RE: COmments on these combat results anyone?
Posted: Thu Sep 08, 2005 6:04 pm
I am Gilligan's opponent in this battle. I hope he does not mind me posting this reply I just sent to him.
There are three issues/questions that seem to be on the table.
First, were you outplayed? No way. Out-lucked, maybe. If anything you are the one who has outplayed me. When I saw the fleet approaching the string of barrier islands I was at first puzzled. I thought, "Those islands are pretty useless as bases and a long way from anywhere". But the forces detected were far greater than might be required to set up a harassing point to my north. It was with a sick, sinking feeling that I realized that the bases on Sakkalin Island were capable of being built up to level 7. They were within easy B-29 range of all of the Home Islands and might put all of Japan under escorted heavy-bomber attack by late '44. Truly a disaster in the making for me the Japanese player. I was forced to admit to myself that I had not reviewed this portion of the map for such a possibility. There's a line in one of Jerry Pournelle's novels about "surprise is an event that happens in the mind of the enemy commander". You certainly caused that event in my mind. Now, normally, bold moves carry with them some attendant risks. Think Inchon. MacArthur was brilliant but maybe also a bit lucky. Sakkalin is a long way from home and you were almost forced to go in blind for fear of giving the operation away. So, hat's off to you for having the imagination necessary to see this possibility and for having the large appendages necessary to attempt it. If it fails, and that's by no means certain (see my responses to the second and third issues below), then you are in no way diminished in my mind as an able and crafty opponent. You could have simply continued to bludgeon your way forward in the Philippines, Java, and perhaps the Marianas. Eventually, the allies would overcome the resistance or the game would come to the end of 1946. Instead you looked for the bold stroke that would make our game exciting and more interesting. I have been almost beside myself wondering what was going to happen (not done wondering yet) these past few turns. Hurrah, sir, Hurrah!
Second, Battle analysis. Ok, after I got over the shock of realizing that I just might be looking at my defeat coming a lot sooner than I had anticipated I spent a long time trying to decide just what I might be facing and what countermeasures I might have available. Since some things have now become evident by what happened in the last turn I will share with you some information that you would mightily liked to have had in early ’44. By early ’44 it had become evident to me that my empire was about to collapse. Attrition of planes and pilots had left me with almost none of either. Many squadrons were sitting around and could not even go to training for lack of planes. The IJN was in equally sad shape, with most capital ships with medium to high SYS damage and pending upgrades not carried out from as far back as ’42. Losses of CAs and CLs made the remaining crucial workhorses too valuable to risk as I had been doing in attempting to oppose your landings in ’43. Even DDs were in short supply. Yes, I still had all of my CVs but no squadrons and few escorts. I think an invasion of Luzon and or the Marianas at that point would not have been successfully opposed by me. One more big push by you and I would probably have resigned. But maybe you were exhausted too. You may remember some of my gloomy posts from that period. So I resolved to trade space for time, rebuild and only oppose the most critical points. By mid to late summer ’44 the rebuilding was essentially complete, new forces and equipment and advanced fighters had begun to arrive so the question now became how and when to use these tools to halt your advance? You supplied me with the answer to that question.
When I thought about your invasion force it seemed obvious to me that to make a base work so far from your logistical center you would have to bring more than enough of everything, with supplies enough to last for a long, long time. That explained the enormous amount of TFs. That made this a critically large investment and it would not make sense for you to come without every escort, CV and carrier-based plane you could scrape up. Fortunately for me I had my CVs reasonably close by. I couldn’t get to your fleet before landings commenced but could get there shortly afterward. If you could get a land base up and running you could fly in escort (the noxious P-38js were within transfer range) and maybe thumb your nose at me while you built up the airfield and then brought in bombers. I could not be certain how long the base (and you chose Shika) would hold after you landed ( not very long in my worst case estimation) so I had to react to try to take out the transports before you got enough stuff ashore to make the base viable in the long term. But first I would have to deal with the CVs. Although I had enjoyed some earlier good luck against your carriers you still had all of the Essex class and whatever else was available from the early war stuff and the large number of CVLs and CVEs. I thought the forces would be approximately equal in size. Any element of surprise I might have had was gone when my TFs tripped over your sub and alerted you to my approach. I decided that there was no time to dance around and finesse, I had to go for a knock-out. It seemed to me that you would probably bias your escort/CAP ratio toward CAP. That would be smart because if we traded losses of planes, pilots and ships you would win. I remembered how our earlier large fight near Midway resulted in a draw because the CAP consistently outnumbered the escort and slaughtered the airstrikes with almost no damage to the CVs. I resolved to load the CVs with mostly fighters (approximately 3-1), I set my CAP to 20%, and I tried to make up my deficiencies in CAP and strike aircraft with land-based LRCAP and land-based level bombers. You were rolling the dice with this invasion and now I was forced to roll the dice and bet everything too.
