RHS II scen 129 GP and me

[larryfulkerson]

Shanghi has an oil refinery but no oil well. That could be a problem if I don't have enough oil flowing to
Shanghi. I was hoping to get some oil from Shanghi for the home islands but it's looking better as a RES
source now. I'll have to monitor the oil level because I may have to shut the refinery off in the near future.

[larryfulkerson]

I've got two refineries that don't have enough oil to run and one of them is at Amoy. I haven't looked up where the
other one is but I'm shutting off the production for those two refineries until they have enough oil to run.

EDIT: I see where I'm spending more than 24K on engines alone and I'm wondering how many engines I can turn off to
save the HI.

[larryfulkerson]

Something new to me is the "Munitions plant" found under the Armaments tab. They turn out guns and I've got a lot of
them. Most of them are nickle and dimed over the map but there's a couple of big ones, near Tokyo and Yokohoma. I'll
have to watch the numbers at first before I've determined whether or not I have enough. Vehicles too. Vehicles tends
to change remarkably at first as I recall.

[ny59giants]

This was the first mod I tried against GP. My issue with it was the huge amount of HI Japan was able to generate per turn. It was supplies and fuel that limits Japan. Has that changed?

I don't think I could play this mod without Tracker. Are you using it?

I'll let GP explain what he is doing differently against you then me. [:D] Probably not getting so many warships sunk!

Beware of his subs around the Home Islands and your major ports. That is the only success he has had.

[larryfulkerson]

ORIGINAL: ny59giants
This was the first mod I tried against GP. My issue with it was the huge amount of HI Japan was able to generate per turn. It was supplies and fuel that limits Japan. Has that changed?

I'm still in the throes of doing my first turn set up kinds of things, our game hasn't actally started
yet, I haven't launched my Pearl Strike, etc. so it's kinda early for me to make a judgement on the
scenario yet, or the game yet, or the economy yet. I suspect there will be a lot of things I'll have
to change in T2 in order for the change from "Pearl Strike" mode into conventional wartime mode.
And I expect Vehicles to drop precipitously in T2 due to units being fielded.

ORIGINAL: ny59giants
I don't think I could play this mod without Tracker. Are you using it?

I tested that the first thing I did after making #4 my work in progress file. It loaded just fine
and I'm using it extensively. The one nit I have to pick with the designer is that there's no way
to see the skill levels of the various pilots. I have no idea when to change the training squadrons
to a different skill other than going to the squadron and looking at the pilots skill levels manually.
For each different squadron and there's close to 300 of them now. A little less than 2K pilots, maybe.
So I've adopted a "date" to change which changes depending on the skill level of the class generally
and how fast they are advancing in the skill they are learning. At 70% I change the skill to something
else and train them some more. Unless there's a shortage of, say, fighter pilots and then I cull the
training squadrons to make up the need.

ORIGINAL: ny59giants
I'll let GP explain what he is doing differently against you then me. [:D] Probably not getting so many warships sunk!

He hasn't explained what he's going to do, although he has told me he's making a plan. That sounds
ominous. I expect him to ambush my Makin invasion TF because he has two times out of the last three
games we've played. This last time, the third game we played he went for Manila and it's ports
instead of Pearl as he was the Japs. That game didn't last long as Brian felt it a burden and I agreed
with him. He's an expert at Allied stuff. I get a better game when he's Allies.

ORIGINAL: ny59giants
Beware of his subs around the Home Islands and your major ports. That is the only success he has had.

Thanks for the heads up. I'm planning on escorting everything I can and I'm looking for low-price
AKL's to run up and down the entrance to Tokyo, back and forth, so he can waste his torpedoes on
some of my smaller ships. That's the theory. Plus I'm planning on having some ASW assets out there
plying the waters back and forth on patrol. And lots of spotter planes. ASW patrols for them. I'm
determined to give Brian a better game this time.

[larryfulkerson]

I was thinking of sending my moves sometime in the early morning hours,
because he usually get's up about 04:00 my time so I usually try to get
it there by 03:00 if I can.....so he'll have something in his inbox when
he gets his coffee and his eyes open a little wider and he has something
to do. I'm not in a hurry but I do like to stick to a routine if I can.
For his part Brian tries to get his moves to me before about 15:00 his
time so that would be about 18:00 my time so I can work on my moves
overnight and do a more in-depth, detailed job of it. That's the way we've
gotten into the habit of and it's working remarkably well.

But he sent me an email saying he's not quite ready and that I shouldn't
sell myself short. In other words, those things I was going to put off
until T2, go ahead and do those things now. Okie dokie.

