Invading North America

[Lonewolf]

While playing as Japanese in the 1922 campaign, I have managed to invade North America after about 3 game months.

First I captured Dutch Harbor and use it as a refuelling base. Then I capture Prince Rupert hoping that I can march my unit to Vancouver but that did not work out too well. I ended up shipping my units to the coastline 2 hexes north of Vancouver and march the rest of the way. I have managed to capture Vancouver after a few days of ground combat. Here are some questions:

- You can use auto convoy for Prince Rupert, but you cannot do that for Vancouver. Do I have to ship everything over from Tokyo? Or Canada supplies will flow to me?
- I remembered in the old Uncommon Valor campaigns that if certain bases are captured; the game will end. eg. If Allies capture Truk or Japan captured Noumea. Is there any similar condition for WPO?

[Helpless]

ORIGINAL: Lonewolf

- You can use auto convoy for Prince Rupert, but you cannot do that for Vancouver. Do I have to ship everything over from Tokyo? Or Canada supplies will flow to me?
- I remembered in the old Uncommon Valor campaigns that if certain bases are captured; the game will end. eg. If Allies capture Truk or Japan captured Noumea. Is there any similar condition for WPO?

is that ai game? [;)]

- You can ship supplies to the point where they can move by valid path. Don't know if auto convoy will work - never use it.

- No. Imho, you have to capture all the bases for the game to end. Beside that there is no auto victory condition as in WITP. By capturing SF you will disable all US reinforcements.

[Zakhal]

I suggest trying a pbem game instead with 3 day cycles. Youll get a challenge, the game is much more interesting and with 3 days per turn its also fast enough to actually see som action (and you will still be young when the game ends).

Also if you are a new player I suggest taking the allies. That way you can afford plenty of mistakes.

[JagdFlanker]

i was curious about the 2 or 3 day turns - do the ships move 2 or 3 days in a row, or are the reinforcements just speeded up due to the dates moving faster? i definatly want to play with 2 day turns next time, but 3 day turns almost sounds crazy...

[Zakhal]

ORIGINAL: Flanker Leader

i was curious about the 2 or 3 day turns - do the ships move 2 or 3 days in a row, or are the reinforcements just speeded up due to the dates moving faster? i definatly want to play with 2 day turns next time, but 3 day turns almost sounds crazy...

3 turns is not crazy at all. You just have to plan the moves three days ahead. Where are you ships going to be and what are they going to do the next three days with these orders? Often though it takes atleast 2 days for the ships to travel and 3rd day is the battle so its quite easy.

So its totally possible and more realistic propably even. Its hard to imagine that in real 1920s war the supreme commander was able to micromanage every unit every day.

I was first having second thougts too but now I totally dig it. And yes there is three (or two) days for each turn (and nothing else).

[JagdFlanker]

well, my new game partner just sent me a new game with 3 day turns so i'm about to find out! looking forward to it!

[Lonewolf]

That is an AI game.
 
Considering that you are in the 1920s hence there is no search planes with a range longer than 2 hexes; it is not very hard to sneak out there. I have not played in PBEM but I don't think that will be too hard. With the forces available for the allies, you cannot cover everywhere. The worst outcome is serious loses of ships and men and possibly the game, that is all.
 
My next goals are capturing Seattle and Portland, maybe that United States base inland. With the limited amount of ground forces Japan has in the early part of the war, there will be no quick ending. Else where I am attacking around the Malay peninsula and Indonesia. Maybe I can walk to India later on.

[engineer]

This is a place where the absence of a "Hearts of Iron" event structure really hurts. For an expeditionary campaign across the Pacific, the USA would mobilize divisions and deploy them as they got ready. Whether the game schedule is too slow or too fast is arguable, but it's clearly a reasonable approximation. However, if a major US city fell to Japanese troops (or a major Canadian city for that matter), the mobilization in the respective nation would kick into high gear. The Japanese victory at Seattle would lead to 30 additional divisions entering the field between 90 and 180 days after the loss of the city. A Japanese victory in Vancouver would have nearly the same effect as Canadian and British troops would see rapid mobilization and end up coming across the Canadian Pacific railway. That sort of mobilization by Great Britain and the USA just isn't in the reinforcement schedule for a war that us usually fought far from the centers of their power.