The first thing that happened was that my CV TFs reacted to yours even though I had reaction set to zero. This meant that carriers were not exactly where I had wanted them to be in relation to Shika but your carriers also reacted. It seems to me now that not all of your CV TFs reacted, just the ones with the big Essex class ships. This may have proved important because it created some separation between groups of your carriers and may have led to the somewhat piecemeal nature of your attacks.
Your attacks went in first but it was your first strike and later my first strike from the CVs that were to prove decisive and to create the conditions for what was a stunning, almost incredible result.
From my notes, your first strike consisted of 108 F6Fs, 16 FM-2s, 72 TBMs, and 86 SB2Cs. My CAP consisted of 109 Zekes, 45 Jacks, 52 Georges, and 8 Franks. The Jacks, Georges, and Franks were LRCAP from local bases. I watched the detail blow-by-blow screen for this attack, which took approx. 2 hours to complete on my computer. I observed the following:
1. I seemed to have a large qualitative edge with the Franks, Georges, and Jacks over the F6Fs. I attribute this to two factors. One is that the game seems to give some advantage to defending CAP versus escort. This makes sense although I cannot say if the advantage so given is of the right proportion. The second is what I might call the Corsair factor. When the game matches some planes against other planes it seems that there are cases where some planes seem almost invincible. This makes sense maybe if we put a Brewster Buffalo against oh, say, a Frank or a George. I’m not so sure it makes sense between relatively equal planes with pilots of relatively equal experience. My overall fighter pilot experience of the pilots going in to this battle was approx. 78 but many were in the 80s and 90s. I had been saving up for a long time and knew I had to send the best I had.
2. For whatever reason, the individual combats were proportionally greater to Franks/Georges/Jacks vs F6Fs than Zekes vs F6Fs than I might have expected. This was particularly noteworthy with the Franks who started with 8 planes, lost planes down to zero and kept on entering combat. There were 2 Frank groups of 36 on LRCAP so the 8 may have been a FOW number. I did notice that the F6Fs kept on fighting for a while after their count reached zero.
3. The CAP vs. escort battles continued until there were no escorts left. I think I really had an approximate 2:1 advantage in CAP over escort so the ratio of kills of maybe 4-1 or 5-1 seems high but not out of the range of possibilities, given the factors cited above. We probably also entered that twilight zone of large air battles where these lopsided, one-way results seem to occur.
4. After eliminating the escort the CAP shot down or forced withdrawal of all of the attack planes. That’s the large air battle factor again I think.
Your forces then commenced a series of mostly rag-tag, uncoordinated for the most part, strikes which were chewed up by that same CAP. The FM-2 Wildcats seemed to be almost not a factor as they were clearly overmatched. Fifteen strikes in all went in with disastrous results for the strike planes.
The next critical event was after the Japanese strikes commenced. After a few Bettys and Frances struck at the transports at Shika without effect the first and largest of the IJN strikes went after your carriers. From my notes, the strike consisted of 106 Grace, 76 Judys, and 484 Zekes. The CAP consisted of 189 F6Fs and 53 FM-2s. I was too tired to contemplate sitting through the blow-by-blow for this one so I just hit the button and watched the scrolling screen as your CAP chewed through my escort. My tactic of loading up the escort proved to be just enough so that even though you shot down almost 400 Zekes (again, the best I had to send) eventually the weight of numbers prevailed and the escort was eliminated. Now the fox was in the hen house and three carriers got hit pretty hard.
