Always with them negative waves... Aaffins/Cheesesteak v. RADM Yamaguchi

[Cheesesteak]

Big Trouble

[Cheesesteak]

Yamaguchi messaged last night saying he would be around all day and could turn. I've been slammed at the office, and have 3 soccer games tonight. Can anybody get Nemo out of retirement for me? I'm sure Yama wouldn't mind if Nemo took a few "celebrity rounds" [:D]

[aaffins]

Nothing real notable for the 12/11 turn.

PoW did make it to Batavia, planning to give her a few days to try to get the sys damage down...however Yamaguchi landed an inf regiment at Palembang, so we may need to get out soon. Base will probably fall tomorrow, but he doesn't have AV support so we should have a few days before we have to run.

Boise got hit by Nells from Mindanao, she's probably toast. We'll put into Jolo and hope.

Houston did get out, she's off Sorong. Thinking she can link up with Marblehead and friends; opponent has a SCTF in the Banda Sea we might go after, but pretty sure he's got CAs in there.

We debated adding Repulse to that TF, but although she has minimal damage her SS Radar is knocked out, so we've elected to send her to Capetown for repairs.

We detected a TF moving SW from Rabaul, I'm guessing that's a PM invasion force. I don't think he can really cover it; that'd be the edge of Betty range from Rabaul so moving the RAN + CA Pensacola to try to oppose it.

CVs are near Midway, ordered them to PH for gas, they'll link up with Saratoga there and we'll head for SoPac. We haven't seen the KB in two days, which is worrisome. Was last seen heading SW from Pearl, so I'm guessing he's routing through the Marshalls. We'll see if he uses them to support ops in SoPac/SWPAC or sends them west. Might be our first real clue about his strategic intentions.

In Malaysia he's cut off the rail line into Singapore with some sort of armored unit. I'm thinking we could use the units trapped north of there to try to punch through to Singapore. Anybody ever been able to make that work? We'd have approx a divisional strength collection of units...he's got more moving in, but he if he only sends on regiment there I figure it might work.

[GetAssista]

ORIGINAL: aaffins
...however Yamaguchi landed an inf regiment at Palembang, so we may need to get out soon. Base will probably fall tomorrow, but he doesn't have AV support so we should have a few days before we have to run.

Aww, get all your bombers in DEI to bomb Palembang oil the next turn. And continue

[aaffins]

ORIGINAL: GetAssista

ORIGINAL: aaffins
...however Yamaguchi landed an inf regiment at Palembang, so we may need to get out soon. Base will probably fall tomorrow, but he doesn't have AV support so we should have a few days before we have to run.

Aww, get all your bombers in DEI to bomb Palembang oil the next turn. And continue

Yes, excellent point. He has some light LRCAP overhead, I think from carriers operating off Borneo, but it's light and it's not as if we have some other great thing we can use the Uglofortresses for.

[aaffins]

Don't have the turn yet, but did just get the replay. I think we might be starting to see some cracks in our opponent's play. This was to be expected, his first few turns were so airtight he clearly had gamed them out, but that's impossible to do after a certain point. We'll see if this is a blip or a trend.

Of note:
1. He seems to have an interesting habit of disbanding TFs into port as soon as they're done with their mission. There are well over 100 ships docked at Pontianak and Singakawang. Launched an attack using Hudsons from Singapore to see if we could exploit and got some hits in:

Morning Air attack on Singkawang , at 56,88

Weather in hex: Heavy rain

Raid spotted at 16 NM, estimated altitude 4,000 feet.
Estimated time to target is 5 minutes

Allied aircraft
Hudson I x 14

Allied aircraft losses
Hudson I: 6 damaged
Hudson I: 2 destroyed by flak

Japanese Ships
xAK Koei Maru, Bomb hits 1
AO Tsurumi, Bomb hits 1, on fire
xAK Fushimi Maru, Bomb hits 2, heavy fires
xAK Ryoyo Maru, Bomb hits 1, on fire

Aircraft Attacking:
10 x Hudson I bombing from 1000 feet
Port Attack: 2 x 250 lb GP Bomb
2 x Hudson I bombing from 1000 feet
Port Attack: 2 x 250 lb GP Bomb

Carrier support unable to supply air cover..

2. He seems to either have insufficient supply or overlooked adding torpedoes to his Air HQs at Manado and on Mindanao, so his Netties are using bombs rather than torps.

3. He launched a shock attack at Hong Kong, resulting in a 1 to 2 which gave him 140+ squads disabled w/o reducing forts.. That probably brings the AV close enough he'll need to take a few days to recover or bring reinforcements.

Only other actions of note were a DD TF finding Boise and sinking her and a series of unescorted Nell raids on a small TF at Batavia resulting in fairly heavy casualties.

