Weapon R&R and production

[mogami]

Y'all are overlooking something and I'm not sure whether anyone cares or is concerned, but...

Cancelling Shinano is not going to allow the Japanese to build DDs faster or in greater quantity. There are other limiting factors. One of these is engines. Japan could not repair and replace engines on her extant container ship and light escort fleet fast enough to keep pace with attrition through use. By 1944, fully 1/3 of the surviving merchant fleet was laid up awaiting maintenance. I guess all this comes down to "shipyard points." If so, the bottom line is that the Japanese should start the war with an insufficient number of shipyard points to both keep the extant merchant and naval fleet in good repair and add new ships. Indeed, they should have a hard time keeping the extant fleet in repair.

Hi, In game terms if the allies stop or restrict the flow of resource and oil to Japanese heavy industry they will also stop (or reduce) the production of naval construction points, Merchant construction points, Shipyard repair points, aircraft engine production, aircraft production. arms production, vehicle production, manpower production, fuel production, supply production (supply is also used to repair/expand industry)

Example of supply relationship to industry. I wish to expand a heavy industry center from 5 point to 10. I spend 500 supply points when I order change.
base then looks like this: Heavy industry (5) 5
next turn if 1k supply in base is gets expended and base looks like this (4) 6
If the 1k supply not available no expansion (repair) occurs.
So If Tokyo is bombed and 200 Heavy Industy damaged it will take 200 days and 200,000 supply to rebuild.

The only way the Japanese can expand their industry is if the allies do not molest the effort. Expansion is there. It's fun to play with. But before the end the Japanese will be unable to maintain the industry they began with (and all expansion will have been a waste of supply)

[mdiehl]

(it could be the same 500,000 tons month after month)

Nope. See my above. These things are going to require down-time. At least in the real world. This is manifestly not a submarine effect phenom. It is that the Japanese lacked sufficient shipyard capacity when the war started to keep the extant fleets going, even with unlimited access to resources, owing to the intensified use of the fleets. Capturing a million tons gets you a short term boost, but in the long run it avails naught because prior to the war these (along with a good chunk of Japan's domestic merchant fleet) were serviced in ports in other nations.

[mogami]

Nope it could be the same untill they are ran into ground. The Korea-Osaka run does not deplete ships the same as the Palembang-Osaka run does. In game terms the Japanese have 2,200,000 lift points (not ship tons) It's too early to tell how many lift points per month their industry/military require. It's something I'm very interested in learning (and so one of the first things I look at when every new build comes out) So far I am able to do quite nicely and I keep 750,000 lift points out of service.

I confine my operations to what the remaining 1,500,000 lift points can keep up with. The ships do require repair so I only use 1,000,000 load points at any one time. The hardest hit type of ship so far is the AP. AP do not carry resource/oil
They move troops (and limited supply)

[mdiehl]

Sorry. I thought this was about what the Japanese could do in the real world.

[mogami]

Hi, Yes it is about the real world . And we need to obtain as much data as possible. But we can't just assume that 1/3 of the Japanese merchants will be laid up forever without finding out why and when. I think in 1944 there were also plenty of Japanese merchants in perfect condition confined to Japanese ports because it was unsafe to use them.

If the Japanese industry in WITP is still running in 1944 then fewer merchants will be in disrepair then if the Japanese industry is hurting. (Its a circle)
In order to keep the merchants in the repairyards not being repaired you need to reduce the amount of repair points being produced.

The numbers have yet to be put in place in their final form. Also the Japanese will not aquire the 1,000,000 tons of shipping from conquest they actually aquired.

[mdiehl]

I am sure we're talking past each other. On 8 December 1941, the Japanese homelands and occupied ports in Korea and China lacked sufficient drydock space and engine maintenance technical crew and spare parts and the production capacity to produce spare parts at a rate sufficient to maintain the extant fleet in a constant state of readiness. No submrine effects. No atrategic warfare. Just a pure consequence of the fact that Japan's fleets were bigger than their capacity to maintain them. That was the real world.

