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IRL https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H%C5%8Dkoku_Maru and her sister ship had a pretty interesting career. My vague impression is that Axis AMCs did surprisingly well, overall in WW2.
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Apr 27, 2021 17:11
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The S submarines have a different type of torpedo then all the other american classes of subs. The MK 10 is an old WWI design and the MK 14 is the newest design that has all the problems. The S boats are mainly coastal subs. Not sure where they are based from out there.
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Apr 27, 2021 17:15
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What will “mission accomplished” look like in India? Is the goal just to push out the frontline and make it harder for Alikchi to roll back your gains, or will you try to use a successful landing in the Bay to threaten his position in Burma?
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Apr 28, 2021 02:58
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  S-34 tries her luck on the cruisers. Her Mk 10 torpedoes only go 34kts though, and our girls are hammering along at 30, she doesn’t have a chance.  The Yoshino class CLs as overgrown DDs do carry depth charges, but they are more for show really.  I very much doubt Northampton is doing 30kts, but RO-63 still misses.  Escorting a convoy she was doing 15 at most, but even with a full spread there are no hits.   Tonight is the night for missing CAs in general it would seem.  With Leander spotted last night, this all but confirms the presence of carriers around Sydney.  S-37 is back at Shortlands. We have escorts here now though, could she have finally overreached?  Ariake is holding a solid contact in the shallow water.  But her racks are empty before S-37 takes decisive damage. Let’s hope the independent destroyers will pick her up though.  Nope. We’re through the naval phases and into air with the sweep at Palembang.  Oscars aren’t nearly as good at this as Zeros are, but we can’t spare any Zeros for anything but India right now.  All forty Liz arrive in perfect order at Bandoeng.  These things are so terrible!  We do at least have a lot of them, and the second wave scores some OK hits.  The second wave at Palembang. Still no kills but that’s the CAP out the way I think.  Unlike Port Blair where the sweep is late.  Not great!  Palembang is swept though. Shame about the thunderstorms.  Despite that they claim a Mitchell.  They are back to trying to sweep Colombo.  Given that we have the CVLs, “S” Division, and maybe even “A” Division here now, in addition to the land based air, this goes poorly for them.  The invincibles are back. I suppose I should just count my blessing that they are deployed here, and not in Southern India.  I don’t know why he bothers being upset at us placing LRCAP here.  Here we go at Palembang. Wish our engineers luck, we need those level four forts down.  The engineers do not roll well, but we take the outer ring of defences through sheer numbers.  Ban  Oops.  Never be a Japanese paratrooper. Trust me, it sucks.   A few :rips: s today but mostly quiet.  Even in the air. Could have been ahead if the treacherous navy pilots would just fly sweep for the army.  That’s the last submarine victim who was obviously going to sink. At least she wasn’t too valuable.  You know who’s not on the sunklist?  Umikaze has arrived at Soerabaja, and is safe in the yards. Now there’s just the random chance she will explode   Shortlands has expanded the airfield to size two, which is very handy.  Submarines in unreasonable numbers have made this whole situation into a mess, but there are some bright notes. Almost all of the 2nd raiders are now here at Rennell, and with a ton of surplus supplies have recovered all their disruption.  Approximately half of the Taifu regiment has survived their adventures to be ashore safely at Shortlands.  And the third raiders were sealifted without incident. Most of the supplies sank though, so Shortlands is now experiencing a crisis that will need to be resolved and the troops allowed to rest before they are ready to be dropped at Rennell. At least another week for his carriers to potentially respond, but on the other hand I am astonished they haven’t come to say hi already and sink everything we have here. It’s not like we could stop them. Seriously, what is he doing with them?? Apart from that botched escort run to Port Moresby we haven’t seen anything of them all game. I’m getting paranoid.   The supplies for Shortlands. Everything that moves around here is going to have to do so at full speed until the submarine situation is resolved or at least reduced. Anything that can’t make at least 14kts will have to stay in port.  There’s so many loving submarines off Lunga the game can’t display them properly  We’ll send our pair of ASW four destroyers down to investigate. Catching submarines in coastal hexes is the only way our escorts stand a chance of actually getting a kill.  We have taken too much disruption at Palembang to continue the assault tomorrow, so we will be back to bombardments with the artillery while the infantry rests.  And the We set the destination to Port Blair, because with such a huge amount of troops he is nigh guaranteed to get decrypts on something. This will result in him being told things like *unit* is loaded on *ship* sailing to Port Blair. Waypoints aren’t available for sigint messages, or I have never seen any, so on the first two days his patrol will spot us apparently beelining to Port Blair. We will then turn north in the night and hopefully disappear entirely for him in the middle of the bay. By day four we will be just off Chittagong, at which point he surely will see us coming but it will be far too late to do anything sensible about it. Following along is every carrier we have (minus Kaga left at Singapore for now), all of our operational battleships (except Ise at Truk), half a dozen cruisers and I’m not counting how many destroyers. This is almost certainly overkill, but if we do encounter resistance we can’t easily overcome, I want the bombardments to be able to go in the next day, no waiting for ships to arrive from Ceylon.  We are on top of the retreating base forces again.
