you're so hopeful about - how do they compare to what you're currently fielding?
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Mar 19, 2021 20:05
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quote:As with most convoluted witp planes, the most likely outcome is nothing at all of course. I thought the most likely outcome of convoluted witp planes was their being grounded due to bad service ratings.
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Mar 19, 2021 20:25
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Kinda looks like you're holding your own in the submarine war so far!
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Mar 19, 2021 20:37
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Right now I think Japan is pretty obviously winning the sub war. The only really big think the Allies have bagged is a flight carrier, while Pharnakes got a fleet carrier, severe damage (or worse!) on another carrier plus a battlecruiser, and something like 3-4 tankers.
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Mar 20, 2021 02:49
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  KX is spotted before she can interfere with the CVLs.  The Mabels on ASW around Balikpapan haven’t been reporting much recently, I wonder if this is his new sub hotspot?  The Nells are keeping the pressure on outside Sabang.  Whatever survivors manage to limp back into Sabang are hardly going to be fighting fit.  Good weather at Darwin today.  A decent number of hits.  How will the Liz do?  Quite nicely, despite the weather.  No CAP at Port Blair, but I don’t think I tasked the bombers.  Sweep is again late at Bandoeng, but at least we have escort this time.  But neither actually engage.  Of course, by unescorted wave two the CAP is present and fights   We will be seeing alot of this in the coming month I suspect. I hope it won’t drag on as long as Ambon at least.  Some Sea Hurricanes sweep Djambula but for some reason get thoroughly wrecked. Is the Sea Hurricane that much worse than the normal variant?  He has based the Scythes back on Ceylon it seems.  Rather surprisingly we don’t do too badly?  The Falcons come in under the CAP again. They will slow some regiments down which is annoying but the damage itself is irrelevant.  We still have some CAP up as the bombers arrive.  The escorts break and run followed by most of the bombers.  The sweep arrives to down the lone Warhawk over Bandoeng.  At least we got it.  He’s still sweeping Jaffna, and you can see our search yielding results.  I-19 comes in dangerously close to Pearl in pursuit of those tankers. The tankers however seem to have gotten away into Pearl safely  Ambon.  Padang was indeed a seaplane base. Excellent.   The war goes on. Not much actual fighting happening right now but that won’t last, Ceylon is going to explode any day now.  I hate all sweep pilots. At least we pull up to even thanks to that nice clutch of flying boats.  No change here, although I did hear sinking noises in the night so something’s happening.  The fuel situation at Singapore is beyond critical. I have every small tanker I can find shuttling between Brunei and SIngapore, and larger convoys are inbound from Balikpapan and the home islands. But until they get here fuel limitations are basically preventing us from sending anything else out into the Bay of Bengal.  If this is to be believed, they are retreating from Darwin? Further evidence he has written Darwin off as hopeless, but surely he can’t really intend to march an entire division all the way across the Tanami desert?   We have caught the stragglers outside Sabang, although it’s quite likely since movement happens before combat they will be in Sabang before we can attack.  The battlewagons are setting up to bombard tomorrow, otherwise not much is happening on Ceylon currently. We will have troops reaching Trincomalee tomorrow, but probably not in enough numbers to attack, so will have to wait another day. Marching 100k men through a jungle takes a bit of time  We have arrived in strength at Batavia, and will order up an attack.  Maybe those tankers aren’t so safe yet after all. We will have our girls go full speed for a turn to catch up again before they can get into Pearl.  Let’s bomb Port Blair since no resistance was encountered there today.  Since the waters around Balikpapan are quiet at the moment, I move our lone trained ASW unit up to Singapore instead. We really can’t have him sinking tankers here! This overstacks the airport so I move the Sallies that aren’t bombing Palembang anymore up to Georgetown to join the Nells in tactical support.  We form a giant convoy at Singapore to load resources to take back to the homeland. This is by no means an economically significant quantity of resources - we need to import some hundred thousand tons per day but we do that with CS convoys across the Tsushima straits. The point is we have moved all the shipping out of the home islands so we need to start sending some back, and there’s no point going empty.
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Mar 20, 2021 19:02
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orangelex44 posted:Right now I think Japan is pretty obviously winning the sub war. The only really big think the Allies have bagged is a flight carrier, while Pharnakes got a fleet carrier, severe damage (or worse!) on another carrier plus a battlecruiser, and something like 3-4 tankers. I'm not sure where you got this extra carrier from, or a battlecruiser for that matter. Our submarines have sunk Saratoga, and heavily damaged New Zealand. Meanwhile aircraft of various kinds have sunk Kortenaer, and heavily damaged Ark Royal, Hermes, Repluse ( ) and Indomitable. Indomitable is probably sunk but I'm not going to fully allow myself to believe that until I see some hard points evidence.