[Helpless]

ORIGINAL: engineer

This is a place where the absence of a "Hearts of Iron" event structure really hurts. For an expeditionary campaign across the Pacific, the USA would mobilize divisions and deploy them as they got ready. Whether the game schedule is too slow or too fast is arguable, but it's clearly a reasonable approximation. However, if a major US city fell to Japanese troops (or a major Canadian city for that matter), the mobilization in the respective nation would kick into high gear. The Japanese victory at Seattle would lead to 30 additional divisions entering the field between 90 and 180 days after the loss of the city. A Japanese victory in Vancouver would have nearly the same effect as Canadian and British troops would see rapid mobilization and end up coming across the Canadian Pacific railway. That sort of mobilization by Great Britain and the USA just isn't in the reinforcement schedule for a war that us usually fought far from the centers of their power.

Similar events are in WPO/WITP.

WPO Manual p. 120
If Japanese ground units move east of column 132 (inclusive), then all American and Canadian air and ground
reinforcements will have their delay reduced by 180 days. Also, several U.S. infantry divisions will become
immediately available.

[engineer]

Cool, thanks, I missed that.  Now I just have to take a closer look at the map and see how far east the 132 row goes. 

Ah, Row 132 is a couple hexes west of Vancouver. So Alaska is fair game for the Japanese, but moving on Vancouver or the lower 48 states "pokes the bear" and speeds up US/Canadian reinforcements.

[Lonewolf]

Just to check out whether those extra infantry divisions exist or not, I am thinking of loading up the saved games as Allies. It will not change my Japanese game plan but at least I can find out whether the page 120 information is true or not. No change to my plan anyway since I have about 50% of my infantry in North America already and all of my air units. Even if computer Allies pushed my back into the Pacific Ocean, it will be a worthwhile fight. Banzai!

[Lonewolf]

Loading up the saved games as Allies shows that there are a few extra infantry divisions down in Los Angeles area and 1 Canadian (3000+ infantry) in the Vancouver area. Not much in Portland yet, just that Engineer division.
 
That will certainly be a problem especially the now reinforced Canadian (3 infantry divisions) are sitting outside Vancouver ready for counterattack. Fortunately I have around 50000 Japanese troops in defense. As for the siege of Seattle, I have around 70000+ Japanese troops. If I manage to capture Seattle and eliminate those Canadian divisions, I'll probably try to capture Portland and dig in.
 
There is 1 Japanese city that is not defended by defaut, it is called Mayasuma or something like that. It is located across the inland sea near Nagasaki. Attacking that place as the Allies can certainly be interesting.[:'(]

[engineer]

The lack of detail in North America usually isn't a problem since play doesn't take place there.  If, however, the Japanese embarked on a serious campaign the base structure in the USA warps the likely course of events.  Some places for all intents and purposes didn't exist yet (Las Vegas, Phoenix, Riverside), but I think it's plausible that potential bases should exist in places like:  Spokane WA, Yakima WA, Astoria OR, Coos Bay OR, Eureka CA, Salem OR, Redding CA, Sacramento CA, Bakersfield CA, Carson City NV, Elko NV, Rock Springs WY, Cheyenne WY Salt Lake City UT, Pocatello ID, Yuma AZ, Denver CO, Helena MT, Billings MT, Albuquerque NM, Flagstaff AZ and Phoenix AZ at least as a 0 air base with a chance to build out to a 3 to 6.  Most of these towns are either population centers in their own right on the left coast or towns along the major railways leading back to US heartland.  In a continental war they would form a chain of potential air bases for the USAAS to operate from.  The Colorado River and Columbia Rivers need to be added.  The Snake, Willamette, Rogue, Umpqua, Missouri, and Sacramento Rivers wouldn't hurt  The USA supply head is on the original transcontinental railway that leads back to the Midwest and the industrial US heartland.  However, there were three other major east-west railways by the 1920s.  The Northern Pacific crossed the Dakotas and went to the Pacific Northwest.  Two other railways essentially paralleled present Interstate 40 and Interstate 10.  The former went across the lower Great Plains and the latter leading to Texas. Eisenhower took months to cross the USA by road with a detachment of military trucks in the 1920s so the road net is appropriately primitive.   

[Lonewolf]

Since this is a wargame and players (like me) may try some crazy stunts that will never make it to the real war plan orange, therefore some details in the North America continent will be nice. It may takes months by road in the 1920s but the railway should be better develop. There should be some provision for local militia equal to the modern day national guards. However I am not an expert in this subject to even say whether they existed back then.

Vice versa if the Allies invade the main islands of Japan, they will not be able to establish anything more than a foothold. There are enough Japanese ground troops on the main islands to repel any landing.

