ORIGINAL: Captain Cruft
ORIGINAL: Tristanjohn
ORIGINAL: Captain Cruft
Overall I wouldn't sweat this issue, it's not that big a deal. You get far more trained pilots come through attached to reinforcements. Also, having played through the start of the game as Japan many times, it doesn't affect how fast you can go. That is all down to supplies and troop transportation and, frankly, how bothered you can be to optimise things.
Well, it does affect things, and if it's "not a big deal" then why would anyone argue for its inclusion in the first place, and why would CHS be interested to make the change?
It's not a big deal on the strategic level whether the pool is 100 or 200, or the replacement rate is 10 or 30. Japan is still going to get annihilated either way, and can still produce only a fraction of the pilots required for all the planes manufactured. You would have to vastly increase the numbers to make any real difference.
The reason people get annoyed with this and want to increase the numbers is because they don't like having to put rookies into their air units from Jan/Feb 1942 time. If the player could re-allocate the pilots from the reinforcement groups to current ones then this would be a non-issue.
As for who eventually gets creamed: that's a convenient rationalization, leaned on often, but it won't ever make for a good wargame.
Getting to rest of it: that could well be. And I think this might owe to players feeling that it's only "logical" to have a pilot for each plane, like a sock for each shoe, and better still to have good pilots, or at least "trained" pilots, ready to fly their planes when they want to fly them. For
all of their planes
all of the time.
I agree that trained pilots alone could not in and of themselves enable Japan to move forward. The critical issue is, and always has been, logistics: 1) supply (both generic supply and fuel--there's simply too much of it by a large margin for Japan, quite possibly too much of it for the Allies in the first year at least) and 2) transportation (this one really hurts, as the ability to move this supply forward fast, not to mention men and assets, is seen everywhere, and especially foils any attempt to curtail the Japanese early). Given the state of the game I'm not sure this can be adequately addressed without a boatload of house rules, and as soon as players agree to every one of those, all of a sudden they're only playing half of Gary's game, which by implication will likely upset the other mechanics and otherwise lead to unsatisfying game play.
All too many players want to move forward fast, regardless of how impossible this might have been historically. A cursory reading of the general boards tells us this, and these people are not at all shy about posting their sentiments. Also, these players wouldn't want to have to train their own pilots, and least of all be required to hold certain air units back from the front while they were training those pilots. They only want
to move forward fast. And no amount of reason or reference to historical data will change their minds.
Then there's the other side of it, where some players refer either to bad historical data, or refer to good historical data which they manage to confuse and thus misunderstand. The bad result is a veritable cloud of misleading posts and discussions, where the predominant arguments run "I believe" or "IMHO" or "I agree!" and all this must be waded through laboriously and disputed one case at a time. Tiring work to say the least. And with little eventual good as the result, as these people believe only what they wish to believe as a rule. Brady's the best example of that, or maybe I should say the worst. No amount of reason works with that person, he simply babbles on and on and continues to think as he pleases. And sad to say he is not alone.
Back to the game system: it moves too fast. That is what the game system encourages players to do, in every way. Move forward, fight lots of battles, take lots of territory. Bing-bang-biff!!!
Japan didn't have all these newly trained pilots to operate all these aircraft all the time at the pace we see in the game. Just didn't. Didn't have the supply and fuel, either. Unless we come face to face with that reality there's no possible correction to the current scheme of things. Even if a correction were found and instituted, many players would still conduct their operations like maniacs, with no regard for lives and assets lost, but at least in that scenario operations would soon enough come to a standstill as it would become logistically necessary to stand down, regroup and rethink one's ideas about warfare.
What's happening here is that the art and science of serious wargames is attempting to simultaneously pander to an older generation and the Nintendo set. The former would like to experience a reasonably-accurate simulation of military history, the latter simply wish to have a jolly good time smashing one another's war toys. And I don't see a workable compromise in between. Gary has attempted to find that compromise, but the result is no better than a dysfunctional game system.
We'll see how it works out with the CHS project. I don't see much good coming from these efforts, though, as long as they're designed to accomodate the AI. That seems to be a loser on its face. I do I hope I'm mistaken, but the signs are not good. As I mentioned above, I believe the only good way to get at the problem is to design a scenario for PBEM only. Eliminate the AI as a factor, then proceed ahead with an eye on logistics all the time. And even then, I don't know. It appears as if every fix is eventually scotched by yet another hard-coded dead end. So, maybe the ultimate solution is to obtain that code and re-write it. And I don't know if that's possible.
