This new stand alone release based on the legendary War in the Pacific from 2 by 3 Games adds significant improvements and changes to enhance game play, improve realism, and increase historical accuracy. With dozens of new features, new art, and engine improvements, War in the Pacific: Admiral's Edition brings you the most realistic and immersive WWII Pacific Theater wargame ever!
Once you hit 1944 sometime (June?) Japanese ASW ships get downright deadly!.
Isn't this because at one time all of the DC launchers were essentially in the same slot in the editor for certain classes of Japanese ASW ships (all the other ASW assets in the game had their launchers split between different slots in the editor)?
Not sure how it worked out mathematically but it was for the E class that this applied. IIRC in one of the official updates this was changed so that their DC launchers were split between different slots making their ASW capability conform to their actual abilities more closely (US subs sank them more than they sank US subs).
Japan never really adopted the armed-escort-convoy0-system even when things had reached crisis point in 1944 when the War Cabinet resigned and Inoue (probably the only admiral with any idea how to fight an ASW war) was recalled. However it should have been prioritised as vital given that Japan was actually an Island Economy, dependant upon its mercantile shipping to survive and hunker down in a protracted war, something which none of her geo-politicians and Admirals )Inoue aside) ever really grasped.
Their thinking was in two small narrow fields :
(1). It will all be over in six months anyway, the western powers have no stomach for a long fight and will accept peace terms (Yamamoto didn@t subscribe to this view for certain)
(2). US subs are inefficient and poor compared to our own I-class subs.
The second point is true, ship for ship the I0class were better, had longer range and, perhaps most critical of all, more reliable and powerful torpedoes (even after the US learned that their torpedoes which worked on magnetic fields were next to useless and changed back to the older WWI ones, they were still slower and had less range than the comparable IJN ones and also around a 40% dud chance (the more expensive and sophisticated ones with magnetic detonators? estimated at between 80-90% unreliable)
However, there were never enough I-class boatst o make a difference, and those that were around the IJN never used properly as they were told not to attack Allied shipping or tankers but instead go for the big capital ships (the few times they did, they had good results) or lie in wait for 'the decisive battle', which never quite happened. Later on in the war the effectiveness of IJN subs grew even less as most were used for transport carrying supplies to their far-flung isolated island bases (as going by sea no longer was an option)