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Apr 28, 2021 17:41
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Pirate Radar posted:What will “mission accomplished” look like in India? Is the goal just to push out the frontline and make it harder for Alikchi to roll back your gains, or will you try to use a successful landing in the Bay to threaten his position in Burma? Mission accomplished would be taking Bombay and rolling him back to Delhi, or maybe even pushing past Delhi to take Karachi. By the time we did all that Burma would be thoroughly starved out and easy to back fill, although it would be more likely he would have launched some kind of desperate attempt to march across the Purvanchals and attack us in the rear from Imphal. Either way taking Burma should be easy, and Rangoon is worth a ton of points that we could really use, plus there's a little bit of extra oil there. The oil is rather negligible compared to the production in the SRA. and if the Allies still have Bengal & Ceylon extremely challenging to safely extract, hence my desire to take India before Burma. aphid_licker posted:IRL https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H%C5%8Dkoku_Maru and her sister ship had a pretty interesting career. My vague impression is that Axis AMCs did surprisingly well, overall in WW2. AMCs in general have a history of doing good work, but it only really works for the underdog. What would allied AMCs even go hunting for?
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Apr 28, 2021 17:48
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Kind of a bummer that they don't let you do more about the submarines. You'd have to reallocate resources from somewhere so it's not like the game would suddenly become unbalanced.
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Apr 28, 2021 19:48
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Pharnakes posted:
Allied AMCs were generally either mixed into convoys to provide hidden protection, or sailing solo basically acting as bait for raiders/subs. It was more relevant in WW1 when U-boats initially followed the naval codes that had them demanding surrender from merchantmen, and a surprise pseudo-warship is unsurprisingly dangerous to a surfaced submarine. And yeah, this was one reason for the shift to just sinking ships rather than demanding surrender. Still, the practice continued into WW2 as well and saw some successes. HMS Jervis Bay sacrificing itself to hold off Admiral Scheer long enough for its convoy to mostly get away is probably the iconic example.
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Apr 28, 2021 22:08
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Any reason you can't just send some Betties or other things odwn to the area to put them on ASW orders?
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Apr 28, 2021 22:41
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Tiger Crazy posted:The S submarines have a different type of torpedo then all the other american classes of subs. The MK 10 is an old WWI design and the MK 14 is the newest design that has all the problems. The S boats are mainly coastal subs. Not sure where they are based from out there. Early in the game, you really don't have many fleet boats at your disposal. So, it's not uncommon to press the little S-boats into front line service from forward bases. They actually saw a decent amount of combat in the early days of the real war too.
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Apr 29, 2021 12:41
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Pharnakes posted:AMCs in general have a history of doing good work, but it only really works for the underdog. What would allied AMCs even go hunting for? British AMCs spent a lot of time on the Northern Patrol in both world wars, hunting for German blockade runners and stopping neutrals that were carrying cargo that might go to Germany. Carrying out an effective anti-commerce campaign is a lot more effective when you have control of the seas.
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Apr 29, 2021 14:38
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Gewehr 43 posted:Early in the game, you really don't have many fleet boats at your disposal. So, it's not uncommon to press the little S-boats into front line service from forward bases. They actually saw a decent amount of combat in the early days of the real war too. Yeah, they're quite good too due to the working torpedoes. They are one of the main reasons some players choose to hit Manila with the KB on December 7th instead of Pearl - the S-boats are arguably more dangerous than the crappy old USN battleships.
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Apr 29, 2021 16:58
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  I think there is one AV here in port but nothing else.  Thank god it’s not all S boats here.  It’s literally every possible penalty a sub can take, but they still can’t find her   These are dangerous loving waters right now.  Thank god we went on full speed.  Look, there’s even one at loving Milne Bay!  Palembang sweep is nice and early again.  No kill again, but it should be clear I think. Also apparently 4 Oscars + 2 Oscars = 8 Oscars for some reason.  Liz are here to bomb random bits of countryside vaguely adjacent to the airfield.  Well, not too bad I suppose.  Sweep is again late (or possibly non existent agan) at Port Blair, but the CAP is absent today.  Despite that no supply hits.  No CAP at Palembang either.  Hopefully no CAP tomorrow as well.  Maybe only one unit left here, but hopefully that's enough to pin them for us to hit them on the ground.  The Sallies arrive and find there are some others still.  Now he’s using USMC Dauntlesses at Milne Bay. We might not be able to CAP trap the Fortresses but this is another matter. Or is that the whole point for bait?  They don’t hit much, largely I suspect because there isn’t much to hit.  Someone with a T99 propped up on a squad mates' back gets absurdly lucky.  He’s very mad about Milne Bay today.  The Fortresses are still here too it seems.  RO-33 spots a convoy of destroyerey things.  Two torpedoes at a destroyer is basically just a waste of torpedoes.  gently caress, if we’d had Betties available at Rabaul on mission   Don’t know what kind of gently caress up resulted in them doing a day time bombardment, but what a wasted opportunity Bit like their wasted ammo really.   