It's 1/43 and I'm already seeing LBA squadrons disappearing all over the Pacific. The SoPac area used to be death on my transport TF's from Bettys out of Rabaul, now they are all over on Timor fruitlessly attacking Darwin, or in Burma going against Diamond Harbor and Chittagong. I've not seen anything more than a Dinah at Rabaul for weeks. There are some Bettys up in CentPac but they won't attack my CV TF's that raided Eniwetok and Kwajalein (sinking an AR, a sub and an AD, good show boys!), and recon is showing the CentPac atolls sparsely to barely held.
I'm wondering if the AI has a "pull back the horns" strategy if it loses all its CV's in 1942; I'm seeing reports from sub attacks on transports of men being lost from land units being carried, but are they reinforcements or evacuees?
Same here. It does not play out historically. Once the SW Pacific is lost the AI pulls most air units out. No fight for New Guinea and eventually I even took Raubal. I don't know what the trigger for the pull out is. It might be CV's or it might be Lea or Buna or even PM. But something causes it. Fought like hell in Burma though and the best stuff you have available is Hurricanes and they can't keep up. I ended up transferring most of the Pearl Harbor P-40's and even some Early Corsairs to Burma and I still barley kept up. The Corsairs had good pilots and once they had experience they were racking up massive kill numbers.