ORIGINAL: el lobo
ORIGINAL: PaxMondo
You've got a plan. Excellent. Watch your supply levels empire wide. At this point you should start growing supply everywhere. Not much, but between now and 9/1/42 you want to see a definite trend where your supply overall, and particularly in the HI is growing. Something like 1 - 4K/day. And of course, you can't starve your units when you do this ... you grow supply by NOT expanding factories and bases and not putting too many air groups into training ... again, tough choices.
Pax, can you clarify this for me?
In Post #187 you stated, “2. Training consumes less supply than combat missions.”
So do I stand-them-down?
Thanks.
Training does consume less, but it still eats supply.
Supply and HI are what drive the economy. Most common mistake by IJ players are that they overgrow their armed forces (generally via air group size) and/or over build their economy (too many factories ... aircraft/engine) and run out of supply.
The second way is to not save enough HI to be able to run your economy (ergo build AC) in late '45/46 when you have no fuel to build more HI. There are plenty of AAR's to illustrate both of these. The first error shows up in mid to late '42 through '43. The 2nd one in '44/45/46.
So, you need to train pilots. No question. You have already declared this game is 'gamey', so I know you are re-sizing air groups. NP. Just warning you that by re-sizing and setting them all to training you can burn through your supply. This is particularly true because you are
realistic RnD which generally means you will expend MORE supply on factories because you can't allow as many to convert as you would in a non-realistic RnD game. Also, your last plan had you RnD on 31 AC models ... that also indicates a lot of supply usage.
You're going to have to watch your global supply carefully. By now, you need to be slowly growing supply 1 - 5K/day. By Sept 42, that needs to be 3-7K/day. In '43 5-9K/day. You need to realize that your forces are ever increasing in the game. You get tons of new LCU's in 44/45 and they will be fighting non-stop eating supply like crazy.
By end of '44 you want as big a supply pool as you can get; 6M for sure, more is better. Overbuild early and your troops will starve.
See where I'm going now? Making any sense?
Guys like Mike and I, we trend chart everything, but what we watch like a hawk is our supply and HI pools. We want to see nice, steady growth from about 3/42 onwards. Factories are not expanded, units are not put into service, combat operations are not undertaken until the supply to support these items is clearly available.
I don't even undertake combat operations unless I see a way to make/take more supply than I consume. That's one reason I like India ... supply rich environment. [;)] Supply Supply Supply.
[:D] [:D][:D]