The IJN and IJNAF then launched a number of piecemeal, somewhat uncoordinated attacks of their own. Many were unescorted and often encountered no CAP. Some did get hit by CAP and were wiped out but some found unprotected ships and scored some crucial hits. I have no idea why sometimes your CAP was not to be seen over the CVEs that were still functional and presumably still had some fighters left.
In the afternoon and the next day the IJN followed up on the advantage gained and pounded every ship they could find with help from land-based bombers.
So, is this an anomalous result? It is so one-sided in terms of ships attacked/lost that one would be tempted to think so. The air-to-air losses do not seem completely out of line to me. Is it possible in this game for the Japanese to win in 1944 what is, in effect, a reverse Marianas Turkey Shoot kind of victory? I think that the game did not malfunction in the sense of a bug but rather this is just how the games works (or doesn’t work) when these large encounters occur.
Third, what do we do now? Well you certainly face a difficult situation but maybe not hopeless. If your forces can quickly take Shika and you can get planes to them they should be able to hold out for quite some time until sufficient cavalry arrives. Hell, for all I know you may have sufficient naval forces in the area to deliver some stunning reverses to me and realize that nightmare scenario I described above concerning B-29 bases on Sakkalin. You are still more powerful than me overall and will continue to receive more stuff than I. You have Corsairs and B-29s and more Essex carriers to come. Your lost squadrons will return even if their ships do not. You must decide if it is worth it to you to continue the fight. The Japanese player has the obligation to fight as long as the allied player wants to continue in order to make up for all of the one-sided fun the Japanese player gets in 1942. It’s your call sir and I will support whatever you decide.
If you want to post about this turn please do so and feel free to use any or all of this somewhat rambling but I hope somewhat coherent monolog.
Once again, cheers to you for going for the bold stroke. It looks like it may not come off but the greater shame would be not to try.
Dave
There are three issues/questions that seem to be on the table.
First, were you outplayed? No way. Out-lucked, maybe. If anything you are the one who has outplayed me. When I saw the fleet approaching the string of barrier islands I was at first puzzled. I thought, "Those islands are pretty useless as bases and a long way from anywhere". But the forces detected were far greater than might be required to set up a harassing point to my north. It was with a sick, sinking feeling that I realized that the bases on Sakkalin Island were capable of being built up to level 7. They were within easy B-29 range of all of the Home Islands and might put all of Japan under escorted heavy-bomber attack by late '44. Truly a disaster in the making for me the Japanese player. I was forced to admit to myself that I had not reviewed this portion of the map for such a possibility. There's a line in one of Jerry Pournelle's novels about "surprise is an event that happens in the mind of the enemy commander". You certainly caused that event in my mind. Now, normally, bold moves carry with them some attendant risks. Think Inchon. MacArthur was brilliant but maybe also a bit lucky. Sakkalin is a long way from home and you were almost forced to go in blind for fear of giving the operation away. So, hat's off to you for having the imagination necessary to see this possibility and for having the large appendages necessary to attempt it. If it fails, and that's by no means certain (see my responses to the second and third issues below), then you are in no way diminished in my mind as an able and crafty opponent. You could have simply continued to bludgeon your way forward in the Philippines, Java, and perhaps the Marianas. Eventually, the allies would overcome the resistance or the game would come to the end of 1946. Instead you looked for the bold stroke that would make our game exciting and more interesting. I have been almost beside myself wondering what was going to happen (not done wondering yet) these past few turns. Hurrah, sir, Hurrah!