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Mar 20, 2021 19:07
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Are the Anns even worth using anymore at this point? They're not achieving much of anything evne when flying against undefended targets. Seems to me the best use of those crappy old things would be to just pull 'em back to the Home Islands and use 'em as trainers. That way they at least achieve something other than padding the Allies' kill counts.
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Mar 20, 2021 23:06
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Pharnakes posted:I'm not sure where you got this extra carrier from, or a battlecruiser for that matter. Our submarines have sunk Saratoga, and heavily damaged New Zealand. I had thought one of Ark Royal or Hermes was a sub hit, and forgot about Kortanaer entirely. New Zealand was classified a battlecruiser, wasn't it?
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Mar 20, 2021 23:19
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Magni posted:Are the Anns even worth using anymore at this point? They're not achieving much of anything evne when flying against undefended targets. Seems to me the best use of those crappy old things would be to just pull 'em back to the Home Islands and use 'em as trainers. That way they at least achieve something other than padding the Allies' kill counts. Anns are the best single engined bomber we have. This makes them cost half of the production cost of a 2E like the Sally, but they can only carry 1/4 the load of a Sally. On the face of it that makes them pretty poo poo, but there's a couple other advantages to being single engined. One is the service rating of 1 instead of 2, meaning they have a better sortie availability and a lower logistical footprint. But the main one is the only need a size 2 airfield instead of size 4 to avoid penalties, and they only count 1 instead of 2 towards stacking limits on airfields. So they have a niche operating in areas where large fields aren't available, however they really can't handle any kind of opposition, including flak. So no we shouldn't really be using them here, however thanks to the realities of war they wind up getting pressed into service in roles they aren't exactly ideal for. And then they tend to die horribly orangelex44 posted:I had thought one of Ark Royal or Hermes was a sub hit, and forgot about Kortanaer entirely. New Zealand was classified a battlecruiser, wasn't it? New Zealand is indeed a battlecruiser, but very unlikely to be sunk.
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Mar 21, 2021 12:19
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Tiger Crazy posted:Being in a high level port really helps ships survive.
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Mar 21, 2021 14:36
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Annoying thing about the IJA light bombers is that (according to wikipedia) they were pretty much all specifically designed to be dive bomber capable, but aren't in-game. Guessing it's a balance issue, that giving the japanese heaps of land-based dive bombers would be too powerful in the anti-shipping role, but it's still annoying. In-game the IJA only gets the ki-48 IIb and IIc as dive bombers. At least the Ki-30 Ann, Ki-32 Mary and Ki-51 Sonia could also be dive bombers, and the Ann and Mary even have useful anti-ship bombs at 1x250kg, same as the Val. The Sonias 4x50kg would be pretty much useless against anything but small merchants though.
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Mar 21, 2021 15:53
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Just wanted to pop in and say your and Alikchi's pace on this is crazy. I started a single-player game around when you started this thread and I'm only midway through Feb '42. The time commitment to getting a turn back and forth between you two and then doing this thread daily is nuts.
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Mar 21, 2021 18:16
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We started on December the 11th so just under a week behind, and we are now on the 4th of May. So yes we are both sinking a lot of time into this. We are obviously enjoying it though or we wouldn't be playing so fast.
