ORIGINAL: Shark7
The real question with Mizuho is if she had not sunk in 1942, would she have actually been converted. I guess I tend to answer 'yes' to this question, as the Chitose and Chiyoda conversion were successfull, and as was mentioned Mizuho was practically identical to those ships.
But as JWE points out, this is easily modde and I know I will be making that mod for my own use for sure. The only thing it really changes is giving you the OPTION of converting them in game. Options are good. [8D]
Regardless, history is a "contingency" science. That is, anything that happens is dependent upon things that happened before. It is inherently not repeatable. But for the most part, WITP is built around reinforcement lists.
For LCU we have a fixed reinforcement list. The only variables are if certain bases are held by the enemy. But nothing can be accelerated or traded for anything else. Both sides have a fixed reinforcement track for LCU, no "production system" at play here.
And for Airgroups, the groups, not the complements, but the groups themselves. Again, these are fixed. You can't have more groups than there are in the reinforcement track. The number of slots in the groups you have on the map places a fixed upper bound on the number of aircraft you can have in play. And this is regardless of production. You can have 10,000 or 100,000 aircraft sitting in your pools but you canot increase the number of aircraft on the map by even one more than the total number of slots in your on map groups. So airgroups also represent a fixed reinforcement for both sides.
The only two areas where there are variables or tradeoffs are in the areas of Ships and Aircraft. And this only for the Japanese side. This being said, both sides have a ship arrival reinforcement track. To be "historical" for the Allies, we need to put the historical ships on the track to arrive on the historical date (sounds easier than it is) and then do the same for the Japanese (again sounds easier than it is - what does the ARRIVAL DATE mean?). But the Japanese then have the ability to spend their Heavy Industry points either to increase their aircraft production and/or to bring in some of their ships early. We've argued (though this argument is not accepted by many) that increasing your aircraft production too much is non-value added because having your pools really full isn't any better than having them sufficiently full. On the other hand bringing in as many ships as soon as possible is very value added and I suspect most Japanese players go for this option. Trying to spend any excess H.I. on acceleration of ships.
So long winded way of saying that the philosophy of the game the AE team inherited is that of a reinforcement track driven system. Other systems allow total flexability on building more divisions or less divisions and more BBs or less BBs and more Airplanes, etc. WITP does not do this. WITP really doesn't have a full blown production system. WITP has a priority system that allows the Japanese to trade off ship acceleration with aircraft production. That is the only choice.
So given that philosophy which we decided to remain aligned with - and the importance of CV/CVL/CVE we decided to only represent the historical OOB for both sides. I'm sure some will disagree with this decision. But we can't please all of the players all of the time. Hence, there is a wonderul new editor which allows almost any kind of ship to convert to almost any kind of ship. And to set up a ship to convert to another ship, once you understand the new editor fields takes just a few key strokes. So there is almost literally nothing that cannot be done now, in the editor.
