Matrix Games Forums

ORIGINAL: Yaab

Chris H, thanks for the answer.

I thought the "5" key was for supplies only. I thought that resources/oil/fuel actually move along existing infrastructure (roads or railroads), hence my question.

So, if I hit "5" it shows me where supplies/resources/fuel/oil can travel to on the map, right?

ORIGINAL: V I Lenin

ORIGINAL: Sieppo

Great reply, thanks! I do not consider it TOO gamey - desperate times require desperate actions. Building an infrastructure for such thing is possible even though it did not happen IRL .

In fact it isn't just 'gamey' but totally, insanely, mindbogglingly absurd - shipments from Malaya alone are bulk goods, like rubber, bauxite, tin, which are totally impractical to move by land due to the weight, volume and distance involved - Singapore to Shanghai (the conceptually least unhinged end port) is ~4000mi; only part of the route has any sort of railway present (you're not going to get any meaningful movement by road alone, doubly so in the 1940s and triply to octupally so for Japan in the 1940s), and even if the Japanese economy were up to producing the tens of thousands of miles of rail, hundreds of bridges, hundreds of locomotives and thousands of wagons that would be needed to construct such a thing after spending years surveying, planning, removing local guerillas & hostile armies etc from the route (surprise: it isn't, unless you compromise its ability to fight a war) it would still require several times less fuel to just put these things on a boat. Meaning, even if every other boat gets sunk you still come out ahead...and that without even considering that a railway's throughput capacity (ie, the amount of 'stuff' which can be moved per unit of time) is minuscule compared to shipping.

Obviously, it's a game and you can do what you want - but - remember that this is a time where building a couple of hundred of miles of road over the course of a year under war conditions is an enormous task - so don't for a second think to yourself that it could have actually been done.