Taking out a level of the forts should make our bombardements more effective.  We could really do with some of that at Bandoeng. But 700 raw AV in mountains with forts   I half expected him to let this drag on forever like he did at Midway and has at Rennell. This is actually good for us, I had no intention of doubling down here and we have a house rule that a paratrooper unit can't do an offensive drop unless the whole unit is present at the originating base.   Only 3 points for those paratroopers.  dudes, apparently nobody cares. I still can’t believe that Banshee got wrecked by an LMG  No losses today!  The Chittagong flotilla has of course hit a few delays, only to be expected with such a huge collection of ships. They are thoroughly spotted on a direct course for Port Blair though, so that’s all good.   I would really like to disband Kinryu Maru here to keep her out of trouble, however she is carrying a searchlight which is too big to be craned ashore at Shortland’s extremely limited facilities, and since you can’t disband a ship loaded with any kind of device we can’t do that. So we will have to limp her back to Rabaul, at least trying to stay out of the way of the majority of these fuckers.  There’s a freighter reported at Rangoon, so just in case the Betties feel like doing anything about it we will sweep.  Oilers spotted! Well, probably just tankers but we wants them anyway.  He has slipped out ahead of us again God, chasing units around in WitP is so loving annoying. I suppose we’ll go all the way to Tennant Creek, if only to annoy him.  We are rested enough at Palembang to have another go.  With good results on the airfield today, we can spare the bombers for direct support.  There’s no Betties available anymore, but the M2 Nells can still carry torpedoes to Rennell in case he’s stupid enough to repeat today’s incident. Pharnakes fucked around with this message at 21:12 on Apr 29, 2021 |
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Apr 29, 2021 17:33
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A Type 98 taking down a Banshee wouldn't be that surprising. That's no LMG, that's a 20mm AA gun.
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Apr 29, 2021 18:45
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I believe the type 98 20mm is a different type 98 from the LMG (which is a different type 98 from a naval artillery).
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Apr 29, 2021 18:57
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gohuskies posted:Yeah, they're quite good too due to the working torpedoes. They are one of the main reasons some players choose to hit Manila with the KB on December 7th instead of Pearl - the S-boats are arguably more dangerous than the crappy old USN battleships. I agreed against my better judgement with Alikchi that I would do a pearl strike in exchange for force Z staying quiescent for turn one. He definitely got the better of that with our two day pearl strike not sinking a single ship I don't think, and certainly no battleships. Had he no requested that I would certainly have been after sinking every submarine in Manilla harbour on the 7th. Magni posted:A Type 98 taking down a Banshee wouldn't be that surprising. That's no LMG, that's a 20mm AA gun. Err, I meant T99, not 98. I'm not aware of a a T98 MG although Japanese type designations are so confusing there might be something. Either way we definitely have no 20mms at Milne Bay.
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Apr 29, 2021 21:11
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Pharnakes posted:Err, I meant T99, not 98. I'm not aware of a a T98 MG although Japanese type designations are so confusing there might be something. Either way we definitely have no 20mms at Milne Bay. The number is IIRC just a year number using the imperial japanese calendar. Type 9x means adopted in 193x in the gregorian calendar, Type 100 would then be 1940 and after that it rolls back to Type 1 for 1941. The proper designation in japanese would always amend the equipment type, kinda like how American WWII designations worked. The confusing bit is that the japanese military used another system (numbering by the respective year of the current emperors reign) earlier and a lot of the older equipment that was designated under that system was also still in use. The Type 98 is the standard light AA gun used by the IJA, basically a Hotchkiss HMG upscaled to 20mm. Magni fucked around with this message at 22:28 on Apr 29, 2021 |
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Apr 29, 2021 22:18
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Anything in general you an do about all those subs? Switch some planes over to ASW? OR just stuck until you can throw a bunch of DD's on ASW up there? Ow.
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Apr 29, 2021 22:25
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Pharnakes posted:Someone with a T99 propped up on a squad mates' back gets absurdly lucky. You weren't kidding - from the wikipedia page on the Type 99! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Type_99_light_machine_gun#/media/File:First_Liutenant_Hajime_Asai_and_His_ten_men_4.jpg
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Apr 30, 2021 01:11
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This is funny because a few weeks ago in the Cold War thread there was a big argument over how likely it is to shoot down a WWI plane at low level with a machine gun.
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Apr 30, 2021 01:34
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pthighs posted:This is funny because a few weeks ago in the Cold War thread there was a big argument over how likely it is to shoot down a WWI plane at low level with a machine gun. World War 2 plane, and it was a loving Il-2
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Apr 30, 2021 01:35
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That was the grog thread, unless there were two parallel arguments. Arisaka rifles were sometimes issued with AA sights so that, as seen in the picture, groups of riflemen could (in theory) partially make up for the lack of AA guns and automatics in general compared to American formations.
