ORIGINAL: Bliztk
Air to air combat [8D], and operational losses, but that`s not the problem.
The problem is the Japanese production.
Yes, but not only aircraft production. Japan seems to produce too many tanks, artillery and squads as well. I've never heard about a Japanese player who had shortages with these. While the Japanese had enough manpower, they historically faced some problems to gather the necessary equipment for newly raised formations. Actually many Japanese combat formations did never receive the necessary reinforcements to make up for losses taken.
If we limit the Allied Production, I think that the Japanese should limited too.
They should experience the limits of their industrial capacity while keeping the choice to alter their production according to their needs - producing more planes, yes, but problems with ship construction and land equipment as a result.
Japan produced between 1940 and 1941 520 Zero Airframes, and 1250 in 1942, the peak years were 1943 and 1944.
Thus in my game the japanese should had run out of Zeros, and I still see strong CAPs on enemy airbases.
I noticed the same in one of my PBEM's. My opponent had lost about 1,100 Zeros by the end of May 1942. The Allies were running out of planes then, but my opponent still had plenty of Zeros (the quality of his pilots had surely dropped, but he trained them up with air strikes on isolated Allied bases and did not face major problems with pilot quality then) and was able to mount major invasions involving multiple divisions at the same time.
Take note that in WitP the Allies are always with their pool of planes empty in 1942, that`s fine, but Japan can overproduce USA until 43 in *modern* airframes
Well, to be fair, the number of planes in the Allied pool mainly depends on the agressiveness of the Japanese player. In one PBEM, playing the Allies, I've more than 500 Warhawks and more than 400 Hurricanes in my plane pool by November 1942. But that was an "unbloody" game thusfar.
Two things:
(1) Reduce available HI for the Japanese at start.
(2) Either completely remove the Japanese factories doing research in PBEM games (that is, reduce them to 1 to keep the factory locations) or use a houserule that the Japanese player may not convert these factories to production factories. These factories are in the game for use by the AI, they did not exist as factories then (they represent research, not production). They're only in the game because the AI would otherwise never produce that planes, Japan literally "gets them for free" when they start production. In PBEM this is not necessary because a human player tends to be somewhat smarter than the AI!
K
