ORIGINAL: treespider
If you refer to a few posts above you will see what you need to do to "correct" the Japanese economy...good luck finding a PBeM opponent. I researched the economy for Japan...and the resources requirements to be transported to the HI are still shy by around 3-5 million points per year...if you want to know the tonnage of rice imported from Indo-China just ask...that being said the resource transportation requirements are about 7 times higher now when compared to WitP....so if you want to increase those requirements have it...however due to the nature of the economic model the entire system may just collapse if you go to far.
As one who has played the Japanese side a good deal more than the Allied, this has come as something of an eye-opener for me.
I had thought that AE provided a tolerably accurate model of the oil/resource shipping operations needed to sustain the Japanese economy, but it seems that the actual requirements are an order of magnitude greater. Worse, there is a broad hint being dropped here that the game may be incapable of providing an acceptably accurate model of the Japanese economy under war conditions. Apparently one major flaw is the game's failure to reflect Japan's food import requirements.
So, one suggested solution is to turn off the production model and to apply build rates instead in order to replicate Japanese production accurately. But does that not mean that all those tramp steamers plying between Dalian and Moji and across the Tsugaru Strait with resources become instantly redundant? In which case, the Japanese player will doubtless hide them in some out-of-the-way port and all those Allied submarines will have nothing to shoot at but the IJN and the supply/troop transports. Won't the only job for the Japanese tankers be the transport of fuel to Truk, etc, whilst Palembang will cease to have any importance? It appears to me that abandonment of the production model leads to even worse distortions of the economy's impact upon strategy than its retention.
Treespider may or may not be right about the difficulty of finding a PBEM opponent if the game's representation of the Japanese economy is made to reflect real life. I suspect some JFB's are sufficiently masochistic as to want to see how well they could manage an accurate economic model. But if AE is not providing such a model, apparently to ensure some people will be willing to take the Japanese side, then let's have that out in the open and stop deluding ourselves that at the grand strategic level AE has any pretensions to accuracy. If the Japanese have as big an economic advantage as is being suggested, then the presence or absence of another two dozen SBD's is a matter of the utmost insignificance.