[Cheesesteak]

Another interesting development. Our opponent is not afraid to chat via email regarding the game. Includes far more "intel" than I would ever share. He is either a bad poker player, or trying to make us think so. Nothing so interesting as to merit copy/pasting (yet), but it's a long game and he is giving us a way to read him. [:-]

[aaffins]

ORIGINAL: Cheesesteak

Another interesting development. Our opponent is not afraid to chat via email regarding the game. Includes far more "intel" than I would ever share. He is either a bad poker player, or trying to make us think so. Nothing so interesting as to merit copy/pasting (yet), but it's a long game and he is giving us a way to read him. [:-]

C'mon there was some great stuff in there, don't hold back:

"nice job cutting off rail at chumpon-havnt seen that happpen that early before."
Uh, you're surprised the base unit showed up on the 12th? Isn't marching that unit from Victoria Point SOP for the Allies?

"you guys have sunk a lot more of my ships than other opponents esp dds"
We've sunk precisely 2 according to intel. Three more ostensibly sunk by collision or grounding. He's running MASSIVE amphib TFs, I think that can result in increased collisions yes?

Other interesting development from the turn, most of his SCTFs seeming to be heading for home...no clue why, there's little we can do to oppose them in Scen 2 at this point. Overall odd behavior IMO.

[Cheesesteak]

An update (for those of you only reading this side of the AAR): the game is not dead nor on pause. Work and social life have been quite busy.

In fact, it was Aaffins birthday this past weekend! We celebrated by attempting to play two games of soccer and drink. Won the first game, then had to FF the second because we broke the house rule of having a beer before playing in our second. It turns out punishment for breaking house rules goes far beyond WITP...

Anyway, consoled ourselves with a p-35 showing- shooting down ~9 Lily's+Nells. Hah!

[aaffins]

12/20/41

There's not a great deal of note happening at the moment. After his carefully scripted opening our opponent seems to have reverted to relatively conservative tactics; only advancing under air cover either from LBA or his CVs.

Nothing so far in Burma, which has allowed us to move in significant supplies. We are embarking the 48th Gurkha Brig. from Colombo, with the intention of reconstituting the 17th Indian Div. There's obviously some risk to pushing troops forward here, but we're hoping we can surprise him with stronger than normal resistance in Burma and disrupt his timeline.

In Malaysia he's on the doorstep of Singapore with enough AV to do the job fairly quickly. Hoping we can delay for a few weeks.

In the DEI he has secured all the bases in Western Borneo and the major ones in the Celebes, but nothing on Java yet. He's been hitting mostly empty ports at Batavia and Soerbaja with the mini KB after covering a landing at Makassar.

He has ~2,500 AV at Clark in the PI, which seems excessive. For whatever reason he's decided he needs to capture that area quickly. Hard to divine what the long term intentions might be there, but we do find it odd to commit so many troops there.

KB is covering a landing of 5-6 SNLFs at Port Moresby. Not a great deal we can do to oppose that.

No action in the rest of the Pacific.

[BBfanboy]

Taking troops off of Ceylon early on is probably a good move. If he targets Ceylon he can easily bring enough to isolate it and take it anyway. Putting the troops on the continent gives them greater longevity and access to supply. Eventually you get enough ships, aircraft and troops to return to Ceylon and be assured you can keep it.

[Cheesesteak]

Agreed. My thought is, given how he's played thus far, he won't venture to Ceylong without committing enough KB to get air supremacy. If that's the case, we wouldn't stand much chance of either fully evac'ing or reinforcing.

Balikpapan has fallen, Tamarkan got paradropped.

[aaffins]

Just sent the 1/3 turn back. Need to get our AAR game together, although I must admit this is not proving to be game with a great deal of early excitement. In general our opponent is moving at what in my estimation is a conservative manner, only landing troops under friendly air cover.

Will go theater by theatre to try to give an overall picture:

Burma: Opponent captured Mergui with raiding paras today, but otherwise no activity. We've taken advantage by pushing approx. 50K supplies and two brigades into Rangoon. One more, 63rd Indian is on the way from Colombo, which will allow us to reconstitute 17th Indian Div. We'll have approx. 1,000 AV in Burma with the AVG and misc. RAF units to contest the skies at least until he can get setup at Moulmein. No illusions about truly stopping him, but I think we can significantly delay progress.

China: Essentially quiet, we took Sinyang. I don't think he's paying a great deal of attention. In all honesty neither are we.

Last stands: We're down to Bataan on Luzon. Only about 300 AV albeit decent supply. Might hold another week or two. We've shot down an obscene number of IJA bombers here, probably over 100 in the last two weeks because he keeps flying without escort.
At Singapore he got a 1:1 yesterday and has a big advantage in AV. I suspect it doesn't last more than a week. He hasn't done much about cleaning up the rest of Malaysia, but that will be a backwater, not much we can do with it.

DEI: He has air superiority over Java, but probably has 6 weeks of ground combat to take Batavia and Soerbaja depending on how many assets he commits. Kaga and light carriers are operating in the Java Sea. This is great training for the pilots but aside from that not sure what purpose it serves.
He landed on Timor at Dili (who else immediately though of this base when those Bud Light commercials came out?) but still hasn't come to Koepang. We have RNN and CL Marblehead in the area and may see if we can score some easy kills.

