ORIGINAL: Dili
That is way more detailed than I might have expected, and an improvement over vanilla if it won't penalize with pp's if already lost
Au contraire! It is worse. A player can risk more those ships and doesn't simulate well the requests of other theatres since it is not the specific ship per se that counts.
The problem, of course, is that the decision to request transfer of ships from one ocean to another is based on losses and operations. If Atlantic lost a lot of DDs they would request some from the Pacific and probably not transfer any to the Pacific. History goes out the window with the first
random statement in the code, so it is absolutely impossible to figure out the force balance between the two theatres. We were faced with one reasonable option: to use historical arrivals
and withdrawals.
We considered, and even tested, some code to use substitutes - type for type or reasonable alternative, in the withdrawals. But it was illogical from the beginning. If the ship that was historically withdrawn had been lost, would another have been ordered out instead? Or would force levels be considered and maybe even another ship transferred to the Pacific? How the hell could we ever figure all that out? Unless we expanded WITP to cover the whole world, add in all the things that would contribute to force balancing decisions, and produce an unplayable monstrosity (in a few more years).
So we went historical. You get transfers from the Atlantic when they historically arrived and you send ships back when they historically left. No consideration for possible losses in either theatre.
If anyone has a better idea, send Joe Wilkerson an email and volunteer to give up your free time for a couple of years working on the next version of the game.