Matrix Games Forums

Originally posted by MikeKraemer
I'm not sure I follow your point The Japanesse have an operational capability that the didn't have historically. The Zero has been given an A historical capability. In Games I've played sunce 2.3 were The odds are roughly 1 to 1 the Zero has an exchange rate of 9 to 1 in it's favor against P-39's and 3 to 1 against P-40's and F4F's. When the odds exceed 1.5 to 1 in the zeros' favor the exchange rate goes to 13 to 1 against P-39's and 5 to 1 against P-40's and F4F's. Not only that but there is not a single incident in WWII where Bettie and Nells lanching torpedo in a port, yet they routinely do this and run a 41% hit rate. The Betty was officially dubbed "type one land attack plane" by the Japanesse Navy, but the crews that flew then called them "type one Lighters" because of their habit of bursting into flames with only a single hit. On the strike against the landing at Gaudalcanal on August 8th 1942 15 out of 23 betties were shot down by flak and only one torpedo hit scored, try that in 2.30 you'll likely see 3 to 5 ships hit by torpedos and only 2 to 3 betties shot down.

Those are not the exchange ratios I see. I am also well aware of the historical capabilities of BOTH sides aircraft.

Originally posted by Nasrullah
On the matter of USN bias: You have all swallowed the camel
of Japanese infinite supply and fuel, yet are straining at every gnat you can find.

I have certainly NOT assumed Japan had unlimited fuel.
They did have 'enough' supply.

Doesnt mean they could deliver it to the targets. But they had it.

The game assumes unlimited supply and fuel for Japan, not you or I. I also have reservations about the bottomless depots at
Brisbane and Noumea. I will let the scholars dazzle us with their light on these points.

I think, Nasrullah, that your attempts to disrail this exchange are for naught.

Originally posted by Nasrullah
The game assumes unlimited supply and fuel for Japan, not you or I. I also have reservations about the bottomless depots at
Brisbane and Noumea. I will let the scholars dazzle us with their light on these points.

From what I've read the U.S. Navy's big challenge at Nomea was lack of warf space and poor organzation. At one point in November of 42, if memory serves me correctly, there were almost 30 ships riding anchor waiting to unload. This wasn't solved until early December 42 when Halsey but an Army General in charge. Can't speak as to brisbane.

D*mn, those Betties do seem to get too many hits on my ships in every PBEM I have! I guess you just have to wait till the Flak, Fighters and OP Losses take 'em down to minor numbers:rolleyes:

However, in the mean time they (Betties) are taking your ships out of action at a nasty rate:mad:

Can't believe I read even half of the prior posts

Later,

Lrfss

Maybe Truk, Brisbane and Noumea can have unlimited supply as they have, but limit how much can be stored at each base. Say 5,000 points of fuel and 10,000 points of supply at each base. That way the over-dumping of bases will be restricted. The most supply I have built up at Rabaul is 350,000.

I read the first page of this thread only:

A) flak needs to be bumped up in value. I have had bases with 10 flak units dive bombed, and the Americans only lost about 15 dive bombers. That seems weak to me.

B) Morale seems to drop off pretty quickly for some air units. For example, my Japanese Tonies can only fly CAP over a base for 2-3 days straight before their morale starts dropping really badly. I haven't noticed this much with the American are units, and hardly at all with any naval air units on CAP. Why is this?

C) B-17 and Liberators. I am concerned that one strike by about 20 of these can close down a decent sized air base. Two strikes on consecutive days can close down most any air base. Is that historical?

D) supply hits seem to happen too often. Fuel hits I could understand, because of the highly visible tank farms, but supplies can be dispersed far more.

E) Not sure why some air raids with a certain number of planes cause 200-300 casualties, and others with the same number of planes cause about 30 casualties

The Tonys are IJA and usually have leaders with stats less than 50. There is only one with 66. So a couple of missions and they are affected. But the Japs have to keep them in action to take the heat off the Zeros.

On the plus side, they are really good at defending bases because they don't fly off to escort attack missions because of their short range.

I just had a look through the taskforce listings for IJN at the Naval War in the Pacific website at

http://pacific.valka.cz/

Some of the actions where B17's were involved in sinking or damaging shipping include,

42/08/19 Hagikaze damaged by B-17 off Tulagi - escorted by Arashi to Truk
42/08/25 attacked by B-17: sunk Mucuki, Kinrju Maru; damaged Uzuki (near misses)
42/09/14 Cruiser Mjoko damaged by B-17
42/11/17 Umikaze disabled by B-17
42/11/23 Hajashio sunk by B-17 in Guna Bay, Huon Gulf (07-00S, 147-30E)
42/11/28 troop transport run to Buna - aborted due to air attack - Shiracuju & Makigumo damaged by B-17s
43/04/07 transport run to Rekata - attacked by B-17 - Amagiri damaged due to strafing

The reference to strafing damage is interesting.