[larryfulkerson]

I think I've found something wrong with Bangkok. I show over 60 AV parked there but the mouseover blurb says
there's only a partial garrison. Is it not counting the units there correctly or something?

[larryfulkerson]

This is my first good look at this mod and as I'm building TF's for the first turn I'm running into these
short-range little thimble-full at a time xAKL's, hundreds of them. I'm used to the behemoth ships that
can carry 10 times what these guys carry. I'm guessing this is to better reflect the shipping available at
the time? Or to make the game more realistic? I'm not sure what to do with these guys. They aren't much
good for anything. I'll use them for between the islands trips etc.

[larryfulkerson]

Here's another little nit to pick. I went through the ships in the hex and counted 13 float planes (1 is down for
maint. ) so I know there's 13 there but when I click on the float planes label in the first display I'm presented
with a squadron of 7 without a way to see any more squadrons. The other 6 planes. D'oh.

[larryfulkerson]

Of all the troops at Cam Ranh Bay that have to be moved I've segregated them into at least three trips. One is
for a unit that got separated from it's plarents somehow and needs a trip over to the PI. Then there's a group
or two that need to go south to Brunei and Miri and there's a large group that need to go to Malaya and I don't
have shipping for all of that at the same time I don't think. Also, there's more troops that are assigned at
Cam Ranh Bay that I may get around to moving somewhere.

EDIT: I got another look at the picture and I note that a lot of those units are in the red supply-wise so I'd
rather give them a day to gather up their supplies before I actually load them. What's the advantage of doing
that? I don't know. It just sounds like what the ground commander would command of his underlings. Either
him or the Task Force Commander whoever that is. I need to check on that.

[larryfulkerson]

I'm still rusty on decifering the ship display panel....and I'm thinking that the
armament on the ship includes some Depth Charges, 4 of them, parked aft on the
ship each of which has 2 shots total. Is that right?

[larryfulkerson]

I found a CS ship at CRB that can convert now into an AO given the right shipyard. I looked into it and the
closest suitable shipyard is at Nagasaki, unless I'm not in a hurry. It turns out that Hong Kong has the
right sized shipyard and that the ship MIGHT be able to convert at Hong Kong after it falls. But that's
probably at least a week away. On the other hand it's going to take at least a week to drive the ship to
Nagasaki and I don't have a good escort for it yet. The invasion ships just now left harbor for their targets
and they emptied the port of good escorts. I've got a PB on hand but he's for emergencies at the port.
I hate to wait that long to get the conversion started. Too bad it takes a seventeen level shipyard to
enable the conversion. I'll skip this ship and come back to it later after I've built a bunch more TF's.

[larryfulkerson]

I just now did an alt-Tab to switch applications to MSPaint and noticed
that WITP-AE was missing from the taskbar. It crashed or something.
I've lost about 3 hours of work. I'll have to start saving more often.

[larryfulkerson]

I've sorted the list of squadrons in aircraft model order and according to this display the Japs have only two
training squadrons that are still flying the Hickory. There's 60 aircraft in the squadrons, 17 in the pools
and I'm building about 3 per turn. That's just about right. I'd like to get a really good cushion of planes
to take into account the flaming up of air wars etc. But these are trainers and I don't anticapate needing a
lot of them.

EDIT: I've got to figure out how to get Tracker to tell me what's the best production rate for each model.

[larryfulkerson]

I got an email from Brian a couple of days ago, the game options, realism options, and one other one I can't
remember now. Pictures of his screen so I can match what he suggests. This I did and then promptly forgot
about them. This is the Game Options we're using:

[larryfulkerson]

And here's the Preferences:

[larryfulkerson]

And here's the realism settings:

[larryfulkerson]

Of all the pilots manning the active combat planes this is a list of the lowest experienced
pilots, the pilots with the least experience I mean, and I'm thinking of retiring them just
to get them out of the inventory. I need pilots with more experience than that flying
the Emperior's planes. Plus the slow learners need to be resigned to be cooks or bottle
washers or something.

[larryfulkerson]

As I recall the oil well and refinery were both 300 in stock, but here in RHS II they have been scaled way back.
This is going to lengthen the war perceptively. Lower levels means less can be pulled out of there per time
period ( say a week ). I'm assuming that Balikpapan and Palembang and so on are scaled back too. D'oh. This
alone will lengthen the war by at least three months I'd say.

[larryfulkerson]

I had a PB at Bangkok that has some minor damage so I put it in the shipyard to heal the wound and then wondered
what else is in the shipyard and found to my amazement that there's a lot of broken ships that start the game
broke. Mostly in Thailand and mostly just three ports and only for about three weeks or so. I don't remember
ANY ship in a stock game starting the game broken. The Allies are getting VP's for the damage on those ships.
D'oh.