SWPac: Tons of sub activity off Brisbane and Sydney. He damaged CA Canberra somewhat significantly (39 Flt). Coupled with his actions in SoPac it seems like there's a good chance his long term are in this theatre.

SoPac: To the extent there's excitement, this is where it is. He has taken Luganville and Noumea. We did not contest, just too early in the war for us to push assets forward. We've been working under the assumption the KB is around, but to his credit he's kept them out of air search range so that's not a certainty. We have been trying to get USN CAs in a position to take a shot at Noumea, but now he's got Betties there (although no torps as yet) and a big SCTF so that seems inadvisable at the moment. We're pulling back to Suva. The USN carriers have been hanging around looking for opportunity but are undetected, they're on the way to Auckland for gas now. We're pushing a few reinforcements into Suva; US FA Bn and a construction unit. He will get Fiji if he comes soon, but we'd obviously like to avoid giving it up so if he dallies a few weeks we'll build up.

Christmas Island and Pago Pago received the first reinforcements, neither is impregnable, but they should put up a decent fight.

We're moving most of our available units to NZ right now, with the intention that we'll push them forward if appropriate or use them to defend NZ.

CentPac: We have SigInt he's moving on Wake, but we have a supply convoy there now unloading undetected. USMC DB squadron is stationed there. We also decided to send in an add'l USMC def Bn, but they are a week out.

NoPac: No activity as yet.

So big picture he's taken New Caledonia, which I don't love, but if you can get there in 1941 it's tough to defend. Aside from that, nothing that really bothers me. I feel like he seems very Pacific oriented, with that in mind we're thinking of sending I Aus Corps to Australia. Other hot topics of debate are what do with our last USMC Def Bn, our big Coastal Arty unit and the Americal Div. Opinions on all that welcome.

[Cheesesteak]

I feel I owe the forum an explanation, if not apology for delaying to update. Work has been a part of the reason, but more interestingly, my wife and I hosted her Flemish cousins for a visit to the US. They are both in the Belgian military, one of them in a special forces unit. Got to hear stories of their training regime and their preferred beers. Turns out Belgian military vehicles are notoriously unreliable, second only to the French

This game is very, very odd. We took an absolute hammering in the opening salvo. Min-maxed gambits took key bases across the map. Since? Snails pace motion, always heavily covered. Enormous amounts of AV piled at Singers and Clark (now Bataan). It's effective at masking intent, but giving us more time to move units forward than first anticipated. I'll take it.

When we say there is virtually no activity in China, we mean it. This plays hugely into our favor. Aside from moving some units around behind the scenes, I want to do absolutely nothing to draw attention to this zone. If he doesn't think we care about it, then we can leverage our fight for Burma to get more supply in. All to early to celebrate anything, and maybe the bourbon in my glass has me feeling optimistic. It's Jan '42, we haven't lost a CV, and the Burma road isn't close to being closed.

NoPac might be a huge area of opportunity. We are moving the Sep infantry unit starting at Kodiak forward to Adak, and back-filling behind it.

[Cheesesteak]

Since we are currently on vacation, played a quick Coral Sea scenario while waiting between turns. Fun diversion, and a reminder of how OP IJN planes are in a 1v1 situation.

[Bif1961]

Christmas, Pago-Pago and Canton are all important to maintain your supply line to OZ-NZ, so the CD unit and 1/3rd of the Americal Division there, Marine Def Bn to Canton Isl and Pago-Pago and Suva get the other regiments of the Americal Division. Aviation assets such a base forces and AV/AVP/AVD to host search planes especially Cats along the lines Islands Palmyra, Christmas Island, Canton Island, Pago-Pago and Suva would be important to be able to see the KB coming.

[CaptBeefheart]

Screenshots are your friends. [:)]

I like the idea of sending troops to NZ. I once played an Ironman scenario (vs. computer IJ) where I got some Marines to South Island just in time to prevent a complete rout. I had a TF nearby with about three days of sigint warning on a Kiwi invasion.

Also, if he goes really deep in SoPac, you might think about building up Tahiti as a transshipment base.

Cheers,
CB

[Encircled]

Sounds like he's grabbed the outer stuff he needs first, then he'll be backfilling before one big move (which sounds like either Oz or NZ). Once he eliminates Singapore and Luzon he can use very little troops to mop up easily.

Maybe stick all your dutch forces in Soerabaja to hold him up a bit?

Face it, its probably Oz, as NZ is a stretch for him.

[Bif1961]

NZ triggers additional reinforcements, maybe not in this mod however.

[aaffins]

ORIGINAL: Bif1961

NZ triggers additional reinforcements, maybe not in this mod however.

We're playing stock, so an NZ attack would trigger the auto reinforcements.