Hi, Whats the name of that old propaganda movie where the crew of a B-17 (begin in PI) and try to fly to safety in Austraila. Along the way they sink half the IJN (they fly in circles over a IJN TF dropping one bomb at a time and they never miss and always score a critical hit.) Of course the gunners shot down a hundred Zeros. (They also strafe the ships they are attacking)

Mogami,
The name of the movie was "Air Force".

what was that, a very early "D" model?

The movie was made in 1943.Probably a "D" model as you state.
Some of the movie was quite fanciful, although it was exciting and
as far as I can recall, is the only movie to deal with AAF ops in the PI at this time. "They Were Expendable" is sort of the Navy counterpart.

RE: Sub provisioning

The only thing really problematic in reprovisioning a WW2 sub as opposed to other types of ships is the availability of sub-specific repair parts, torpedoes/mines and the cranes & winches needed to load torps and mines more easily.

Torps can be loaded "by hand" so-to-speak - and it was done historically - when it was neccesary. However, tracking which port has available torpedos at any given point is just a bit over the top. Perhaps the torpedo availability issue could be solved by only allowing resupply of sub torps at ports in a full state of supply, but that's as far as I'd really care to see it taken.

I'm as much of a grognard as the next wargamer (and more so than many), but there's a limit beyond which it just gets ludicrous to try to simulate it all. Turns take long enough already without having to deal with a bunch of B.S. "admisistrivia". This is a great game, as it sits. Let's NOT encourage going so far with realism on every last detail that we ruin a great PLAYABLE game. Does anyone out there recall what SSI & Gary Grigsby did when they ruined "12 O"Clock High - Bombing the Reich" with too much detail?

Another nice, but simple, solution could be to still allow subs to reprovision anywhere, but to make it a bit like loading/unloading cargo at smaller harbors so that it takes longer (maybe an extra day, but no more) to reprovision a ship in a smaller port. Also, if we had a sub tender that could function in a fashion similar to the AV's in the game, that unit could remove all port size and supply level penalties.

Hi all,

I hate to get caught in this quagmire but...
I think the B17's are fine; yes they do a lot of damage to bases but from my limited experiance playing the allies they tend to come back with most if not all of the raid damaged. And maybe 1 shot down. As it takes 2-4 days to repair the B17's I think it works fine. Probably the biggest change i would like to see is low level flak inreased. Up to 1000ft in a B17 or 24 and every guy with a rifle will be putting .30cal holes all over your plane. Admittedly those are not terribly deadly but they add up. And, yes, there is documentation of that happening. Even fighter pilots on low level raids were shot down from rifle fire. And B17's were designed as anti-shipping patrol bombers in the first place and they did get the occasional hit on underway ships. I think it is fine.

Japanese kill ratios; 2.5-1 up to 10-1.
I have said this before, with the kill ratios the allies claimed in the war Japan would have had no aircraft left. You have to do some research before blindly accepting kill ratios. I personally think it works fine in the game and which ever one of you was claiming that in the game the Japs are gaining 3-1 or 5-1 ratios over wildcats is either insane, full of defecation or doesn't know how to rest his fighters.

I can show almost ANY results in this game just by changing the parameters by which I and my opponent play! This has been said by another poster but i will repeat it; How would the war have changed had the Japanese not used their subs for supply runs? 75% of the Japanese sub losses were during supply runs and they could carry miniscule amounts of cargo, it was a bad idea. But it happened and changed how things turned out. Maybe not a big change but some change.

Next, I agree with the poster who mentioned Japanese engineering vehicles. I have posted about this before to no response. I had a teacher /Mentor years ago who was a sergeant in the 1st Marines and who landed the first day on GC. He was there till the withdrawl of the 1st Marines. He told me that the army was getting all of the supply and equipment priority with the navy number 2. This left the marines at the hind tit supply wise and Savo I. messed that up even more. The marines had a grand total of one(1) bulldozer landed. The rest of the vehicles, tractors, road rollers, gas locamotives, pick up trucks, power shovels and graders were all captured from the Japanese on GC. And this was a very minor advanced base the Japs in July '42!

For my scenario i added a few engineer vehicles to the Japanese pioneer units and subtracted half of the vehicles from the seabees. My uncle, who is still living was a seabee in SoPac and i asked him about this and he said the seabees were about half as well equipped as the EAB's. He said the seabees basically had their arms untill the middle of '43.