[engineer]

Unfortunately I'm awash in that sort of historical detail. 
 
- Most of the contemporary interstates parallel railway right of ways for much of the way in the western USA since the railway engineers had already scouted the best grades through the mountains. 
 
- The towns I mentioned above.  While the interior west was relatively depopulated in the 1920s, the railways had put depots every 100 miles along the rails to water and refuel their locomotives, and towns grew up around those depots.  That leads to a plausible potential base every-other hex along the railroads leading east.   
 
- The state militias had been integrated in the National Guard by the 1920s.  Many of the divisions that show up in the WPO reinforcement schedule are mobilized National Guard formations. 
 
- The US war plans for the 1920s envisaged the creation of five armies with about forty divisions total and an air corps of about twelve squadrons attached to each army and an extra air corps attached directly to the AEF headquarters.  Each division and corps was also to be assigned a squadron of observation planes.  Heavy bombers, navy squadrons, and marine squadrons were over and above that.  That adds up to a potential USAAS of 120 squadrons instead of the 20 or 30 squadrons that are in WPO. 
 
- Given the Spanish-American War veterans, Philippine Insurrection vets, WW1 veterans, and broad firearms ownership, your observation about a spontaneous militia parallels my thoughts.  I don't know how to get into the existing code about Japanese moving east of the 132 hex row, but that would be a logical place to create some of these "Volunteer" formations with a new US Volunteer Infantry squad (a slightly lower soft and hard attack to reflect poorer training and abstracted poorer staff work in the adhoc higher formations) that would show up in major cities and be attached to a restricted headquarters so they don't readily become available for overseas deployment. I suspect that the local governors would tell Washington to pound sand, raise the formations on their own in immediate response to the imminent threat of a foreign invasion, and then Congress would federalize them to put them into the chain of command via the War Department. 
 
- The other point that I don't have any idea how to code would be the incessant guerrilla warfare that widely armed US civilians would wage on a foreign occupier.   One idea might be to make any Japanese unit east of the 132 row take attrition as though it was in a Malaria zone to reflect the insurgency that would be taking place below the horizon that WPO covers.    
 
- Given the historical Japanese preparations against a possible invasion in WW2, there is a parallel logic that once Korea or Okinawa are no longer under Japanese control, militia units would be organized throughout the Home Islands of Japan (to the detriment of conventional unit production and supply generation).      
 
- My Western Citadel Mod (nearly complete to the original scope) is set in the late scenario. It keeps the WPO ground reinforcements but adds massive USAAC reinforcements per the historical war plans, adds the Columbia River as far as the Dalles, and adds some additional west coast ports (Astoria, Coos Bay, Eureka, and Monterrey).  Astoria was a must add since with no Washington Treaty, Astoria's ship building industry doesn't shut down following WW1 and the Portland shipyards get rolled in Astoria.
 

[engineer]

Mrs. Engineer, a Spokane native, chuckled at the notion of a vast forest between the Cascades and the Rockies.  I searched her National Geographic map set and found a North American Map from 1924 that is perfect for WPO.  It's hard to know where to start on the modifications that would be needed to make things right. 
 