Second, Battle analysis. Ok, after I got over the shock of realizing that I just might be looking at my defeat coming a lot sooner than I had anticipated I spent a long time trying to decide just what I might be facing and what countermeasures I might have available. Since some things have now become evident by what happened in the last turn I will share with you some information that you would mightily liked to have had in early ’44. By early ’44 it had become evident to me that my empire was about to collapse. Attrition of planes and pilots had left me with almost none of either. Many squadrons were sitting around and could not even go to training for lack of planes. The IJN was in equally sad shape, with most capital ships with medium to high SYS damage and pending upgrades not carried out from as far back as ’42. Losses of CAs and CLs made the remaining crucial workhorses too valuable to risk as I had been doing in attempting to oppose your landings in ’43. Even DDs were in short supply. Yes, I still had all of my CVs but no squadrons and few escorts. I think an invasion of Luzon and or the Marianas at that point would not have been successfully opposed by me. One more big push by you and I would probably have resigned. But maybe you were exhausted too. You may remember some of my gloomy posts from that period. So I resolved to trade space for time, rebuild and only oppose the most critical points. By mid to late summer ’44 the rebuilding was essentially complete, new forces and equipment and advanced fighters had begun to arrive so the question now became how and when to use these tools to halt your advance? You supplied me with the answer to that question.
When I thought about your invasion force it seemed obvious to me that to make a base work so far from your logistical center you would have to bring more than enough of everything, with supplies enough to last for a long, long time. That explained the enormous amount of TFs. That made this a critically large investment and it would not make sense for you to come without every escort, CV and carrier-based plane you could scrape up. Fortunately for me I had my CVs reasonably close by. I couldn’t get to your fleet before landings commenced but could get there shortly afterward. If you could get a land base up and running you could fly in escort (the noxious P-38js were within transfer range) and maybe thumb your nose at me while you built up the airfield and then brought in bombers. I could not be certain how long the base (and you chose Shika) would hold after you landed ( not very long in my worst case estimation) so I had to react to try to take out the transports before you got enough stuff ashore to make the base viable in the long term. But first I would have to deal with the CVs. Although I had enjoyed some earlier good luck against your carriers you still had all of the Essex class and whatever else was available from the early war stuff and the large number of CVLs and CVEs. I thought the forces would be approximately equal in size. Any element of surprise I might have had was gone when my TFs tripped over your sub and alerted you to my approach. I decided that there was no time to dance around and finesse, I had to go for a knock-out. It seemed to me that you would probably bias your escort/CAP ratio toward CAP. That would be smart because if we traded losses of planes, pilots and ships you would win. I remembered how our earlier large fight near Midway resulted in a draw because the CAP consistently outnumbered the escort and slaughtered the airstrikes with almost no damage to the CVs. I resolved to load the CVs with mostly fighters (approximately 3-1), I set my CAP to 20%, and I tried to make up my deficiencies in CAP and strike aircraft with land-based LRCAP and land-based level bombers. You were rolling the dice with this invasion and now I was forced to roll the dice and bet everything too.
The first thing that happened was that my CV TFs reacted to yours even though I had reaction set to zero. This meant that carriers were not exactly where I had wanted them to be in relation to Shika but your carriers also reacted. It seems to me now that not all of your CV TFs reacted, just the ones with the big Essex class ships. This may have proved important because it created some separation between groups of your carriers and may have led to the somewhat piecemeal nature of your attacks.
Your attacks went in first but it was your first strike and later my first strike from the CVs that were to prove decisive and to create the conditions for what was a stunning, almost incredible result.
From my notes, your first strike consisted of 108 F6Fs, 16 FM-2s, 72 TBMs, and 86 SB2Cs. My CAP consisted of 109 Zekes, 45 Jacks, 52 Georges, and 8 Franks. The Jacks, Georges, and Franks were LRCAP from local bases. I watched the detail blow-by-blow screen for this attack, which took approx. 2 hours to complete on my computer. I observed the following:
1. I seemed to have a large qualitative edge with the Franks, Georges, and Jacks over the F6Fs. I attribute this to two factors. One is that the game seems to give some advantage to defending CAP versus escort. This makes sense although I cannot say if the advantage so given is of the right proportion. The second is what I might call the Corsair factor. When the game matches some planes against other planes it seems that there are cases where some planes seem almost invincible. This makes sense maybe if we put a Brewster Buffalo against oh, say, a Frank or a George. I’m not so sure it makes sense between relatively equal planes with pilots of relatively equal experience. My overall fighter pilot experience of the pilots going in to this battle was approx. 78 but many were in the 80s and 90s. I had been saving up for a long time and knew I had to send the best I had.