Michael

Your point about B-17s being invulverable is moot I think. They were in fact quite invulnerable in the Pacific theater. Very few were lost by enemy action, the majority being lost through operational mishaps. This is correctly modeled. As for accuracy, hitting ships at anchor isn't beyond the realm of possibility, and this did happen occasionally in real life. Underway is a different story, but you are the only person I've noticed posting about hits "all the time" on TFs underway. I have never seen this in any game.

I agree, the whole B-17 being overpowered argument is imaginary. I haven't seen any tests run with the editor and stats presented to support the argument, or historical evidence that the B-17 results in the game are consistently out of line with historical results. All I've seen is one person complaining loudly and persistently, and ignore the historical facts presented that nullify his argument. I've been playing PBEM for quite some time and don't even bother putting B-17s on Naval Attack missions because they are so ineffective.

Pay the toll to the troll.

I agree, this notion that the B-17 is some sort of ship killing doomsday device has not been evident in any of the games I played on the latest version. If there is a problem its that B-17s and B-24s cause too much damaged and casualties when bombing land targets. I hope this will be looked at for WitP.

Originally posted by Snigbert
Your point about B-17s being invulverable is moot I think. They were in fact quite invulnerable in the Pacific theater. Very few were lost by enemy action, the majority being lost through operational mishaps. This is correctly modeled. As for accuracy, hitting ships at anchor isn't beyond the realm of possibility, and this did happen occasionally in real life. Underway is a different story, but you are the only person I've noticed posting about hits "all the time" on TFs underway. I have never seen this in any game.

I agree, the whole B-17 being overpowered argument is imaginary. I haven't seen any tests run with the editor and stats presented to support the argument, or historical evidence that the B-17 results in the game are consistently out of line with historical results. All I've seen is one person complaining loudly and persistently, and ignore the historical facts presented that nullify his argument. I've been playing PBEM for quite some time and don't even bother putting B-17s on Naval Attack missions because they are so ineffective.

Pay the toll to the troll.

Then Snigbert you have chosen to ignore the other posters
that agree with me that the B-17 vs shipping is ahistorical.
Your characterization of the argument it simply untrue and I am
surprised at you. You normally do not misrepresent or lie.

Originally posted by decourcy
Hi all,

I hate to get caught in this quagmire but...
I think the B17's are fine; yes they do a lot of damage to bases but from my limited experiance playing the allies they tend to come back with most if not all of the raid damaged. And maybe 1 shot down. As it takes 2-4 days to repair the B17's I think it works fine. Probably the biggest change i would like to see is low level flak inreased. Up to 1000ft in a B17 or 24 and every guy with a rifle will be putting .30cal holes all over your plane. Admittedly those are not terribly deadly but they add up. And, yes, there is documentation of that happening. Even fighter pilots on low level raids were shot down from rifle fire. And B17's were designed as anti-shipping patrol bombers in the first place and they did get the occasional hit on underway ships. I think it is fine.

Japanese kill ratios; 2.5-1 up to 10-1.
I have said this before, with the kill ratios the allies claimed in the war Japan would have had no aircraft left. You have to do some research before blindly accepting kill ratios. I personally think it works fine in the game and which ever one of you was claiming that in the game the Japs are gaining 3-1 or 5-1 ratios over wildcats is either insane, full of defecation or doesn't know how to rest his fighters.

I can show almost ANY results in this game just by changing the parameters by which I and my opponent play! This has been said by another poster but i will repeat it; How would the war have changed had the Japanese not used their subs for supply runs? 75% of the Japanese sub losses were during supply runs and they could carry miniscule amounts of cargo, it was a bad idea. But it happened and changed how things turned out. Maybe not a big change but some change.

Next, I agree with the poster who mentioned Japanese engineering vehicles. I have posted about this before to no response. I had a teacher /Mentor years ago who was a sergeant in the 1st Marines and who landed the first day on GC. He was there till the withdrawl of the 1st Marines. He told me that the army was getting all of the supply and equipment priority with the navy number 2. This left the marines at the hind tit supply wise and Savo I. messed that up even more. The marines had a grand total of one(1) bulldozer landed. The rest of the vehicles, tractors, road rollers, gas locamotives, pick up trucks, power shovels and graders were all captured from the Japanese on GC. And this was a very minor advanced base the Japs in July '42!

For my scenario i added a few engineer vehicles to the Japanese pioneer units and subtracted half of the vehicles from the seabees. My uncle, who is still living was a seabee in SoPac and i asked him about this and he said the seabees were about half as well equipped as the EAB's. He said the seabees basically had their arms untill the middle of '43.

Michael

The B-17 issue that 'I' have raised is soley about the B-17 vs SHIPS. Not bases. That may indeed be an issue, but it is an issue
I have not raised.