I am playing my first serious game of WITP as the allies using the CHS mods and Mike Browns' Extended Map.
Based on the comments from other in this forum I will gladly admit that I did not really have a proper sense of the right and wrong things to do in this game, nor the full knowledge of the history of this theater of operations. However, over the years I have played a number of board games from other manufacturers in this theater, thus I did have some idea on the need to avoid the Japanese carriers in the early part of this war.
After a couple of experiments with the game using the stock map, I had gathered enough understanding of the game interface to settle down and start a real campaign. The one thing I had noticed during these experiments was the similarity of the basic Japanese initial battle plan (this as I played the Japanese in each experiment).
I thus decided to play as the allies and configure the game with all realism switches in the on state and reinforcements for both sides set at fixed.
At the outset I had settled myself on striving to interfere with Japanese merchant shipping in every way possible. I also intended to use the Chinese forces aggressively to engage as many Japanese forces as possible in the hope of keeping them from being used elsewhere. I had also concluded that both the Phillipines and Malaya were lost causes and the best think I could do in both locations was to execute a fighting retreat towards Singapore and Manila respectively.
Singapore fell mid January '42 and Manila eventually fell May 20th.
Before the fall of Singapore I had been able to extract most of the air force and a number of infantry, engineer and aviation units, most of which were deployed in Panembang or Batavia. A few were routed to Port Moresby and Rabaul.
I then set up a kill zone in the straits between Singkep, Singkawang, Palembang triangle and then spent my time bombing everything that passed into that region from Palembang, Batavia and a tiny carrier force. Eventually I was forced out of Palembang and retreated the ground troops in good order to Teloekbetoeng and Batavia, and move the airforce to Batavia.
I also placed some Catalinas in Teloekbetoeng.
And thus began the battle of the northern Java Sea.
It is now the start of July 7th 1942, and I am still bombing Palembang and the triangle in force and the current Intelligence screen below details the state of the game I guess.
Although this is my first game, and it is only July, I am not impressed with the performance of the AI. However, I would nevertheless ask an opinion in this regard from the more experienced players, and also whether it is also worthwhile continuing this particular game.
Archangel