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Apr 30, 2021 03:12
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The WWI thing was a typo, everyone knows it's trivial to shoot a lawnmower from the sky! I can't keep my military threads straight. Edit: Thank god Banshees were never fitted with PTABs pthighs fucked around with this message at 08:06 on Apr 30, 2021 |
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Apr 30, 2021 05:25
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So, what are the chances that the Liz somehow has the same bomb load as the Betty
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Apr 30, 2021 13:27
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It’s really weird how bad the Liz is for you. I guess the gimmick is it has ridiculously long range, rather than a high flight ceiling or armor, but it should still carry a heavy load I would think. In the games I’ve seen it used effectively, though, it was used for surprise bombing of the continental US from Canada or the Aleutians. Do you have the Rita available in the future too?
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Apr 30, 2021 13:36
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  There is at least one oiler in this convoy, but the first attack is flubbed.  Seal scores a hit on the supplies coming into Shortlands.  Hits are fine, it’s detonations we don’t like. Note his cruisers around Guadalcanal chasing our ASW TF around. We should be too fast for them though.  Wellingtons rather than Beauforts at Trincomalee tonight, that’s a bit more serious.  But they bomb the airfield, rather than the port.  Why are his escorts so much more observant than ours  Seal engages our ASW destroyers! Surely we have her now?  Useless fucks.  He’s still intent on being mean at Milne Bay it would seem.  We don’t really have the resources spare to contest at the moment.  Scythes at Rangoon   Lots of Scythes. Whatever that is out by the Andamans should be in for a bad time though.  They’ve repaired a Floatfire at Port Blair. There’s no reason the Zeros are refusing to sweep, the game just seems to get this thing sometimes where specific combinations of orders just don't go through.  Three supply hits and our losses could have been far worse, not too bad I suppose.  Only one unit hit on the road today.  Dauntlesses again at Milne Bay.  They achieve surprisingly little.  And then the main wave.  I am so looking forward to the day (night) we can finally bombard Port Moresby.  And Cairns too of course.  No CAP at Palembang today.  Here we come on tactical support.  Better than I had hoped, and there should be plenty more on the way.  Wave two achieves little however.  At least one of our escorts is paying attention!  Attempt two at Palembang.  The engineers again fail to contribute much, but we again make solid progress despite that.  do   Not a great day in the air.  loving Scythes!  Yesterday Intel decided Repulse had not in fact sunk, today they tell us she’s sunk on the opposite side of the world. (227,3 is the offmap hex that handles traffic to and from Britain. It’s possible he seriously miscalculated her damage and she sank crossing the Atlantic for repairs, but I’m not holding my breath over it)  Whatever this is is just on the edge of strike range for the CVLs, and not at all for the CVs, so that explains their survival.  We are fading just nicely out of contact for him. The invasion flotilla itself is the only TF he can really see, and that is mostly carryover from yesterday.   We are going to pull “S” Div out from the pack to catch this freighter and hopefully add a day’s confusion around if we are going to Port Blair or not.  We can also spare one destroyer from escorting these transports I think.  I hope this immediate crisis is mostly resolved by the time these guys get here, but we should be mining these bases anyway.  Per the usual pattern we will order a day’s rest at Palembang. Air support can remain tactical for now though I think.
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Apr 30, 2021 17:35
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wedgekree posted:Anything in general you an do about all those subs? Switch some planes over to ASW? OR just stuck until you can throw a bunch of DD's on ASW up there? Ow. As you can see active ASW TFs are mostly a waste of time and fuel for us. The only thing that works is ASW plane patrols, but we only have enough pilots for one sentai currently, who are still protecting the Makassar strait. pthighs posted:The WWI thing was a typo, everyone knows it's trivial to shoot a lawnmower from the sky! Thankfully IL-2s don't get PTABs either in witp or with witp's individual hit chance per bomb they would be nightmares. Velius posted:It’s really weird how bad the Liz is for you. I guess the gimmick is it has ridiculously long range, rather than a high flight ceiling or armor, but it should still carry a heavy load I would think. In the games I’ve seen it used effectively, though, it was used for surprise bombing of the continental US from Canada or the Aleutians. The problem with the Liz is (I think) that is has no manoeuvrability, armour or durability, so it gets suppressed by flak very easily. It does indeed carry a heavy load, half as much again as a Fortress or Liberator, but I think the combat engine is stacking so many penalties against it's hit chance it still ends up being poo poo. Plus they are extremely expensive for us to build and maintain, they definitely aren't twice as good as a Sally or Betty despite being twice the cost.
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Apr 30, 2021 17:41
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Well, there goes another month. Let’s start with India again. The big events here are obviously the fall of Colombo on the 9th and a fair amount of naval action in the Bay of Bengal, albeit with no direct confrontation between significant warships. The plan hasn’t changed much, and of course we are now (circuitously) enroute to Chittagaong. His defences in Southern India don’t seem to have changed significantly, which is an encouraging sign for what we might be up against at Chittagong. Port Blair has been put on the back burner to wait until we have a solid beachhead in at least Bengal, if not India proper.  Not very much has changed in the SRA. We’ve reduced them to just Bandoeng on Java and kicked them out of everywhere important in Northern Sumatra, leaving just Palembang. Plamebang is hopefully going to fall anyday now, I wish I could say the same for Bandoeng  We’ve marched nearly 300 miles south from Darwin, and are also nearly half way to Wyndham. This is a rather slow theatre.  No dramatic swings here either. The fact he got to Rennell first is very annoying, so we need to do something about that whilst also keeping Milne Bay more or less supplied, and building up the Solomons, and to do all of the above whilst basically having nothing deployed here but a handful of older cruiser and destroyers, and under constant harassment from literally every submarine he has. Oh and also we must bluff our way through our weaknesses here so he doesn’t start swinging carriers around, and discover there's really nothing between him, and well, the homeland. So no pressure or anything.
