Disease, pestilence, starvation ...

[Szilard]

... and the dreaded jungle-rot.

Has this been covered already? It's a big realism prob with PacWar. It's a rational strategy in the game to put units into long-term struggles for RL hell-holes like Guadalcanal or Bougainville, not really because you're desperate to capture the base or clear it of Japanese, but just to build up experience levels.

In R/L, a few months of exposure to the places, expecially under combat conditions, was enough to wreck soldiers, from malaria, dengue fever etc etc, with no real recovery in many cases for the duration of the war, and require a long rest for the units concerned to bring them back to fighting condition.

The effects should be greatly intensified by lack of supply and they should be worse for the Japanese because of more primitive medical services & lack of drugs.

Also - starvation. For example, Japanese troops cut off in the SW Pacific & elsewhere quickly turned into marginal subsistence farmers wracked by tropical diseases, not soldiers.

Locations should be rated for these kind of effects - obviously Manila is going to be a different proposition than Guadalcanal.

Major reference for these comments is "Touched with Fire: The Land War in the Pacific" by Eric Bergerud - well worth reading.

[Joel Billings]

Yes, currently the Uncommon Valor engine takes these issues into account. First in addition to combat squads and weapons, it has support troops. Without adequate support troops, the combat troops begin to wither away. Even with support, units get disabled based on their location and their supply situation.