2. For whatever reason, the individual combats were proportionally greater to Franks/Georges/Jacks vs F6Fs than Zekes vs F6Fs than I might have expected. This was particularly noteworthy with the Franks who started with 8 planes, lost planes down to zero and kept on entering combat. There were 2 Frank groups of 36 on LRCAP so the 8 may have been a FOW number. I did notice that the F6Fs kept on fighting for a while after their count reached zero.
3. The CAP vs. escort battles continued until there were no escorts left. I think I really had an approximate 2:1 advantage in CAP over escort so the ratio of kills of maybe 4-1 or 5-1 seems high but not out of the range of possibilities, given the factors cited above. We probably also entered that twilight zone of large air battles where these lopsided, one-way results seem to occur.
4. After eliminating the escort the CAP shot down or forced withdrawal of all of the attack planes. That’s the large air battle factor again I think.
Your forces then commenced a series of mostly rag-tag, uncoordinated for the most part, strikes which were chewed up by that same CAP. The FM-2 Wildcats seemed to be almost not a factor as they were clearly overmatched. Fifteen strikes in all went in with disastrous results for the strike planes.
The next critical event was after the Japanese strikes commenced. After a few Bettys and Frances struck at the transports at Shika without effect the first and largest of the IJN strikes went after your carriers. From my notes, the strike consisted of 106 Grace, 76 Judys, and 484 Zekes. The CAP consisted of 189 F6Fs and 53 FM-2s. I was too tired to contemplate sitting through the blow-by-blow for this one so I just hit the button and watched the scrolling screen as your CAP chewed through my escort. My tactic of loading up the escort proved to be just enough so that even though you shot down almost 400 Zekes (again, the best I had to send) eventually the weight of numbers prevailed and the escort was eliminated. Now the fox was in the hen house and three carriers got hit pretty hard.
The IJN and IJNAF then launched a number of piecemeal, somewhat uncoordinated attacks of their own. Many were unescorted and often encountered no CAP. Some did get hit by CAP and were wiped out but some found unprotected ships and scored some crucial hits. I have no idea why sometimes your CAP was not to be seen over the CVEs that were still functional and presumably still had some fighters left.
In the afternoon and the next day the IJN followed up on the advantage gained and pounded every ship they could find with help from land-based bombers.
So, is this an anomalous result? It is so one-sided in terms of ships attacked/lost that one would be tempted to think so. The air-to-air losses do not seem completely out of line to me. Is it possible in this game for the Japanese to win in 1944 what is, in effect, a reverse Marianas Turkey Shoot kind of victory? I think that the game did not malfunction in the sense of a bug but rather this is just how the games works (or doesn’t work) when these large encounters occur.
Third, what do we do now? Well you certainly face a difficult situation but maybe not hopeless. If your forces can quickly take Shika and you can get planes to them they should be able to hold out for quite some time until sufficient cavalry arrives. Hell, for all I know you may have sufficient naval forces in the area to deliver some stunning reverses to me and realize that nightmare scenario I described above concerning B-29 bases on Sakkalin. You are still more powerful than me overall and will continue to receive more stuff than I. You have Corsairs and B-29s and more Essex carriers to come. Your lost squadrons will return even if their ships do not. You must decide if it is worth it to you to continue the fight. The Japanese player has the obligation to fight as long as the allied player wants to continue in order to make up for all of the one-sided fun the Japanese player gets in 1942. It’s your call sir and I will support whatever you decide.
If you want to post about this turn please do so and feel free to use any or all of this somewhat rambling but I hope somewhat coherent monolog.
Once again, cheers to you for going for the bold stroke. It looks like it may not come off but the greater shame would be not to try.
Dave
