ORIGINAL: Feltan
The issue isn't the effectiveness of the artillery, nor even guns wearing out (which they would) -- rather, it is an issue of doctrine and logistics in general.
The Japanese military historically was not trained for mass fires. Like most countries (other than the U.S. and U.K.), the Japanese did not have the concept of a Fire Direction Center (FDC) that could concentrate the fires of multiple units on a single target. Each unit had a Forward Observer that used a common point of reference to direct fire (i.e., I see the church steeple, you see the church steeple, aim at 320 degrees 3 KM from said point). A single artillery unit normally supported a single ground maneuver unit. This is primarily the method used by the Japanese, Germans, Russians and most other countries during this period. A corallary to this was a planned fire scheme that was based on pre-sited coordinates. The aforementioned doctrine is effective and simple, it doesn't require detailed maps, it doesn't require radio communication (normally used land line) but precludes the effective quick massing of fire. Hence, the effect of multiple regiments of artillery in a Japanese attack would not be equal to the sum of the parts -- each added unit would only add a fraction of its strength to the attack. Perhaps a simple way to model this would be to restrict the number of artillery units to the number of land units, with no more than a regiment of artillery per infantry division in support.
The logistics is a bit more straight forward. Units normally did not stockpile enough ammo for multi-day bombardments. However -- they could and sometimes did. I agree witht he postings that state a heftier supply consumption is in order. It is. I don't have a handy reference to state what a normal Japanese basic load consisted of -- but I would venture to guess it was no more than several dozen rounds per tube. Enough for sustain fire for a few hours at most. More could be brought in, but we are talking a more substantial logistic effort than is portrayed in the game. For a dozen artillery regiments, we are talking a significant tonnage of shells for a multi-day sustained bombardment. The game currently doesn't do a good job of modelling this.
Lastly, one could safely assume within the context of the game -- if mulitple tons of supply were being shipped in to support a bombardment, that some small percentage of that tonnage would be replacement tubes for the guns. Such an item is major end item replacement, and is generally part of the supply chain. So, I don't see a special problem with that issue once the logistics is made more realistic.
Regards,
Feltan
Have you read Nomonhan? I was actually surprised at the "sophistication" of IJA Artillery capability presented in that story. Certainly not "modern mobile battle" capable - but multiple artillery units operating together at least. Perhaps Nomonhan is mostly "Russian versus Japanese" a la a WWI capability - but the Nomonhan example is not one that would be familiar with those who only known about IJA artillery capabilities as demonstrated in the "Pacific" sense there were very few cases of massed IJA artillery in the Pacific!
As to logistics, a basic calculation for 105mm would be, 33 lbs per round, 4 rounds per minute (sustained rate of fire), 50 minutes per hour sustained. This results in 200 rounds per hour or 6600 pounds per hour or 3.3 tons per hour. If a WITP/AE supply point is one "ton" then this would be 3.3 supply points per hour. So then if we assume a game "bombardment" is 2 hours long, then this would be 6.6 supply points per tube per bombardment. Or for an artillery park (about 4 regiments worth) of 100 tubes, this would be 660 supply points per bombardments.
In some of the examples we see in this thread, the cost would be 2 to 4 times this amount. Also we might want to factor in the supply cost of getting the rounds to the guns. If any mechanized transport is used this cost could be a significant amount.
But a case can thus be made for dramtically increasing the supply cost of "bombardments" and I'm sure this will be considered for the future.
In the interim, if players see too much concentration of artillery, they can try a combination of house rules and also spreading out of the defenders to avoid concentrated targets for concentrations of artillery.