If you are suggesting that the problem should get worse as strategic warfare effects kick in, I agree. If you are suggesting that the problem did not exist until strategic warfare effects began to take their toll, I do not agree.

[mogami]

Hi, I have not made enough turns to assess the effect of time and use on the existing Japanese merchant fleet. It does suffer from normal wear and tear.
I don't know what will happen when large numbers of ships aquire battle damage and the normal damage. We will likely need to get at least a year into a game. I will say that after 6 weeks of my last test over 70 ships were in the repair yards (scattered from Hong Kong to Tokyo) and they were not repairing very fast. (not all ships decreased one point of damage per day)

We might be worring over nothing. But I think we are trying to make judgements too soon in development. I'll keep track of this for certain as I go.

[Mr.Frag]

As Mogami has pointed out, messing with your industry (call them units for simplicity sake) has extreme penalties and impact. (I use likely because nothing is cast in stone)

(a) You will likely be able to convert unit x to unit y (translate this to mean convert aircraft factory that produces A6M's to Oscars instead).

(b) You will likely be able to increase unit capacities.

Both (a) and (b) cause what can be called damage. Damage is repaired at the cost of supplies. The amount is likely to be adjusted so we'll ignore it for discussion purposes. (consider this to be retooling, constructing expansions, etc)

Units (factories) consume resources and product points.

Points are traded in to accomplish things.

Things are your final items (grunts, planes, ships).

Upsetting the relationship between these by (a) or (b) above disrupts your end goal of Things so is by the nature of the impact restrictive in nature (a very good thing).

For any of this to function at all requires shipping to go out and fetch the materials (resources) in the first place.

For Japan to do anything beyond roll over and die on turn 1, Japan has to actively seek out and conquer the sites where the materials happen to be at, then establish safe routes for this shipping to fetch and return the materials.

It is all one big interdependant web which will have you sitting by your desk for hours at a time with a pad and pencil, scribbling down possible avenues of how you think you can connect the web together better then someone else.

At the same time, the enemy will be doing his best to disrupt your careful plans with a large broom to sweep away the web.

There really is no easy way to discuss the implications of all this because it is very likely to change dramatically as time passes. It is at the very core of the game. Basically, assume any and all things that happen to be in this catagory will change multiple times between now and when you buy the game. This is really more about strategies of how to play ... there will be vast disagreements because at the heart it is a issue of play style, not mechanics.

[mogami]

Hi, The two most important products of Industry are supply and aircraft.
Without supply you can't fight. Unless you produce aircraft faster then you lose them.......

Everything else is just tinkering. If there was no war to fight. If the Japanese had access to all the resource and oil they could haul, if the Japanese played for 4 years when they were done they would still be an industrial gnat when compared to the USA on Dec 7th 1941.

[Mr.Frag]

Mogami, thats the large broom I referred to that simply sweeps away the little cobwebs

My first thoughts was to convert everything possible into spitting out the best possible ranged fighters coupled with the best possible torpedo bomber with extreme range to simply try and buy time by hitting as far back behind the allied lines as possible, but the problem is that operational losses simply strip the pilot pool quick enough that this becomes pointless...

Wonder if the USA would be interested in selling some B-17's

[Brady]

Part of the Japanese merchant fleat was laid up in 44 because for two years the Japanese had forgone regular maintance to keep the maximum number of ships at sea. But this only aplied to those older ship's, not the newer one's.

[Brady]

Somthing to consider is that while removing the shinano for example will indead free up substantial resources for other production, the player will likely not avaoid regular maintance on his ship's, thus he will not slug up the works later in the war production wise by haveing many of his merchant ships in dier nead of maintance at one time. Even so the amount of historical production/maintance would be greatly inhanced by the removal of say all large Naval vessals from production at comercial yards, how that capacity is used by the player is well be up to him.....

[Mr.Frag]

Brady, repair yards are a separate entity then naval construction yards and merchant construction yards.

Each functions independantly.