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May 1, 2021 11:07
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  Katsutade has found the “whatever”. A nice sized freighter.  A single T93 is enough to rip open her bottom and she plummets like a stone. Another one of the Steel * series down.  I-155 misses her opening salvo but surfaces to use the deck gun instead.  Then proceeds to miss another four torpedoes before finally getting a hit.  And then even more for a couple more hits. Well, that’s a definitive kill anyway, even if it did take about ten torpedoes. It’s mostly just interesting to see he still has stuff here at all.  Boldened by last night’s kill of a Betty, they launch a large raid at Trincomalee. However most of them turn tail at the first sign of any opposition at all.  Predictably enough the MG armed Oscars can do nothing to the bombers apart from throw off their aim. That’s enough though.  No CAP at Port Blair today.  There is a CAP at Bandoeng, however our LRCAP is on hand to intervene.  The flak is especially vicious today however.  Every plane in the second wave sustains damage.  We launch a strong attack at Port Blair.  But hit poo poo all.  Oh dear, he has LRCAP up from Tennant Creek.  Astonishingly they only claim two, but we obviously can’t fly here if he’s going to do that. Oh well.  Another Dauntless eats poo poo  The Havocs are active over Java again, but the Oscars catch them.  No kills of course.  Bored of bombing Rennell to no effect it would seem.  I’m not sure bombing Lunga to minimal effect is much more exciting.  At this point it must be costing them more in supply than it costs us. I wonder if the Nells will fly against whatever that is at Rennell.  He’s not totally bored of bombing Rennell then.  I suspect he might switch the bombers around for tomorrow, we should maybe switch the LRCAP too. Rufes will not fare so well against Mitchells I feel.  The Nells did fly. Come on a nice CA or something!  Quite a lot of CAs, but too much flak  And here they go.  Nice fireworks, arseholes.  They are appearing quite worn down at Palembang now.  eng.   Wait a second, that’s a big jump in navy points from a few days ago. Has Repulse actually gone down somewhere? Surely not.  Goddamn these Liz are just not worth it.  Repulse or no Repulse two nice medium freighters.  The flotilla is just too big and too easily spotted. Everything else is undetected, the carrier TFs included. Although speaking of if you look in the bottom left you’ll see I managed to issue orders to both sub divisions of the KB, leaving the invasion with only the CVLs for cover.  We are into May, a great month for us in aircraft arrivals. The H8K1 Emily patrol, the Ki-44 Tojo army interceptor and the L2D2 Tabby navy transport are all fantastic additions to our capabilities. This screen makes your eyes bleed, you say? Yeah, mine too.   I decide that maybe it would be no bad thing to send S”S in for fuel. We aren’t going to need all six on station at once, and this way we can stagger them to maintain coverage.  The cat is pretty much out the bag now, but we will try one last trick to make him think that even though we aren’t going to Port Blair, Diamond Harbour was the target all along.  This is recovery enough, I am keen to keep the pressure on here. Soon we will find out just how badly we have lost the game. You see, in addition to taking 1k supplies to repair an industry location, each location is also capped at recovering a maximum of one per day. So Palembangs 900 oil, if fully damaged, would take 900 days to come back to full production. An immensely stupid mechanic that just encourages the Japanese player to ragequit if they roll badly.  Maybe if we try at 15k feet the Liz won’t be totally worthless.  We are going to drop on Brome. I’ve been wanting to do this for a while but either paratroopers or transports were never available.
