Japan's best oil routes

[Marshall]

I was wondering if there was a best oil route for japan roadmap.
How to get the oil safely out of DEI and Rangoon area
It has to be shipped, so far I relied on hubs, from DEI to Manila, then from Manila to Japan.
I ship the oil, but I know some just ship the fuel out, does this not affect the Japanese industry, doesn't it need oil as well?

Basically I want to ship out as much oil, as efficient and safe as possible from allied subs.

[nashvillen]

You want to ship fuel first.

[bartrat]

Ship fuel first as suggested above.
Make convoys with escorts (with antisub ratings).
ASW air patrols along routes
Naval search along routes (INCLUDE night patrols also)
Route convoys along coastal hexes.
Make sure ports expanded so you can dock ships.
Unload at ports with refinery if possible (unloads faster).
Convert xAK to tankers (if you have any to do so).

[Chickenboy]

Hi Marshall,

Oil and resources to not spoil and are not degraded by movement across the continental landmass of Asia (e.g., Southern China). They can be transported to Hong Kong (or Canton) and will magically, mystically appear in Port Arthur sometime later. Doing this with fuel or supply will result in some losses in transit. So, yes, having separate resource / oil dropoffs makes sense.

You can, of course, ship in oil / fuel / resources directly to the home islands or you can break it down for separate drop off points if you prefer. Fuel should probably be brought in directly to the HI, resources / oil needn't be brought in immediately, but can be transited through an intermediary port closer to the source. For those HI shipments, Fukuoka, Shimonoseki or Hiroshima serve well, as you can dock all but the most grotesquely large TF there and unload faster. Smaller TFs can go to Nagasaki or some of the smaller ports on Kyushu.

We go 'round and round' on the value of oil versus fuel shipments. My opinion is that both are critically important-equally so. Fuel is necessary for heavy industry production in the home islands. Oil is important for refining to fuel with the extra little bit of supply that's produced by that as well. You'll find that having some supply from refining oil in the home islands is nothing but good and will be very important in the mid-late game.

Summary: get all of it. Oil and fuel are equally critically important. Slightly different functions, but something you don't want to leave behind for the Allied dogs to recover or restrict access to.

[erstad]

Doing this with fuel or supply will result in some losses in transit.

You sure? I thought this was true of supply but not fuel.

[SenToku]

I would not ferry fuel directly to Home islands. Reason is that none of the DEI fuel producers have really good ports (Java is expection, but is minor producer). This would mean that you haul fuel in convoys sized less than 50k tons total or load in non-docked mode and to protect every convoy you would have to tie huge number of escorts to them.

Alternative, like Chikenboy said, is to use drop-off point. Saigon (connected with rail to Haiphong, which in turn can be built to size 9) is one alternative. You need fewer small convoys if you connect all you fuel producing points here and then pick the dropped fuel from Haiphong with larger convoys heading to Shimonoseki along chinese coast (shallow all the way). Also Saigon-Haiphong has advantage of having seperate drop-off and pick-up ports thus you do not have large number of convoys in single port overloading it.

[pharmy]

ORIGINAL: erstad

Doing this with fuel or supply will result in some losses in transit.

You sure? I thought this was true of supply but not fuel.

I've seen this quoted "95. Gameplay Change: Removed the wastage of resources/oil/fuel during overland movement." not sure which patch. I think 1.00.9 something

Having all the oil/fuel/resources flowing back overland from Burma/Singers all the way to Fusan eliminates, to me, one of the (supposedly) major challenges of the game, getting the HI supplied with enough raw materials fast enough while having to run through a gauntlet of submarines?.Especially when in 43 most of the US subs will start getting more effective torpedoes. Based on the many AARs I've read nobody really seems to run out of raw materials in 44 anyway, as Japanese ASW is too effective and the merchant fleet is oversized. If they eliminated wastage by overland movement and since it seems that oil for example has no problem traveling all the way even through such road and rail-less gaps as the one between Burma and Thailand, Thailand and Vietnam and the one in Southern China, then surely it is the final nail in the coffin of a never been quite effective economic warfare aspect of the game. If major convoy shipping is eliminated from the SRA to the HI, then I think the AFBs might have a case for working US torpedoes to try to somehow balance out the situation before their subs find no targets. There will still be short convoys running throughout the DEI, but their limited geographical area, and the ease of plugging entrances to it, make your opponents task much harder. Barricading the whole China Sea is much harder. My current PBEM is 3 months away from 43 and my opponent is eagerly awaiting the end of his endless dud frustrations. If he finds no targets I think he might just go completely mad.

Sentoku's suggestion of Saigon-Haiphong is not the type of overland "magical" movement I wrote of above, I think with a rail line that is perfectly in keeping with historical and original gameplay intents. I was writing of the way oil/fuel seems to move even across the border from Vietnam, to South China on roads and then, especially if Changsha is not in Japanese hands, on minor and major roads all the way to Shanghai and beyond. In the War in the East forum a lot of people debated what Hitler could have achieved with the Caucasus oil fields, since Germany would have had no real way to ship the oil back to its own refineries, in the Pacific theater there was no debate, Japan got the oil fields it wanted, but historically ran out of oil and fuel in the HI due to the loss of their shipping

[Chickenboy]

ORIGINAL: icepharmy

I've seen this quoted "95. Gameplay Change: Removed the wastage of resources/oil/fuel during overland movement." not sure which patch. I think 1.00.9 something

Interesting. Was that from one of the betas or an official patch?

[EHansen]

ORIGINAL: Chickenboy

ORIGINAL: icepharmy

I've seen this quoted "95. Gameplay Change: Removed the wastage of resources/oil/fuel during overland movement." not sure which patch. I think 1.00.9 something

Interesting. Was that from one of the betas or an official patch?

Second official update, dated November 7, 2009