ORIGINAL: Canoerebel
GreyJoy, those aircraft losses shown on your Intelligence Screen: Wow! Nearly two to one and decidedly in favor of the Allies. Very few players have seen numbers like these, and for a newcomer to achieve them against an experience player in a Scenario Two match is remarkable.
You have found your opponent's achilles heel. The tendon in his heel (the Japanese airforce) has snapped. The wound is open. He is bleeding profusely. One of your highest priorities right now should be to further attrit the enemy airforce whenever and wherever possible (of course, you already know this, but soemtimes it helps to look at it from a different angle).
Typically, the Japanese navy is also an Achilles Heal. Japan has a limited number of battleships, cruisers and aircraft carriers. Each one of those you claim is a big score. Eventually you'll probably begin whittling down the IJN navy. If you win the air war, Japan's aggression will diminish, you'll gradually change over to Allied aggression, and rader will have to employ his navy to slow you down. But if you break the back of his air force in the meantime, his navy is going to be much more vulnerable.
Keep up the good fight.
Don't know CR if this vision is too optimistic.
We all thought Rader's got his backbone broken during the air battles of Karachi, where his fighters and bombers were falling in droves...and he had not.
Probably his avg pilot quality has decreased. That's for sure imho. But he still has so many planes that it's easy to compensate at least part of his losses.
For sure we're improving. For sure we're getting stronger and our losses can, under certain limits, be replaced (talking about Navy now).
Now i need to start to exchange 1 ship for another ship of the same class. I have to stop losing major ships for nothing...but, unfortunately, i cannot count on Rader's mistakes, cause he seldom does any. So to sink his ships, to kill his pilots, i need to begin to really attrit him and the Solomons are prooving to be a good attrition field.
I need to have him bleed against my walls. he still has to save from destruction those 5 divisions trapped at Tulagi since Jannuary. Don't think he can efford to lose them. At the same time he cannot let me live in the Solomons...if he did so within the next few months i'd start to bomb Rabaul back to stoneage....no, he need to dislodge me from there. To do that, once he discovered that the frontal clash was too expensive (remember the terrible landings at Tulagi) he wisely decided to advance slowly building an incredible chain of mutually supporting bases in order to strangle Lunga and starve it imposing a definitive air and naval blockade.
...and we have to fight still to remain alive and to gain time...time is on my side (as the old song says). He's now fully committed here, as am i. But every day i get new toys...and in April things will be changing.
With those 130 Hellcats (plus the 45 Wildcats, the 65 P-40Ks, the 30 Kitti and Spits V, the 30 Corsairs, the 40 P-38s and the 25 P-39s) i'll be able to stand a continuous defensive CAP over Lunga and Tulagi...and my walls will get stronger.
...and in April we'll start our counteroffensive from Karachi...we'll open another front again....and he'll have to divert more air assets there...
I'm the man on the wall. I'm the man of the watch. I will never surrender
