General Patton vs. larryfulkerson Focus Pacific #75

[larryfulkerson]

ORIGINAL: BillBrown
He has lots to do. I think it took me 3 days to do turn 2 as Allies in a scenario 71 game.

Yeah, turn two in either version of Focus Pacific is crazy time consuming.
I quite agree gentlemen. I received some moves from Brian just now and I'm going to make a copy of
his file and store it somewhere safe and start up the combat replay.

[larryfulkerson]

Brian says he went back to the standard extended map ( by some involved process no doubt ) and now I'm getting the
message that he's using a different PWHEX.dat file and do I want to continue. I'm not sure I do. If I continue and save it
with my file wont' that mess him up? Advice please.

[BillBrown]

Ask him to send you his three files. pwzlink.dat, pwzone.dat, and pwhexe.dat. Put those in your WitPAe directory.

[larryfulkerson]

ORIGINAL: BillBrown
Ask him to send you his three files. pwzlink.dat, pwzone.dat, and pwhexe.dat. Put those in your WitPAe directory.

The only problem with that is that *I* didn't change my map........it's still Focus Pacific standard and he said he got
tired of the FP map and went back to the stock / extended map route, which means he went back to the stock map
first and then added the extended map stuff. I'd like to check out this "extended" map. Where can I find it anyway?

Oh, and I sent him an email asking him what he wanted to do about this little problemo and it got there after he had
already retired for the evening and I probably won't have any more news about the game until tomorrow morning
after he gets up and at'em.

[BillBrown]

The map panels make no difference, only the three files I listed.

[larryfulkerson]

ORIGINAL: BillBrown
The map panels make no difference, only the three files I listed.

Sounds good.

Oh, and I sent him an email asking him what he wanted to do about this little problemo and it got there after he had
already retired for the evening and I probably won't have any more news about the game until tomorrow morning
after he gets up and at'em.

I got an answer back from Brian. He sent me the extended map panels and I copied them into my Art directory replacing the
old ones and now the map looks like the original stock map but Aden and Abadan matched up with their hexes and Amsterdam
is in the right place. I think we're done. I'll get busy on my moves.

[larryfulkerson]

This is 9Dec41 and I'm looking at the points in the pools for Nav shipbuilding and Merch shipbuilding and I'm thinking that's not enough.
I would like to have about 1K in the pools for both of them as a buffer so I turned off the shipbuilding for each of them for one turn to
get some points in the pools and then I'll adjust the levels to maintain about 1K in T4. This will work you'll see.

[larryfulkerson]

Here's how the economy is doing right now. I'm running in the red for every goodie listed and that can't go on long. Actually the RES
and oil haven't started flowing into the home islands yet so all is normal.

[larryfulkerson]

And for those of you interested in seeing the economic chart, here it is. All looks good to me. So far so good.

[larryfulkerson]

And as for the KB: I've got them headed back toward it's oiler to get topped off and the oiler group itself is in motion to pass way
north of Midway headed for Wake. The KB follows the path of the oiler. Maybe I should have left the oiler where it was and let
the KB meet it before heading west........I didn't do that because I'm in a bit of a hurry and I don't mind taking risks when the risk
is low.

[larryfulkerson]

Meanwhile on the north coast of Borneo there a fight going on for Miri and I've got them set for a deliberate attack tomorrow morning so
we may have Miri pretty quickly now. I hope the damage to the facilities is light. I don't mind repairing them if need be but it's expensive
in supplies and I don't have an abundance of that at the moment. Also, I've got more reinforcements headed south from CRB headed
to Brunei and Miri and I'm having to put them into a holding pattern in the middle of nowhere while some Allied ships pass from east to
west in front of them, which is to say, in their path. I think those two Allied ships are a diversion to draw my attention away from that
large group trying to escape from Manila. Maybe I've got enough assets nearby and I can take care of both groups.

[ny59giants]

OK, I'm now in front of you game wise (4 Feb '42).

