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Hi! I´ve experienced some strange turn, I play as Allies against AI, its Christmas of 41 and one japanese PB with AP came to the shore of Canton Is. PB fired few shells of "invasion support", than I´ve got report that "TF 184 troops unloading over beach at Canton Is." with no further details. Next day, japanese TF is two hexes away from Canton and it seems that no Japs are on the island. What was that? Japanese diversion tactics ? Fog of war (though it seems strange not to see enemy troops on 14 km atol )? Anything else? Any idea from much more experienced player?

Sounds like they were repulsed or destroyed on the beach.  Normally you should get a full report but sometimes it's just a short note that flashes by on the screen and there's no backup in the combat reports screen.

I had one instance in my game where the Japanese AI invaded Canton Island & the enemy troops did not show up on the map (those crafty Japanese must have been masters of camouflage). However, I was able to assign combat orders to my troops on Canton Island so I knew that the enemy troops must have been present. I bombarded them & then they showed up on the map on the following turn.

There is only one USN base force unit so if they are there somewhere, I'll lose Canton, which is pain. I didn't expect them so early. Reinf are already on their way but it seems that it will be too late. I really wanted to hold that island. Anyway, thanks for sharing your experience!

ORIGINAL: murphys35

There is only one USN base force unit so if they are there somewhere, I'll lose Canton, which is pain. I didn't expect them so early. Reinf are already on their way but it seems that it will be too late. I really wanted to hold that island. Anyway, thanks for sharing your experience!

I wouldn't worry too much. The Japanese AI has a tendency to send vastly inadequate forces to try to snatch random bases. That mostly provides you an opportunity to kill them. If the invasion force doesn't capture the base right away, it's probably too small to do it at all.

that combatReporter app will sometimes catch those 'flash-by' msgs for retrieval by date. or you can look in your game's SAVE dir for the "Combat_Events_<yymmdd>.txt file for that date.

Speaking of SAVE files, is it okay to delete those? My SAVE file is starting to build up quite a bit of them.

combatReport needs all those txt files, but if you don't use it, you can move or delete them at your pleasure.
tracker reads the pws files, & adds the info from them to its own database file, so you can move or delete those at your pleasure ('cept for the current one!)

but tracker will hork on occaision, in which case you need all the past pws files to rebuild its database from scratch.

wrt the original post, those troops might still be on Canton - a NavSearch plane won't notice them, you'd need to recon the specific hex (sometimes for several turns, esp. w/ low recon skill) to get a radar-return from them. or you could just land-bomb the place, & see if you cause any casualties!

So, after another turn after the invasion (?), still no Japanese presence or activity is reported. Well, we will see...

In some situations an amph TF will reload the assault group if the defenders are considered too powerful. It's a force comparison of some kind - so if the AI is landing a tiny, potentially already disrupted LCU fragment even a base unit might scare it off. (I suspect that the AI sometimes doesn't realize a previous invasion didn't work, so when it comes back to land the support parts of the assault LCU this can happen multiple times).

The message doesn't appear in the OP report as far as I know. It flashes up during the landing phase "Such and such reembarks".

That is my guess at least. Besides being a bug I guess it could also be a supply TF with no actual troops, but I haven't paid enough attention to the specific wording on amph supply only unload screens.