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Mar 21, 2021 19:16
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  No night action tonight.  Only an xAKL, but James Cook not making it through the Bass strait, that's worth a chuckle.  No CAP at Dawin of course, but more importantly: What's that south of Port Moresby???  Damnit, they dredged up more CAP at Sabang. At least these planes aren’t at Colombo I suppose.  The escorts sacrifice themselves to at least limit the damage to the Nells.  The remaining Warhawk doesn’t try to interfere with wave two.  The damage at Darwin now should be such that he would have a very hard time changing his mind and contesting it.  Still no CAP at Port Blair - the fighters that were there are presumably the ones now at Sabang.  With thunderstorms though they probably don’t need CAP.  No flying boats destroyed sadly, which was the only reason we are doing this.  The lone Warhawk left manages to down a Sally outside Sabang.  Finally. I don’t know why I didn’t just set LRCAP over Bandoeng in the first place.  The bombers still don’t manage to actually hit anything of course.  The first sweep in at Dambulla is again the Sea Hurricanes. This means we should at least get a few kills before dieing to Scythes  I wish it would show us a line for where these raids are coming from. I don’t think it’s a carrier in the area but I’m at least nervous of the possibility.  What was that Terry Prtachett line? Let’s all get our throats cut boys!  Oh well, not complaining.  If you fly low enough and your planes are lovely enough, eventually they will get shot down by LMG fire.  The JAAF base force unit at Dambulla does have a radar, so we can see where these Mohawks came from.  Since the CVLs are reserving CAP to defend themselves, the convoy at Milne bay is in for a potentially rough time. Or possibly not, it all depends if he has been too busy bombing Lae to train his pilots in naval attack.  Evidence thus far would suggest that, just like the Banshee pilots when we first saw them, these guys hardly know what a ship is let alone how to bomb it.  This last Warhakw at Bandoeng is in for a bad time I feel.  We only damage it before it dives for cover.  Carriers! Carriers just where we want them! What’s going to gently caress us over this time???  Wave one does not make it through.  A couple Anns bomb Bandoeng.  RIP this convoy, but at least these are planes that aren’t attacking the CVLs. I’m not even sure he sees the CVLs?  Owie, but it was only a labour battalion  The Liz come in at Ambon.  But are having an off day today.  Come on round two!  It seems my idea to get the pre bombing dogfight to happen at 20k feet hasn’t worked  Eleven Betties are through! Previous experience would suggest we need something like 200 through per torpedo hit  They go for Constitution rather than a carrier but at least they hit her!  She might have poo poo all for armour, but she’s still a big lady and will take a lot more than this to go down.  RO-64 is spotted before she can attack a transport.    Batavia here should be easy enough.  Down a fort level for even casualties, a decent start.   Who doesn’t love the smell of burning Betties in the morning!  Well if that doesn’t do it for you we have the grilled Zero too?  Today was definitely his day, but I’m not too sorry. We tried a thing that was unlikely to work and it didn’t, but if it had it could have been disastrous for him.  This explains why the CVLs didn’t get involved anyway. Why they are here I have no clue whatsoever, I can only assume I set them to destination not patrol, but maybe it was no bad thing looking at the pile of ships they have there. As you can see Milne bay now has an airfield though! Which I am sure is about to get thoroughly cratered.  Nigitsu Maru, the worlds  Our labour battalions  We will reactivate all of them and stuff some more disposable bodies into them. Good as new!  The KB is at Medan and the fuel is available, but thanks to the wrecked port, it is going to take forever to refuel them.  We are starting to think about Midway again, and this time we mean it. It will take 75 days before these troops are ready to embark, which is plenty time to In the mean time they are heading to Truk.  Amagi however will not be rejoining the KB for a while longer than that.   Soerabaja has been repaired enough that the Christmas Island TF has loaded, so we begin loading for Darwin.  The battleships are ready to run in and flatten Colombo again. No sign of a carrier in the area apart from those mysterious Sea Hurricanes, minimal detection on them, they should be fine.  We will do LRCAP on them just in case though, which will also neatly let us doge the Scythes.  They did indeed escape into Sabang before we could hit them again, so we start the final march. You can see he’s got ideas about taking Medan back with the Dutch troops, but we have enough stuff left there he isn’t getting anywhere.  Just incase we send the bombers their way for today.  We will push them out of this one last hex next to Bandoeng, and open up the road to Kalidjati.  If I was him after today’s success I would raid Rabaul. He is far less aggressive than I am but all the same, we will evacuate all shipping from Rabaul while we have the time to do so. I also decide I am through throwing Betties into carriers, it rarely works unless you get lucky, and getting lucky is not my strong point. Most of the Betty squadrons are dispersed across the rest of the theatre or sent home to rest. The delightful thing about Betties is we can bring them all back again if we need to on only a day or two’s notice.  The Zeros, or what is left of them, are sent up on CAP to at least deplete his airgroups if he does raid us. A valid strategy as Japan for the first year or so can actually be to just try and attrition the airgroups, never mind the carriers.
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Mar 21, 2021 22:11
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Is the Darwin operation going to be on-time to catch the invasion bonus? Or is it looking to be a couple days too late?
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Mar 21, 2021 22:22
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It's going to be tight but we should just do it.
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Mar 22, 2021 01:40
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Pharnakes posted:the Army’s second carrier is commissioned at Osaka today. lol forever at the depth of interservice rivalries in Imperial Japan
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Mar 22, 2021 02:52
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Akratic Method posted:lol forever at the depth of interservice rivalries in Imperial Japan I mean, our navy has an army, and the navy's army has it's own air force.
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Mar 22, 2021 03:19
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Is there anything else you can rush to where the American carriers appear to be, or will you have to let them off the hook this time? Would the KB make it in time or are you holding them back to cover the Darwin landing? What are you putting into the Midway attempt this time, given that he’s had the chance to reinforce and fortify it by now?
