I'm now the proud owner of over 1000 of these heaps of sh ite.
The plan is to send them in en masse before my proper bombers in the hope the entire USN runs out of .50 cal ammo in shooting them all down. Hey, you never know.....
With your PP one option is to convert to FB and then to F, turn them to kamis and use them for CAP. [;)]
Don't think I can do that with PDU off?
Ahh. Maybe not. The upgrade for those is LB I guess so just the kami planes.
"Success is the ability to go from one failure to another with no loss of enthusiasm." - Winston Churchill
A relatively quiet period considering the date. His cripples continue their slow crawl back to Guam pursued by my subs that achieve nothing other than being damaged or sunk. I try a cheeky high speed raid by my three operational CVs and at extreme range they sink a couple of damaged APAs containing by the looks of it at least a full division and a few DDs before I send them back home for fear of reprisals from his (at a guess) 12 or so undamaged CVs at Guam. The British CV Implacable is confirmed sunk by intel, hopefully at least one more went down as well.
In China He does another deliberate attack at Hankow which knocks the fort down to 2 and due to lack of supply my adjusted AV falls alarmingly:
Ground combat at Hankow (85,50)
Allied Deliberate attack
Attacking force 233604 troops, 2657 guns, 3050 vehicles, Assault Value = 9119
Defending force 145168 troops, 1327 guns, 642 vehicles, Assault Value = 4357
Looks like I've got maybe a couple of weeks here before I'm kicked out. I've toyed with the idea of sending a kamikaze supply TF consisting of AKLs to try and get some supply through but such is his crushing air supremacy I doubt any would survive the trip. Maybe use single ship TFs?
I'm now the proud owner of over 1000 of these heaps of sh ite.
The plan is to send them in en masse before my proper bombers in the hope the entire USN runs out of .50 cal ammo in shooting them all down. Hey, you never know.....
Am at the end of September '45 and have been surprised by the plethora of kamikaze bi-planes that have been thrown at me.
Willows seem to be the prevalent model in the heavily modded scenario 40.
Looks like I've got maybe a couple of weeks here before I'm kicked out. I've toyed with the idea of sending a kamikaze supply TF consisting of AKLs to try and get some supply through but such is his crushing air supremacy I doubt any would survive the trip. Maybe use single ship TFs?
I don't think it's worth the expenditure in supply. You'll never build a stockpile as it will be bombed away, even assuming it does get in.
Air transport, perhaps, if you can be sure it won't be intercepted. However, I think it's best to cut your losses and save the supply.
The x3 bonus from Hankow's urban heavy terrain isn't going away. Unsupplied units perform at 25% peak effectiveness. The x4 (!!!) terrain bonus goes a long way to make up for the lack of supply.
However, I'd suggest using it as bait for a trap. An expendable string of empty, low-value PB/xAKL's with heavy LRCAP over it moving down the Yangtze should generate an Allied response. If the Allies use naval assets, a few kami squadrons on hand might get a shot at flying into DD's without much Allied CAP around...
Keep fighting!
As a side note, was down your part of the country a few weeks back. The time I spent on the LNER was the closet I've ever came to jetlag without flying ever! Good views from York northwards made up for it, however!
Looks like I've got maybe a couple of weeks here before I'm kicked out. I've toyed with the idea of sending a kamikaze supply TF consisting of AKLs to try and get some supply through but such is his crushing air supremacy I doubt any would survive the trip. Maybe use single ship TFs?
I don't think it's worth the expenditure in supply. You'll never build a stockpile as it will be bombed away, even assuming it does get in.
Air transport, perhaps, if you can be sure it won't be intercepted. However, I think it's best to cut your losses and save the supply.
The x3 bonus from Hankow's urban heavy terrain isn't going away. Unsupplied units perform at 25% peak effectiveness. The x4 (!!!) terrain bonus goes a long way to make up for the lack of supply.
However, I'd suggest using it as bait for a trap. An expendable string of empty, low-value PB/xAKL's with heavy LRCAP over it moving down the Yangtze should generate an Allied response. If the Allies use naval assets, a few kami squadrons on hand might get a shot at flying into DD's without much Allied CAP around...
Keep fighting!
As a side note, was down your part of the country a few weeks back. The time I spent on the LNER was the closet I've ever came to jetlag without flying ever! Good views from York northwards made up for it, however!
Hello MM, valid points as always. Still plenty of supply in the homeland but getting it anywhere else is proving very difficult now.
Yes, we have some good beaches and castles on the Northumberland coast if you ever make it that far north.
Not a lot to report. I finally manage to take a bite out of one of his big daytime B29 raids of over Nagasaki before his sweepers arrive, at least 50 go down and I manage to trade 1:1 in fighters for a change:
He then switches them to night time port bombing, trying to finish off my cripples from the recent Okinawa actions. They further damage a few cruisers but over the course of three nights he loses another 50 to NF and flak/ops. Of course I lose more NF in return but I still have plenty left in the pools.
The last few days of this period his death star sorties and hangs around Iwo Jima covering his DMS fleets sweeping the mines there, but not before 4 or 5 are sunk by CD guns in the process. The majority of my fleet is in TFs at Tokyo sitting under 1000 fighters, although I doubt he would dare try and move his DS within strike range of the homeland as he knows even a 2000 plane CAP may not be enough to repel any large counter strike by my LBA.
