request for ideas

[el cid again]

The only effective area of cooperation in military operations between European and Asian Axis powers
was in the matter of submarine (and related raider and blockade running) operations (giving credit to
Norman Polmar in the indtroduction to his Submarines of the Imperial Japanese Navy) for this assertion.
Because it is interesting chrome, and of slight operational significance - RHS included these subs and
raiders in WITP and here - thanks to Mifune - we also got all the transports and tankers - with the exception
that I left out (in both cases) the transport submarines - having no way to model shipping rubber,
tin, quinine (the main things) and a bit of gold to Europe from Japan. Going the other way came some
plans and weapons and even jigs.

Now it is perfectly true there are numbers of Japanese sub transports in the game already - and Italian
and German ones might be used in theater as they are. But that is both ahistorical (basically - a few
did get commissioned in IJN late in the war) - and does not model the effects of getting stuff out of theater.
Nor, on the inbound trip, of getting stuff into the theater.

I wonder if there is any way to do something about either of these effects - which would justify including these
vessels in my mind.

FYI - our German (and any Italian) subs appear at the SE map corner (at a location called Amsterdam Island -
located in the correct hex) - so they do not get a "free transit" of the Indian Ocean as was the case in RHS WITP
and some other mods. Granted they were based at Panang Island or Singapore - they did not start at either -
obviously. Here we force them to transit - and have an understanding Amsterdam will not be occupied and turned
into an Allied base. It is useless for an airfield, and almost useless as a port - it is a volcanic rock the only attempt
to work for any purpose (raising cattle) failed utterly. It is just a place for the subs to appear - not refuel or repair.
All the raiders and transports start on the map already - they came before the Pacific war began - and the only thing
to add is the Italian subs - which - never mind how they were at launch - are all transport subs when they reach the
theater. The Italians were rather good at that sort of op - more successful than either the Germans or Japanese -
an odd case.

My ideas along these lines include creating a "Europe" at Amsterdam which cannot be attacked or constructed -
which needs resources - and ONLY Axis subs can feed it - IF they succeed - Japan gets HI points. Otherwise,
we might have an inbound sub carry something - just what is not clear - to simulate weapons imports. As they did
send Me-262s, maybe we make development of that plane dependent on arrival of the designated delivery vessel?
Or maybe some kind of weapons - in the formm of a langu nit - defined similar to Allied "weapons pools"???

[inqistor]

I am not sure fuel expeditures will be worth extra HI points.

Have you checked how "convoys" work? Is this possible to define some for Japan?
I was actually wondering, if it is possible to script some engines in convoy. It is possible to drop planes there, but engines seems to be more general option.

So, if those Axis submarines would be defined as convoy (sinkable), with additional, commonly used plane engines, it would be worth to risk them.

If convoy do not work, maybe it is possible to create fake LCU with engines as its Devices? And then the possibility to disband such LCU in Tokyo, to get those engines to pool.