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Mar 22, 2021 03:40
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Pirate Radar posted:Is there anything else you can rush to where the American carriers appear to be, or will you have to let them off the hook this time? Would the KB make it in time or are you holding them back to cover the Darwin landing? Pharnakes posted:
And even if they did have the fuel, the American CVs will probably be gone before the KB could get there unless Alikchi gets very aggressive.
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Mar 22, 2021 04:11
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Caconym posted:Annoying thing about the IJA light bombers is that (according to wikipedia) they were pretty much all specifically designed to be dive bomber capable, but aren't in-game. The game doesn't allow for multiple roles/designations for a single airframe.
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Mar 22, 2021 05:04
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uPen posted:I mean, our navy has an army, and the navy's army has it's own air force. Hey now, the US navy's army has a navy and that navy has its own carriers.
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Mar 22, 2021 06:28
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If the US Army built its own carriers and landing vessels and so on like the IJA did, they would still call the crew of those vessels soldiers and not sailors.
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Mar 22, 2021 08:15
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Pharnakes posted:
You have no idea how happy I am with this change in attitude from you. This game gets ridiculously frustrating even when winning decisively as the allies and player morale is number 1 cause of defeat in any playthrough of this type of long-term campaign. While I could absolutely sympathize with you on the sheer level of bullshit you've had thrown at you, the level of confidence you project when typing up these reports have a very large impact on the level of hype your devoted spectators can reach. Or put more simply: We like to see you be smart and confident in the face of bullshit. Keep it up, I'm sure the allies are gonna fold in just a few more weeks.
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Mar 22, 2021 08:23
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And honestly I think just the fact that you did it and also hit a capital ship with torpedoes might have him turn back. Just knowing he could've lost another carrier then and there.
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Mar 22, 2021 09:43
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Jobbo_Fett posted:The game doesn't allow for multiple roles/designations for a single airframe. I know, I meant they could "also be dive bombers" along with the later Lilys, not as a sub-role. (But "attack bomber" is implemented as a check-box that can be applied to any air-frame to allow them full performance at low-level bombing, so as usual, the game is... less than consistent.)
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Mar 22, 2021 11:31
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Pirate Radar posted:Is there anything else you can rush to where the American carriers appear to be, or will you have to let them off the hook this time? Would the KB make it in time or are you holding them back to cover the Darwin landing? Yeah there's no way the KB is responding to this paticular situation. We will send the entire division to Midway, but with a minimum of 75 days planning to go it's far to early to say what ships will be involved, or indeed if we will launch the attack as soon as planning finishes, or if we will have to wait for other things to happen first. SerthVarnee posted:You have no idea how happy I am with this change in attitude from you. Don't worry, I'm nowhere near burn out, and neither is Alikchi. Like I said, we are averaging 12+ turns a week, which we obviously wouldn't be if it was a drag for us. I like to write the posts as I play the turn, so you will get the highs and lows of my reactions to events. However I can go full propaganda and claim to sink 2 carriers a week if you would prefer.
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Mar 22, 2021 14:31
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Pharnakes posted:
Yes become Orphan Pharnakes and make a post saying you were conquering and winning all your battles. Any ship sinking means two carriers and numerous cruisers and destroyers.
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Mar 22, 2021 17:00
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"Two carriers, a battleship and numerous cruisers and destroyers." Every goddamn time a PT boat runs into a couple of xAKL.