Air HQs - Find and prep them for bases that they will be headed to. I like Kuantan, Palembang, Denpasar, Koepang to form western flank. If you don't plan to go for Port Moresby early, then take Horn Island and get an Air HQ there to close off eastern approaches to SRA/DEI. In our game, Brian is building up Port Morseby. IMO, I'll just kill more later. [;)]

Malaya - I would consider using just 5th and 18th Division plus Imp Gds Div to push down the peninsula with maybe a fourth if resistance is stiff. Focus on Singkawang or Toboali (potential size AF7 that can be quickly built up) while a whole division is on way to Palembang (invade within first two weeks). Rather than throw all those divisions at Singapore have them go to Java. Once captured, those four division can be shipped to take Singapore. For Singapore, just get enough Aviation Support to support 125 to 150 Lily/Sally set at 16k to keep fort building at Singapore halted (I like Kuantan for this). Get down to Johore Bharu with all your troops. Start prep of 25th Army HQ & Southern Command HQ for Singapore NOW!! Start pairing up a 'mobile' Command HQ with an Army HQ for major bases.

Overall, focus on the capture of Oil centers first. Embed your older, slow BBs in Amphib TF that will face those Dutch CD guns. Mine have soaked up the CD gun hit and dished out good casualties to defenders. For your non-KB CV/CVL/CVE get them off those oil center bases to ground attack as secondary for Kates. I was able to do a few turns of this and then invade. I had very little damaged oil and refineries when I took the bases. Don't shock attack as that causes too much extra damage to facilities.

AKEs - You should have gone with 8 to 10 Lima Class xAKs to AKEs. Great capacity to load 14" shells that Aden cannot do. Live and learn, Larry. [:-]

Leaders - Since you get so many PP, start going through your air groups now.

Little guys - Ansyu C to PB, Kiso E to PB or AMc, To'su to ACM

[larryfulkerson]

Hey NYG dude......thanks ever so much for all this advice. I'll do my best to follow it. I've been putting together an HTML document that
I'm using to keep my todo list items and I've put your list of good advice items in my todo list so I can refer to it again and again.

[larryfulkerson]

Here's the east coast of Malaya now. I've made landings in several places and my troops are starting to fan out and march across the
width of the peninsula to get to the west side to capture all those ports and bases and I'm in serious negotiations for Kota Bharu and
it looks like a naval bombardment is in order there. I'm pounding it with aircraft strikes and I'm thinking it might be ripe soon.

[larryfulkerson]

Here's a list of the damaged ships now. I've gotten off light so far on these invasions. Several ships have been sunk of course but the
number of floating damaged ones is fairly low IMHO. The damaged ones are heading back to a repair port like Saigon. I plan on using
the Hong Kong repair yard when I finally capture it and repair it.

[larryfulkerson]

I played briefly with the idea of maybe invading K-town but I see how there's 22K defenders there and I don't have nearly the resources
to take it by sea. I'm thinking I'll have to march overland and attack from the northwest. Still, that's a lot of defenders and I'll have to
pound them for a couple of weeks at least to soften them up for attack.

[larryfulkerson]

Here's just some of the figures for stuff in the pools. I'm keeping track of the size of the pools because I want to maintain about
500 engines and about 100 planes as an operating level and I'm not nearly there yet. I understand there's a 500-engine bonus
to be had.

[ny59giants]

Economics - Industry

I need to see three to five days worth with all naval and merchant ships being built to see how short you are. I think FP uses RHS type Heavy Industry, but I'll need to see what they are, too. See screenshot below to see what my game vs Gen Patton looks like.

[ny59giants]

Economic (Part 2)

Tracker - Air Production - Engines - Planning Pop Up

This pop up is invaluable when it come to knowing how many Engines you will need. The bottom is not 100%. So I go to Air Production and filter (click on) "Engines" to see each airframe and corresponding engine. The screenshot show where I'm at.

[ny59giants]

Economy (Part 3)

Tracker - Ship Production - Naval

I've been steadily expanding my Naval Shipyards for the first two months, but I'm still short. I still have 2 CV, 3 CVL, 2 CA, and 2 CL for major warship to eat into points yet. The "Build Point" (1793) are used according to ID number. So, CVs will be first in line for building. The "Start Building" number with a (-) in front states how long its been building. Thankfully, I get a few completed, but I'm unable to accelerate any without halting something.