Oil and the Ozzies

[cyberwop36]

Has anyone dumped a bunch of oil in Austraila? [besides BP of course [:D] ]

If so how much of a supply production jump can I expect? I figure they have plenty of resourses and some heavy industry. So each oil point should give me 1 fuel AND 1 supply point right?

Is there spoilage for oil?

Will oil move automatically to where the HI is?

[Twotribes]

I moved a fair amount from the Dutch area to Darwin, hadnt seen it move last time I checked but havent looked lately.

[AmiralLaurent]

It seems to me that Darwin is too far away by rail to have any move of ressources done from here, they should be shipped in Southern Australia to be of any use.

[Grotius]

As I recall, someone did some experiments and found that oil doesn't move from the northern Aussie ports to the Heavy Industry locations in the south. That person found that Sydney was a pretty efficient, central drop-off spot.

[Central Blue]

you'll have plenty of time to use the tankers to move the oil out of Darwin and Derby after IJ takes Singapore or until the KB starts patroling the area. Don't forget Amboina and Sorong.

I haven't seen any jump in production. I think it's about keeping your existing production stoked; but I'm not real big on reading manuals.

San Diego has a gigantic pile of oil at the start of the war, maybe it's running downhill. There's also two big fleet oilers there to haul the crude to Sydney and Melbourne.

[Synjin]

Oil and resources don't spoil, only supply and fuel. And even then, they only spoil when the port + airfield < 10. When they are > or = 10, no spoilage. Darwin won't spoil, but Derby, Whylla, Broome will spoil. The formula for spoilage is something like (airfield size + port size)^2 * 1000 = Maximum supply before spoilage. Where ^2 means "squared".

And I've dumped LOTS of oil and resources into Darwin and Derby. Once I noticed they weren't moving anywhere by rail after that, I took a few extra transports and moved a bunch of it down to Perth which has 600 HI. Perth promptly had a boom in supply/fuel levels. Enough that it's definitely worth it.

What I do now is run the dutch tankers and AKs between the oil and resource bases in the DEI, and hump it down to drop off points at Derby and Darwin. Then I take a really REALLY big transport of supply (500k+), fuel (500k+) and all the oil/resources I can pull out of the US west coast and ship it down to Sydney. After offloading, I peel off maybe a 3rd (about 15-20 each of the 18k TKs and 7k AKs) of those transports and use them to run a bucket line of resources/oil between Derby/Darwin and Perth, and then from Perth to Melbourne and Sydney. 2 or 3 will be put on CS missions to supply the two NZ islands, and that little land mass just south of Australia. Some will also be given decent ASW escorts to begin fuel/supply TFs to places along the east coast of Oz and PM, Gili Gili and other assorted SWPAC bases near Oz. The AI always has a REAL heavy sub presence all along the east coast of Oz.

Then send the remaining 2/3rds back to San Fran.

With the large amount of oil and resources, Sydney, Melbourne and Perth (and Brisbane if you want to dump it there too) become real supply and fuel machines after a little while.

Another great place to draw oil from is Okha-Sakhalin in Russia. It's got like 900 oil and after a few months I checked it out and it had over 200k oil. I sent a real big TF of 18k TK to go pick it up and it got out scott-free and full of oil. Think about sending a good escort when playing a human opponent, because you have to pace right through that string of Japanese islands. The Jap AI seems to ignore that area, but a human opponent would only need a Val/Kate flight or two on those islands to tear you up. Or a spare float plane on search to see you coming in, and then a spare CVE/CVL in Japan to cruise up and kill you. I'm not sure about what kind of rules regarding attacking an Allied TF in a Russian base hex are in effect. Something like that might activate the Russians, though I haven't tested it.

It's likely also considered "gamey" since it's Russian oil, and they aren't activated.

[cyberwop36]

Thanks for all the help. Espcially about the northern Oz ports. San Diego magically gets about 24k in oil every time I run it down. So about a 18k tanker a week will work.