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May 1, 2021 20:57
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  If they keep trying eventually they will hit a destroyer I suppose.  Probably not with only two torpedoes though.  Back for another try though.  Four torpedoes once would probably have been a better strategy then two torpedoes twice.  Australia is bombarding Milne Bay. This is ballsy given how deep under our umbrella they are, but presumably they will retreat under the CAP at Port Moresby for the day.  Seven supply hits would a lot nastier if there were any significant volume of supplies to be destroyed  We open the airphase with the sweep at Palembang. Nothing here but I feel overall today might be spicy.  Despite us using LRCAP instead of sweep or escort at Bandoeng, somehow the Oscars aren’t here.  gently caress it, I’m retiring the Liz from frontline service. Or any service at all.  A well coordinated strike at Palembang.  Damage is predominantly to the second line troops however.  Out shell shocked LMG crews are unable to claim a Dauntless today.  Good job I didn’t swap the LRCAP around in the end. This is annoyingly successful results for a half load at that height into fortified troops though.  Maybe the first wave just got lucky.  We only have Oscars defending Trincomalee currently.  They are unable to prevent the bombers penetrating, although no significant damage is inflicted and they catch a couple on the way back out.  The next wave isn’t escorted at all.   Now we’re on to the main act.  The larger planes push through with only one loss, but damage is even less than the Blenheims managed.  He’s not letting up at Milne Bay.  They are of course causing damage but this is hardly a main base for us.  And mostly they are dropping bombs in craters.  The first carrier strike goes out. A little bit of the CAP from Calcutta, presumably, is present.  Well that was a waste of torpedoes. Fortunately I’m pretty sure there’s nothing here we can’t sink with bombs so it doesn’t really matter.  Next strike is against something in Diamond Harbour itself.  Pop goes the ship.  And one of the Airacobras foolish enough to take on our best.  Bad weather at Port Blair today, but no CAP.  Meh, but whatever. Disappointingly messages pop up about our Betty squadrons scrubbing their missions though.  Well, not all of them then.  How much shipping did he have in the Bay? Why?? What was he planning on doing with it all????  The Betties come right into Rangoon harbour, but there’s no CAP here today.  Presumably everything they have has been pulled back to Bengal.  Portland again.  Portland is a very lucky ship it seems.  Palembang again. It can’t be long now.  Today the engineers get off their butts and the benefits are immediately obvious. We take minimal damage whilst blowing a massive hole in their line, but fall short of outright victory. This should have inflicted minimal disruption for us though, and we can keep the pressure on.  Excuse me, WW1 was supposed to be 20 years ago. And half the world away.  Speaking of WW1, they are charging us again at Rennell.  Get hosed. THis is just the kind of stupidity we needed them to do to set us up for an attack.  And here we go at Broome.  Op mode (-)   A pretty decent day, spectacular Broome fuckup asside.  A nice one in the air anyway.  Mostly small stuff, but I’ll take them.  We are still going to win here, but we have to wait to unpack. We would have easily caught all those planes, what a shitshow  An entire armoured division arrives for us in Cam Ranh today. This is something from scenario 2, I don’t think the Japanese ever had an armoured division.  He is building a base at Normanton. I had been planning to paradrop there, then land troops, but this probably ends that. Lately I’ve been thinking marching down the road and then dumping supplies into the hex amphibiously once the fighting starts would probably be better anyway.  Now that it is May, we have the option to convert some ARs without using our very biggest Kyushu class ships. Conversion takes a full year though.  Kinryuu Maru has safely threaded the needle back to Rabaul, through disgusting numbers of submarines. Now that we have heavy aerial patrols though they will get stiff penalties to carrying out further attacks. Just as well given how many of the loving things are here.   There is no longer any purpose in deception. Landings will begin tomorrow night.  Hiei and Atago will perform the opening barrage tonight.  “A” carriers are moving in close but will remain on an anti shippining stance. I don’t want to order CAS until we know a bit more of what we are up against.We know there will be a decent chunk of flak here in the harbour fortress itself, but if there aren’t significant troops to bomb CAS would just be a waste of planes. I do set some sweeps though.  Time to end this.  The Liz are stood down, and so we can resume sweep at Bandoeng instead of LRCAP. Once Palembang is over we will use the medium bombers from Singapore instead of the Liz.  For some reason I’m a bit vague on, we got an upfront injection of the new transports put in the pools. We have it under production, but it would have taken us months to build up a stockpile large enough to put them in action. Certainly not complaining, and as soon as these aircraft are assembled and ready, we will start our counter attack at Rennell.  We are going to try our luck with LRCAP again at Milne.  Actually, on second thoughts, that parachute battalion must have all but wiped itself out. Let’s go for the attack now!  If Palebang falls maybe we can catch that submarine before she can slip out of sight.
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May 2, 2021 17:58
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The Guards Armored Division is a scenario 2 thing. The IJA had IIRC four tank divisions during WWII. Three of those were in a way ad hoc formations - basically, during the fighting in China the IJA formed "armored groups" that centralised much of the tank units in their respective areas, and those were eventually formalized and reoganized into three permanent tank divisions in 1942. The fourth was the "Hagane" 4th Armored Division, which was founded in 1943 with some involvement of german advisors. It was meant to be a Panzer Lehr-style handpicked formation serving as a cadre/testbed for the IJA's attempt to formalize a proper doctrine for division-size tank formations. 