[mogami]

Hi, Mr Frag that is true. But you can convert a Naval Yard to a Merchant Yard or a Merchant Yard to a Naval Yard. (all it takes is time and supply)

[Brady]

O, I see Mr. Fragg, I didnet know how this was treated in WiTP, I was refering to the reality of the situation and extrapolating for what I thought WiTP would do. TY for enlighting me.

[Mike Scholl]

Mike I said in my post that 6million tons of material in a year only require 500,000 tons per month (it could be the same 500,000 tons month after month)

Please re-read your post, specifically the portion about 13 million tons of steel
production being reduced to 1.5 million tons and leaving 11.5 million tons of
shipping. Like I said.., I don't think you said what you meant---but it is what
you said.

More importantly, what I said was that during the year 1941, Japan used 10
million tons of shipping. She used it even though Western Imports were "drying
up". I can't tell you for sure what or how much cargo was moved from where
to where with it. Could have been 50,000,000 tons in an average of 5 trips, or
100,000,000 in an average of 10 trips, or something in between. It IS how much
shipping Japan used during the last year of peace. So she was carrying some-
thing with it during that year. And something worth the "rental price" of 3.5
million tons of foriegn ships at a time when her exchequer was strained to the
utmost.

You speak of having "plenty of shipping available" in the game test. If that is
the case, something may be wrong with the figures used. One quick check is
that from the day the War began the ENTIRE Japanese Population was put on
severe rationing by calories (not the "meatless day' type of the US) based on
workload. If you contend that there was plenty of shipping, then why starve
your own people (on whom you were dependant for war support and production)
when there was plenty of food available in East Asia (which you quickly con-
quered)? Something in the situation doesn't seem to match up with the history.

[mogami]

Hi, OK what I meant was if Japan was using other nations merchant marine in pre war period once the Embargo went into effect she did not need 13 million tons of material shipped any longer. She still had the demand but not the supply so there was no loads for her merchants or other merchant marines to carry. This did not release 13 million tons or even 500,000 tons per month it did remove the requirement for that commitment to be met.

(If I normally need 5 helpers to carry in my grocerys but then the time comes I only have access to 1 load of grocerys I can carry it myself.

If 3 of my helpers are now hostile even if I then get access to 50 loads of grocerys I can only move 3. So I have to limit my diet to what I can carry home. I have to learn to make each load last for the interval between trips.
But I'm only starving if I need more then I can carry per trip in between trips.

If I can find a closer grocey then I can make more trips. I can even perhaps lose a helper in the process.

If prewar Japan required transport to move material from USA and distant ports.
And Once war begins she aquires access to same materials closer at hand she no longer has the need for as much shipping as before. The industrial potential might not be realized. This is not important as long as the industrial requirments meet the demands of the war. In the pre-war period Japanese industry produced 13 million tons of steel per year. This is what built the Kaga and Akagi, Zuikaku and Shokau, ands Yamato yaddya yaddya. When the embargo was placed there was no more "build 2 more Yamatos" but the Japanese ship building did not come to a crashing halt. (I'm sure there was a delay) Once more iron ore was aquired Japanese production began to raise. to a peak of nearly 8 million tons in 1944. The Peak output when the merchant fleet had been exposed to attack and breakdown and everything else. (The Japanese had begun moving material via rail and then shipping it shorter distances)

The major problem for Japanese shipping in 1944 was the food sources were all difficult to move to. Industry keep right on going (it was always under potentional so it is difficult to reduce further.)

Are you completly confused now??


The game has not been tested far enough to see if there is enough shipping. I limit my operations by what 1,000,000 lift points out of 2,250,000 lift points can do.

[Brady]

Can we expand the rail linkages durignthe war between given points?, or are we confined to prewar rail heads? If we are confined can we increase the available rolling stock on existing lines?

For example having to Ship across the yellow sea could be avoided if their was a good rail link from Southern Korea, to Manchuria...

[mogami]

Hi, At this point there is no rail construction

[Brady]

It would be an interesting adation, not to mention slave labor....Bridge on the river Kui(sp?) come to mind........