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Mar 22, 2021 18:12
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  The ASW patrols are unsurprisingly busy to the east of Pearl tonight.  The bombardment force bumps into a pair of R class Battleships on the way to Colombo. Hold on to your pants boys, we have heavy surface action.  5k Yards? And they have a lot more destroyers than we do   Well that went quite nicely. WitP did it’s usual thing of bugging out the combat “animations” when I alt tab so just imagine a bunch of explosions and then Resolution sinking. I wonder if that was a bombardment TF too? Normally when a bombardment TF meets a surface combat TF it’s a bad time.  O23 missed the memo that we have Soerabaja now, and our destroyers have her pinned down in the shallow water of the harbour.  Well, had her pinned down, but she’s probably feeling a bit rough after that.  RO-64 has a good bash at a destroyer but misses all of them. I like to see you trying like this though!  We’re back on O23!  Still not heavy damage though.  The Lillies open today’s airball.  Some Fulmars come at Jaffna, and we have CAP to oppose them. This is interesting and probably highly fatal - the LRCAP is set low to protect the battleships from torpedo bombers. Why is the LRCAP here? Well, the battleships turned back after their fight, and consequently they are now out of range of the Zeros, resulting in them putting up LRCAP over whatever random poo poo they feel like. Since the only possible targets for LRCAP are the battleships and Jaffna, they have chosen Jaffna.  We trade equally with Fulmars. FULMARS!  Please let him have sent the Hurricanes somewhere else today.  Well some of them are here bombing us on the road between Jaffna and Dambulla.  Thanks to escort penalties at least we don’t lose any here.  Now for some reason when the bombers arrive at Jaffna, there isn’t any LRCAP?? RIP Ardmore Maru, I really thought we’d saved you  The cratering of Milne Bay begins. By the time they are done there will probably be less airfield than there was when we started!  I’m sure there’s many more waves to come.  Like so.  The Warhawks have shuttled back to Port Blair in the night. Well, we can kill them here just as easily.  Although perhaps not…  We are flying perpetual CAP over Bandoeng now, so it will get drawn into any fight that occurs here.  But this still isn’t enough.  Somehow we have wound up with CAP over Dambulla, and it is above the strike. Maybe this could be nice?  Could have been a lot worse, certainly. I cannot wait for the Billy to get here and for us to have something actually competitive with the Scythe.  The Sweep arrives at Bandoeng.  Sit the gently caress down. It looks from this like he is still committing at least replacement airframes to Java, if not new units.  Rathburne rounds the day out by making an extremely half assed attempt on I-23.  We get nothing at Ambon today, but I notice his quoted AV is dropping every day. I wonder if starvation is starting to work its magic here?  For who knows what arcane reason the odds swing against us at Batavia today. We do fine despite that, but will probably need to rest for a day now.  We smash them outside of Bandoeng, not very surprisingly. A few cooks run off to Bandoeng, but we are now free to march reinforcements to Batavia.   Look at those navy points jump!  And somehow when all is said and done we come out ahead in the air?  No, I don’t think we got two intel.  Resolution is genuine for sure though.  And this single 15” hit on Hyuga was the only significant damage we took. Hit well above the waterline but the shock sprung some rivets and ruptured a couple steam lines as well as thoroughly wrecking a fire room. Fixing all this will take a month or two, but unlike Amagi she will fit in the yards at Singapore, which will save considerable time and fuel from having to go home.  The rest of the taskforce is just fine. I am almost tempted to turn them around, but let’s not push our luck if we are finally getting some!  Presumably there are so many holes in Ardmore Maru the bomb hit one of them and did comparatively little damage   We have sufficient strength at Trincomalee to begin the assault.  I wonder if what those battleships were actually doing was trying to break out to raid our convoys inbound to Jaffna? This is quite plausible, so we will send the combat effective units to merge with the convoy. Having those Billies get sunk would be totally unacceptable.  Hyuga and Yugure meanwhile head for Singapore.  We have no AKVs, who would be immensely useful in this situation for their ability to ferry planes without requiring to break them down into crates. So I order a conversion to begin on a freighter in for repairs at Singapore.  Looks like maybe he is going for Tulagi instead?  In case he is, we order the tenders to go hide over at Auki.  quote:Christmas Island IO expands airfield to size 1  So remember how we’ve discussed before about how the defender always gets the terrain bonus, regardless of who owns the hex? Well here’s another hot WitP tip for you, when you enter a hex, you take control of every hex side in that hex. If it is a contested hex, you only flip control of the side you entered from, the other five remain under your opponents control. Tip three: You can only leave a hex through a hex side you own. So if you enter a contested hex through one side, then he manages to get behind you can enter the hex via that side, your only option of escaping is to come in and flip a hex side with a new unit, or win the fight in the hex thereby taking control of all six sides. Which tends to be a challenge when cut off from supply. Now how does all of this apply here? Well, we are going to start entering Bandoeng from multiple sides, but only with relatively light forces whilst most of our available troops fight in Batavia. However, thanks to Bandoeng’s mountainous terrain, he won’t be able tot kick us out easily and will thus start getting surrounded. And this is how you “surround” 50k men hiding in a mountain fortress with a few second line battalions And they have to invite you into their fortress then storm it and take it back from you if they want to leave   I was planning to wait until we had battleships available for support before attacking again at Ambon, but let’s test this worn down by starvation theory one time first.  I realise that having the 80th div sit around with their thumbs up their asses at Truk for the next couple months is a waste of time, and that they might as well go and take Palembang in the meantime.
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Mar 22, 2021 21:48
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How many of those 10 hits on the other BB were 410mms?
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Mar 22, 2021 21:55
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Is tomorrow the day we find out what the billies are? FW190s or BF109s are what discord is betting for.
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Mar 22, 2021 21:58
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