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Looks like your air war has changed with the arrival of the Frank Ki-84r. [;)]
We have a limit of 35k feet for sweep/CAP in 1945 so I just decided to put my best fighters at that altitude. I think the layered CAP you have advocated works when the opposing planes and pilots are of similar quality but in this game my pilots are on average 10 exp lower than his and were still taking heavy losses when flying at the 5/7/9k alt bands you mentioned. I'm still losing but now at 2-3 to 1 instead of 5-10 to 1. I have also taken a lot of time to make sure the best pilots are in the best planes. I was horrified to find a load of 80 exp pilots still flying the Zero and swapped them out for rookies instead.
I've bought back all the fighter air groups from my sunk CVs and will be resizing them to 72 plane Sam groups with all my best pilots, that should make a dent in his sweepers hopefully.....
The Boeing factories are going to have to add another shift if you keep shooting them down like that.
Well according to intel I have shot down about 800 (so probably 600 in reality), so he still has over 1000 in play at the moment. At least 500 visit Hankow on a daily basis.
Unacceptable loss rates for bombing missions in the ETO was 10%, acceptable was under 5%. If he has lost around 33% of those currently available so far, that doesn't bode well for him.
Looks like your air war has changed with the arrival of the Frank Ki-84r. [;)]
We have a limit of 35k feet for sweep/CAP in 1945 so I just decided to put my best fighters at that altitude. I think the layered CAP you have advocated works when the opposing planes and pilots are of similar quality but in this game my pilots are on average 10 exp lower than his and were still taking heavy losses when flying at the 5/7/9k alt bands you mentioned. I'm still losing but now at 2-3 to 1 instead of 5-10 to 1. I have also taken a lot of time to make sure the best pilots are in the best planes. I was horrified to find a load of 80 exp pilots still flying the Zero and swapped them out for rookies instead.
I've bought back all the fighter air groups from my sunk CVs and will be resizing them to 72 plane Sam groups with all my best pilots, that should make a dent in his sweepers hopefully.....
I didn't realise you had an altitude limit. That changes a lot. I would not fly the low CAP if we had a 35k limit because ...
1. When you set CAP to 35k and have some decent radar in hex, your CAP will climb above sweepers coming in and dive. Huge advantage.
2. All of your best airframes can reach 35k, and he has no altitude advantage in sweeps, ever. The low CAP is only useful to combat high altitude sweeps where you can't match those max altitudes.
"Success is the ability to go from one failure to another with no loss of enthusiasm." - Winston Churchill
Forts now down to one but once again he takes a beating in terms of losses. Unfortunately he realised I was getting supply up river and now has flooded it with PT boat TFs and low flying bombers, so that avenue is now cut off. He continues to pound it daily with hundreds of B24s and B29s and I have no supply left, although the ground units are still at 60-70% of required supply, so it looks like I can hold here for at least a few weeks more. Meanwhile his 2E bombers concentrate mainly on Changsha but he has not tried a ground attack there for at least a month.
Luzon: The end is nigh at Clark, fort is down to 2 and he has 10k AV to my 1K. I'm busy marching the troops slowly to Bataan for the last stand but I think they will be kicked out of Clark before they can complete the march. As with Hankow, Clark is bombed daily by hundreds of bombers of all types and supply is all gone.
Iwo Jima: His death star has been circling the island for the past fortnight and blasting it every day in an effort to force me out of supply, along with bombardments from TFs containing up to 10 BBs. His latest ground attack was on the 15th:
Ground combat at Iwo-jima (108,77)
Allied Deliberate attack
Attacking force 34944 troops, 618 guns, 935 vehicles, Assault Value = 1386
Defending force 25077 troops, 331 guns, 162 vehicles, Assault Value = 479
Still at 6 forts and he loses almost half his available AV in the attack. I'm hopeful of sneaking in another supply convoy when (if) his death star finally retires to replenish....
Well with only a month to go before the commies join in I finally started to look at the situation in Manchuria. My first job was to ship in some fuel to restart the industry there as I had totally neglected it and virtually every base was low on supply. I lost a big TK convoy in the process to low flying bombers from China but fortunately after they had already unloaded, the Yellow Sea is a no go area for my ships now.
Secondly, I have scraped together every unrestricted infantry and eng unit in the homeland and sent them to Rashin on the southern coast of Manchuria for redeployment. In total I have 16k AV to play with (including units in Korea). Any tips on how/where to defend? I don't see any reason to defend beyond the red line on the the map apart from small speed bump forces:
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The weak point in your line is the clear hex at Chinchow - that is where I would attack if I was him. Breaking the rail communication between regions is huge.
No matter how bad a situation is, you can always make it worse. - Chris Hadfield : An Astronaut's Guide To Life On Earth
Paul, you are punishing Mr. Kane even as the Allies inflict punishment of their own. Post a points screen when you can. I like following your games for many reasons, one of which is that you're just ahead of me and Erik (you caught and passed us), and it's interesting to compare the relative situations.
"Rats set fire to Mr. Cooper’s store in Fort Valley. No damage done." Columbus (Ga) Enquirer-Sun, October 2, 1880.
The weak point in your line is the clear hex at Chinchow - that is where I would attack if I was him. Breaking the rail communication between regions is huge.
That's a great spot BBfanboy and one I would have overlooked. Four rail lines converge at that spot. I will certainly be looking to reinforce it now!