Magni fucked around with this message at 06:55 on May 3, 2021 |
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May 2, 2021 21:20
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Exactly what the IJA needed in 1943
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May 2, 2021 22:48
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  More missing of destroyers.  I-154 takes a prolonged pounding in return, but seems to have avoided any major damage.  All these submarines must be stuck on 10/10 detection, but sometimes they still get the chance to set up an attack.  I had deliberately sent these guys west of the Admiralty Islands to try and avoid the obvious route into Rabaul, but there’s just too many submarines here.  Back to night bombing at Trincomalee.  The moon is still bright, but storms and harassment from the Oscars protect us.  We bump into an AMc or something outside Chittagong. Unfortunately that’s not the only bumping that occurs.  Poor little Fuji is nearly cut in half, and we don’t even shoot at the minesweeper.  Then “A” Division encounters a freighter. Looks like a nice big one anyway.  The Oscars open what is hopefully the last day of the battle of Palembang with reports of empty skies and light rain.  Moderate rain for the Nells at Rennell. And no Floatfires, I was half expecting Floatfires.  No damage either, mind you. You win some you lose some.  The fighters at Broome are pressed into ground attack rather than CAP, but only manage to traumatise some Kangaroos.  The morning wears on and the carriers start launching. The first raid to arrive is the sweep of Chittagong.  Shokaku’s full group is committed, the poor Warhakws never had a chance.  We are back to a mix of airfield and ground attack at Port Blair, which seems to be yielding results.  The main bomber wave arrives at Palembang.  Not bad at all.  If he’d gone for airfield attack here he might have actually achieved something.  A pair of Hudsons from Port Hedland also miss our men at Broome as they frantically try to sort themselves out.  The Mitchells still have it in for us at Lunga.  The weather mostly favours us today it would seem.  The one day we put up CAP is the one day the Fortresses are first in at Milne Bay. gently caress  It goes about as well as it usually does when we try to fight Fortresses.  Time’s up for Annalock.   Next up is probably another AMc, with a little CAP over her.  It takes more than a couple of Airacobras to stop us, and the first Kate to make a run plants one square amidships.  Splat I think is the usual descriptor for this situation.  There’s considerably more CAP over Diamond Harbour. Let’s hope this means he did think we were going there.  Once again the escort blow the CAP aside without loss to the bombers.  Hardly worth the fuss really.  We got two of them, and an Airacobra, but losses to the Zeros balance that out.  The CVLs go for a strike on Calcutta itself.  Still nothing very exciting.  We do better in the air here, but they do pick off a straggling Kate as we leave.  Here comes the counter strike from Calcutta.  The elite Zero pilots push their poo poo in without breaking a sweat.  As dusk falls and the planes are recovered, the first Battleship Division opens up on the fortress guarding Chittagong Harbour.  Nagara has a rough old time of it, but better her than an LSD. The Skytrains are presumably a part of the attempt to keep Burma supplied now the sea lanes are thoroughly severed, or possibly emergency evacuations to try and bolster troop numbers in Bengal. Well, good luck with that.  Speaking of LSDs, here they come, Settsu leading the way.  An extremely violent bout fills the bay with smoke and flame, but in the end the warships are able to present any significant damage to the landing ships.  Normal casualties for a landing of this scale. Now we are out of the bonus time, if we didn’t have 100 planning here we would be losing around 50% of our men to disablements.  We storm wildly into yesterday’s breach at Palembang.  This is too much for the primarily second line troops holding Palembang, and they retreat in confusion to the west. Now we get to see just how hosed we are in terms of oil income  Bandoeng is rather less dramatic, but a result that favours us all the same.  How about Rennell? Looks like we didn’t get as many of the Taifu troops here as I would have liked, probably due to traffic jams at the still small field on Shortlands.  gently caress YES!! That’s the stuff, what a fantastic end to a good day. This could sooo easily have spiralled out of control for us, and with our carriers two thousand miles away and busy for at least the next fortnight, if he’d bought his girls out to play there would have been nothing we could do. Now that we have the hex we can use the transport Mavis to bring in more troops and ensure he can never take this back. I was terrified that I would be forced to escalate with what cruisers and destroyers we have available here, and that he would either bushwack them with carriers or else just use his overwhelming numerical advantage to win a surface action. And as a final bonus we’ve annihilated an entire paratroop regiment. Well, maybe he had a squad or two somewhere else so he might not have to rebuy the unit, but we’ve wiped out all of it’s combat strength and he really doesn’t get many paratroop squads in replacement. It’s going to be 6 months probably before the 2nd USMC Battalion is any problem of ours again.  This also is great. One 1/3rd of a Division and one Brigade against our two divisions and two tank regiments. It looks like the 35th isn’t ashore in numbers yet but by this time tomorrow when we are attacking they certainly will be.  Troops packed onto the beach make for a bloody artillery duel, but we give as good or better than we get. That AT regiment might prove a slight fly in the ointment, but look at all that delicious AAA to overrun.   Well that, that was a big day. Nearly 200 army points, and many more to come soon I would hope.          My advice to anyone who wants to get in on this madness is not to try and run an airlift operation under the noses of half a dozen carriers.  Mostly small again, but the freighter is worth an extra point today!  Nagara is not formally dead, but she’s definitely up for being scuttled. If she’s the worst we lose in this operation I’m a happy supreme commander.  Poor little Fuji isn’t much better but she might survive.  At Rennell we have inherited half of an airfield, but we will suspend construction immediately to focus on fortifications first.  