Raver is still too chicken to try being the red team, so I'll assume the burden, and he'll take his slapping for the first 18 months of the war before he gets to do any (when he does, he'll do the usual frightened Allied player tactic of sailing around with the Uber Death Star). Once again I will spread the peace and love of the IJ Empire across the Pacific, using group hugs, high fives, pats on the back, thoughtful counselling and Haiku. My officers will spend a lot of time talking about their emotions, and about their favourite colours (the colour discussion will be short - their favourite colour is the same as mine or they'll face the firing squad - red).
I also hope to activate the top secret easter egg code that got implemented during the top secret Gamma testing. That's right - assign the right leaders to each unit on the OOB in ascending order of their height - and fight like this for 2 years - and Japan gets 10 free nukes and a pair of Stealth Bombers in '44. [X(]
House Rules:
1. Jap player gets a free punch on turn 1 - complete surprise all throughout the theatre. Raver gets to move his CVs, order his Chinese armies around, that is it for turn 1. He gets to give orders turn 2.
2. I will not port attack anywhere except PH on turn 1. After that, if there is anybody dumb enough to be parked at Manila or Singapore, I'm squashing them. Don't care how realistic or not this might be.
3. No 4 engined bombers under 6000ft. Not that Raver ever does this anyway.
4. If I intend to attack Russia, i need to pre-activate them 2 weeks prior.
5. PDU is on, and we won't restrict it. Neither of us will abuse it to the point of being gamey, but is too useful to do without.
I'm still building the first turn (taking a very long time - I'm going to make this one perfect - production wise as well as combat wise) but I thought I'd start the AAR off with a few general thoughts and ideas on how I'm going to proceed. I'll start with strategic stuff, so as not to give away my top secret plan (we're going to declare war on the US on December 7th!!!!).
Production:
Using a different strategy this time - economise rather than expand.
In other games I've grown the economy to a monster that is never satisfied, never running at 100% and never providing everything I need. This time around I'm halting a lot of aircraft production to take advantage of auto factory upgrades - I'm halting a lot of aircraft production just because I don't seem myself using those aircraft types very much at all. I will restart them if I need them.
I am expanding smaller factories (anything under 10 gets expanded to 10) which will give me a marginal boost to my total economy, but a massive boost to its efficiency (smaller factories work more often due to availablility of smaller amounts of HI points etc.
I am setting up massive training facilities for the pilots of the aircraft types I'm not going to use very much of (those Nate pilots are going to be dangerous if they ever get into an Oscar down the line).
Engines is pretty straight forward - we all do the same here.
Direction:
I'm loving Pzb's crazy Indian invasion, and I've often wanted to do something just like it - but large scale insanity is Raver's forte. I'm hoping to expand the SRA a bit further than is traditional, say, but I don't intend to invade India en masse. December will be about Shock and Awe. Shock is at how rude this AAR will probably get when I spank Raver across the SRA, and Awe will be the part where you see Raver on the news theatening to throw himself off . . . well off some tall building in Melbourne (I'm assuming they've managed to build some tall ones) because I'm not playing nice. [:D]
On turn 1, I intend to invade the following bases:
