ORIGINAL: herwin
ORIGINAL: tocaff
Many people keep complaining about how fast the Allies can build an airbase. My ex father in law was a CB and I remember him telling us about how they would land on an island that still wasn't secure and within days LBA was operating where there had been nothing. Of course this kind of field wasn't for the big boys to fly from, but.........
Four weeks from scratch was the record for an operational bomber base in the Pacific.
I don't doubt you are right Harry, but the next question is raises for me is: why? Why was four-weeks the fastest?
I bet it isn't because it is 'impossible' to take a feral site and turn it into a working bomber base in anything less than four weeks. Rather, I'd guess it is because of the number of troops, tools, fuel, supply, administrative efficiency, bulldozers, work-policy, etc.
In sum: it should be POSSIBLE for a player to do almost anything that did not happen in the actual war, as long as it was not IMPOSSIBLE to have done in the actual war. As long as what a player CAN do was possible, and involves an appropriate cost/benefit tradeoff I can't see any reason why a player accomplishing something like a bomber base 10x as fast as they actually were put up should not be allowed in the game.
There are at least some examples of unprecedent accomplishments: Lex was supposed to take days or weeks to get fixed enough for Midway (or was it Yorktown?) but they got it 'ready' in what? 48 hours?
I think the real problem with the game, as far as I can tell from my limited experience, and listening to you guys, is that there are not proper tradeoffs for certain actions which run counter to historical reality. Mostly these actions tend to involve concentrating much larger quantities of stuff and people in smaller areas than actually happened (deathstars, 5 Eng units on one base, etc.).
Other games deal with such things with stacking limits, but I seem to recall having discussions on here before, and not being able to conclude that a 60 mile hex was small enough that one could logically arrive at sound reasons to impose stacking limits. In fact, it seems like it was you who was explaining to me just how many Divisions the Soviets or somebody had stacked up at various phases in the Eastern front war?
I don't know what other guys do, but when I'm playing the AI, I find that I will often strip a 'rear' area base, and the stock game gives me plenty of Pol Pts to be able to do so. For example, right now in my game against the AI, most of the units that start out assigned to West coast in SF, LA, and SD have been shipped out to Canton Island, Baker, Palmyra, etc. While the game allows me to do this, in actual fact, I'll bet it was not done. Even though the threat of a Japanese invasion of the West Coast was minimal, I'll bet the brass left PLENTY of manpower and firepower on the West coast, but the game doesn't require the player to do that. In fact, with the "auto Uber US Power" that comes with any Japanese assault on the West coast there is no reason to leave much of ANYTHING on the West Coast, even by degrees in Pearl and Oz too.
In sum: it seems to me it is too easy for the Allied player to move units that probably would have been left idle in rear area defense far sooner than probably happened in the actual war, and it is also far too easy to stack up way too many units very quickly.
Some ideas here? Don't allow so many units to switch HQ, and don't allow units that are not from the same HQ to be in the same stack (except for home bases: West Coast, India/SRL, and Oz)? Or one step even further: have sub-HQs (Command Groups or some such) that come into the game pre-assigned for the most part, these could be based on actual historical patterns of units which operated together. Except for sufficiently large bases, do not even allow units that are not in the same Command Group to be in the same stack or TF.