Palembang. Oh my god yes, yeesssssssss. That is the true triumph of the day, we’ll have Palembang back at full production by the end of the year. That’s the last big weight off my mind really, we have now hit all of our expansion targets except Fiji, all of the oil is ours (Burma hardly counts), and we are ashore at Chittagong with every expectation of taking it tomorrow. Things are looking up!  He is starting on another airfield in the Aleutians, I’m glad I’m already building up strength in the Kuriles. I’d really like to launch an Aeulitan campaign to get us a bit of depth here, but if he’s heavily investing it’s probably too late already. reports posted:G4M1 Betty from Kanoya Ku K-1 attacking a Electric Boat S-18 class SS at 108,125  Now that we have taken Palembang, it is time for a strategic resources review. If you look at the disabled production line for oil you see 10,450 which, given that one point of well produces 10 oil points a turn means we have 1045 wells to repair, at a total cost of 1,004,500 supply. However, oil is only any use to us if we can refine it, and if we look at the “actual production” line for refineries, we see that our current refinery capacity is 30,240 from 3024 intact refineries, which is already less than our current oil production of 35320. Even if we repaired all the refineries at a further cost of 910,440 supplies we would still not be able to refine all our fuel. Now, you have to remember that sooner or later we are going to be under blockade in the home islands, so building the oil reserve isn’t a bad thing necessarily, but also at the same time unrefined oil left over at the end of the game is wasted production potential. So we will repair some of the refineries, but we won’t bother with all. What we certainly will not do is actually expand refinery capacity.   It turns out Atago and Hiei still have quite a bit of ammo left, so they will stay to bombard again.  And it’s the Inaba sisters’ turn to join the fun.  We are trusting to massive bombardment and numbers to power us through whatever forts he might have built up here. Chittagong is also a clear hex which helps hugely of course.  I-7 has found something big, heading for Pago Pago or Fiji. We only have a couple subs in the area but let’s see what we can do.  Now we have Palembang we can take the Sallies from Singapore and base them at Soerabaja to have some actually effective heavy bombers for hitting Bandoeng  Most of the troops at Palembang are staying for some well earned rest, but a few of the smaller formations will chase west.  With a truly obnoxious quantity of submarines still in the area we can’t risk any surface shipping, especially since Rennell has no port facilities so any TF would be forced to linger. Thankfully we do have the Mavis transports, who are immediately brought back to Rabaul from Shortlands and put to work carrying some construction crews down to Rennell.  We are loading up the troops at Medan who have been planning for Vizgapatnam, the target for the third wave of landings in India. They will be shipped to Colombo to wait until we are done with Chittagong and then Diamond Harbour.  And another massive troop convoy begins loading at Cam Ranh for Colombo. These troops aren’t planned, so will be part of follow up waves.  And from Koepang the Argentina Maru is picking up the Yokosuka 1st SNLF para unit for the indian theatre. Large parts of the interior have minimal defences so there is significant scope to use paradrops to speed up our offensive.  We have plenty of troops at Broome, now the challenge is just keeping them supplied until they are ready to attack. I also start sweeps in case he thinks to put up a CAP to stop our transports.
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May 3, 2021 18:27
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Congratulations on the good luck at Palembang!
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May 3, 2021 18:53
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Holy hell, this is getting exciting.
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May 3, 2021 18:56
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aphid_licker posted:Exactly what the IJA needed in 1943 Well, I mean, yes? Obviously it was too late but they did manage to get the China front moving again in '44. Grammarchist posted:Holy hell, this is getting exciting. Are you trying to imply that it is possible for the greatest game ever to at some point not be exciting?
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May 3, 2021 20:12
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Black Gold Pacific "P"
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May 3, 2021 20:18
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Honestly, right now it feels mostly like a comp stomp to me. I hope Alikchi starts actually doing things soon. I realize the IJN has a big advantage early on, but I don't think he's actually made a significant move with his navy... ever. I'm not counting the obsolete BBs that tried to engage the initial Ceylon landing forces.
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May 3, 2021 20:30
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So, since the game is way past this point and it doesn't matter, how do you all think the Chittagong battle is going to turn out? Pharnakes has a good ratio, but I've seen even more overwhelming Japanese assaults fail in my games, also I've come to recognize that Japanese AVs are simply lesser than Allied AVs, and so if P. gets a couple of bad rolls, Alikchi may have enough time to do something for once and move in further troops... Still, I guess I'm overall somewhat optimistic?
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May 3, 2021 20:47
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Glad Palembang didn’t go to poo poo. That’s the worst mechanic in a game with a lot of bad mechanics.
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May 3, 2021 21:09
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| # ? Apr 26, 2024 15:57 |
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steinrokkan posted:So, since the game is way past this point and it doesn't matter, how do you all think the Chittagong battle is going to turn out? Pharnakes has a good ratio, but I've seen even more overwhelming Japanese assaults fail in my games, also I've come to recognize that Japanese AVs are simply lesser than Allied AVs, and so if P. gets a couple of bad rolls, Alikchi may have enough time to do something for once and move in further troops... Still, I guess I'm overall somewhat optimistic? Pharnakes doesn't do "a couple" of bad rolls in this game. He goes all out on the snake eyes or he rolls perfectly on an entirely unimportant encounter.
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May 3, 2021 21:39
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