Gents, lets put aside all this "Should have had better search/more escort/air attack" in place arguement. I had all three, perhaps not in big enough quantites,
Umm, if we want to see gamey we should look under defining the terms of a debate such that only one's own viewpoint can be correct. No, the presence or absence of your naval search, escorts, own hunter-killer SC TFs positioned to dart out and kill the enemy if they were spotted and your own naval attack planes IS germane to the discussion because THEY are what would make this mission a suicide mission - which seems to be your gripe.
Given the fact that the mission was run on 4 occasions without loss and once with total loss the overall loss rate per mission was 20%. That's low for many mission types historically and certainly NOT the same as a suicide mission. You did NOT have sufficient recon or SC TFs or escorts or naval attack planes in the area and so the Allies could run this mission 4 times for NO loss. You can't wriggle out of that truth by re-defining the terms of the argument to leave out the measures you should have taken to prevent this mission being a success.
You made a mistake and got punished for it. That's fine, we all make mistakes. I think your bigger error is in not just learning from it but in trying to avoid the lesson by declaring it gamey... Declaring it gamey means you rules-lawyer it out of existence. Accepting you could have stopped it means you examine the mistakes you made, fix them and the next time an opponent tries this he ends up with a dead DD on the first circumnavigation and no useful intel.
but this is obviously a one way mission.
Which was completed successfuly on 4 occasions without loss.... thus proving it was NOT a one way mission.
With that said, and just to add some balance here, Miller is not alone in bringing gameyness into play instead of just going "I messed up, I should have played better". Canoerebel has fallen back on gameyness claims in the past several times also and I've disagreed with him - for the exact same reasons as here - in his thread when he's done so.
I think it is important to point that out so that the consistency of this positiong can be seen... Gameyness shouldn't be pulled out to excuse poor play ( and we all are guilty of poor play at times ) and both of the opponents in this game being discussed have pulled the gamey shiboleth out of the hat at different times - and not being warranted in doing so.
Both of you need to accept that poor play and lax play gets punished. Both of you also need to realise that when a sub sinks a lot of your ships or a lot of your planes don't return home when you would have preferred them to then the reason is rarely the game being broken but more probably lies in your play. Someone has recently reminded me of lots of examples from this game which actually DO fit into gamey and lots of other examples which aren't but were complained about instead of actually looking at the level of orders being given by the CO.