1)  The RR from Vancouver to Prince Rupert is too close to the sea.  It swung far inland before going into Prince Rupert.  This makes any assault more difficult since you have to march overland from the invasion beaches to Vancouver. 
2)  The Canadian-Pacific RR isn't anywhere to be seen.  Furthermore, Canada had a pretty dense rail net for the first hundred miles north of the 49th Parallel east of the Rockies.  Calgary and Regina are missing bases.
3)  There should be a rail line piercing the Cascades for the Northern Pacific RR and Spokane becomes a rail hub where three lines running west to the coast meet three different lines that cross the Rockies in Northern Idaho.
4)  Another rail line traces the road that pretty much runs along the old Oregon Trail.
5)  This is actually a pretty common feature in the NA map.  Most of the roads that are shown (Up the coast north of Mare Island and the Central Valley in California) are actually rail lines.  I would upgrade those to rail lines. 
6)  The coastal RR from LA to Mare Island runs along the coast to San Luis Obispo and then jags inland to run north only to touch the coast again between Monterey and Santa Cruz just south of Mare Island.  A spur connected the Presidio Monterey to the main line.
7)  The jag to the south at San Diego is correct.  The Southern Pacific RR from Yuma to San Diego dipped into Mexico and stopped at Tijuana before going into San Diego.  I don't know what Mexican-American relations were like in the 1920s.  In WW2 Mexico joined the Allies and even sent a fighter squadron of Lend-Lease Thunderbolts to fight in the Pacific.  But it might be an idea to turn Mexico into unplayable terrain for WPO.  The coastal plain at San Diego is too wide, the mountains should be adjacent to the coast hexes there.   
8) The Santa Fe RR running along the current I-40 route that meets the RR from the USA base near Barstow CA.  Another RR climbs out of LA to San Bernadino along the current route of I-10.  It forks and one branch heads SE to Yuma while the other goes north skirting the mountains to link up with Santa Fe. 
9)  There was even a third north/south RR line running from the Union Pacific RR east of the Sierra Nevadas down to Barstow.  I've seen abandoned tracks where a spur from this line went into Death Valley to haul out the borax that was being mined there.  (They didn't use the mule teams further than necessary). 
10)  I always figured the USA base as Denver given it's location relative to the mountains, but when you count the miles east on the Union Pacific RR, it comes out closer to being Salt Lake City.  That means the mountains should be east of town (the Wasatch Range).  A RR runs north to intersect the road/RR near Pocatello. 
11)  Back up in the Northwest, the terrain between the Cascades and the Rockies should be clear and another mountain range, (the Blues) should parallel the Washington/Oregon border.  South of the Blues, that should be clear terrain instead of forest. 
12)  And then there's the Snake River valley that seems to go through what shows up as mountains in WPO. 
13)  Alaska was shown with a RR from Anchorage to Fairbanks.  The RR from Anchorage over towards Seward was shown as proposed. 
14)  Population-wise, Nevada and Arizona were only about 75k total in the 1920 census.  California was about 4 million, Washington was over 1 million, Oregon was about 750k.  My estimate is that any sort of US volunteer formations can't exceed about 2-3% of the total population without significantly effecting production.  The coastal states could mobilize about a dozen brigades of 2nd rate infantry, the interior states would probably raise a cavalry regiment each (the Arizona Volunteers (better known as the "Rough Riders") rise again!).   However, these forces would allow garrisons at all the west coast ports and over time, the fortification levels would top out.
 
I'm tweaking in the northwest for rail and terrain and will probably fix the rail and base nets for Western Citadel.  The artwork and WPOHex edits for the western third of the USA look pretty daunting to me.  The checking features on EditorX are great for keeping things consistent and correct in this sort of exercise.

[Lonewolf]

I have managed to capture Seattle and that 4 coastal guns just south of it. Not easy at all. You have to Shock Attack a couple of turns, wait a few turns to reduce the fatique, then attack again.

My next plan is Portland which should be easier because it is lightly defended. Then I will start pushing down towards Mare Island. I'll have to decimate what left of the Seattle defenders somehow. However I doubt I'll ever have enough troops to take out Mare Island. It will probably months in game turn to get more troops in to do that job.

[engineer]

I took a stab at filling in some detail on the USA per the NG map referenced above. When confronted with the paradox that the map in WPO is compressed (distortions are inevitable at the edges of 2D projection of the 3D globe), I elected to try keep the right proportions between landmarks in the N/S axis and held to the 60 mile/hex scale in the E/W axis. (For example, it's only 6 hexes from Portland to Mare Island - 360 miles - but take a look at an atlas and 10-11 hexes would be a better figure). Given that ground operations are most likely around Puget Sound, I did dig into the artwork and modified Washington and Oregon to align better to the topography so we have plains east of the Cascades, and added the Cascades in Oregon along with the Blues and some mountains along the Oregon/California border. (I am not a great "Paint" artist).

My Western Citadel mod will incorporate this map and the WPOHex has been updated to reflect this map. EditorX was a lifesaver to catch inconsistencies and about forty minor issues from stock WPO have been cleaned up. (These were mostly along the map edges and some coast line mismatches where one side would point to a ground hex while the other side of the coastline pointed to a "both" hex-side).

This screen-shot is the USA. The following posts include updated Canada and Alaska.

[engineer]

Here is the map for Canada and Northern Great Plains. Note that Winnipeg just barely fits on the map off the right top edge of this image.

[engineer]

This one has the least changes. Juneau and Sitka get labels. The rail line goes all the way to Anchorage and up to Fairbanks. Cordova (where the rail line in Alaska touched the sea) gets a small port. Skagway and Whitehorse (which were linked by a rail road) are added. If production was enabled resources would be coming out of the interior to the ports, but that's beyond the scope in WPO.