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The problem with the Japanese wiping out India and the Convoy system are interlinked.

The UK starts with 105 Merchants and the US with 43.

The UK cannot receive production and oil from its allies if it doesn't have the Indian Ocean route open.
25 Merchants are needed to just handle Imports to the UK.
And, of course the US can't get anything to India or UK unless it has Merchants in the Indian Ocean.

What seems to be broke:

Subs are useless as raiders. The at start Escorts are more than capable of handling Japan's subs.
Surface ships are just slightly above useless for raiding the routes.
Land Based Air can get regular hits but usually average about 50% hit chance.

Which doesn't matter because fleet CV's are hell on wheels. Kido Butai can sit on the Indian Ocean convoy lane while supporting the taking of Ceylon and destroy the entire Allied Merchant fleet in a few turns. Combined with the CVL fleet camping the route while blocking the port of Bombay they can take out close to 20 merchants per turn on average.

The UK and US will have no choice but to shut down their convoys under these kind of attacks. With India cut off from production and oil they will quickly collapse. Ceylon will be taken easily. With LBA moved their to give the carriers protection the small US carrier fleet can't possibly challenge them to open the routes.

To fix the conquest of India problem both Convoys and India defenses have to be fixed together.

I don't have any great ideas on how to do this for the Convoys.
I do think subs need to be a little more effective to make them worth building.
I do think the escort vs sub system needs some improvement.
The Allies probably need Merchants already in the build queue to offset early losses.

But Carriers are a problem. Historically Japanese carriers would never spend their time chasing cargo ships. I don't know whether that is because its beneath a "warrior" or they couldn't afford to waste fuel doing it. But if a carrier group of six fleet groups decided to camp on a convoy route I could see them doing hellish damage.

But I also suspect that as soon as they sank 2 or 3 the rest of the cargo ships at sea would immediately return to the nearest port and wait for the carriers to have to go refuel. We shouldn't see this massive cargo ship kill. It should be more like a disruption in supplies moving on the route.

But even a disruption of convoys would kill India. India starts with an internal production of only 45. Most of what it needs to build up its forces comes from the UK and US. 45 will barely keep up with attrition from the Japanese offensive. When Calcutta and Ceylon fall it will be around 30. Things fall apart quickly after that.

Allies can try to play cat and mouse for a while turning on and off the convoys to keep the Japanese guessing when they can rest their fleets or raid the lanes. But it only delays the fall of India at the expense of their merchant fleets.

I love questions like these. Without getting into the particulars, I would like to suggest that a few general questions must be asked.

1. Is it possible to accomplish the tactic or tactics in question in a historically accurate, real-world setting? Can the Japanese or any navy keep the kind of units in question on station or in port as suggested? If yes, proceed.

2. Is it possible for a leader (Yamamomo, Nimitz, The War Production Board, the emperor) to overcome the societal hurdles in question? If yes, then proceed with possibly some kind of statistical hit as to the outcome considering that people will be people.

An example might be suicidal behavior. One of the first suicidal actions in the Pacific was an American flyer who crashed his crippled plane into a Japanese destroyer. The Germans at the end of the war tried to recruit enough pilots for a suicide unit but failed. The Soviets tried and succeeded to do the same earlier in the war. Although not a designed suicidal attack, the Taran tactic was essentially a suicide mission.

3. Is there any way, within the current rules set, to realistically and historically use the proposed counter tactics? If not, then change the rules.

4. If it would be possible at some future date, to accomplish or defeat a certain tactic with technological advances, then let those advances be chosen for research at some determined price.

I once read a very long, short story written in an Alternate History Forum. The premise was that the author was writing an alternate history of World War Two. He was telling tale after tale of the most ridiculous situations you could ever imagine. Just the stupidest and most unrealistic things imaginable such as, a fictitious army created using rubber tanks, planes, and artillery pieces along with a disinformation campaign, that worked.

Or having the Soviets hide and move millions of troops, thousands of tanks and planes and their supplies over 3000 miles from Moscow, using a one-track railroad in the time period of under 4 months, a totally ridiculous premise if there ever was one. Everyone knows the Soviets were logistical idiots.

Yet these and hundreds of others are true but would have been deemed impossible in any WW2 forum if they had not happened.

I believe that many unrealistic situations are caused by the victory conditions, such as parachuting a unit in at the last moment to take Berlin.

In the beta testing of WPE one enterprising tester, who’s initials begin with GW Gardner, ran the entire length of the Black Sea from Romania, with an invasion force of one Division (as I recall) and landed behind a significant Soviet force and really messed me up. To make matters worse he had the blessing of the game’s designer.

Anyway, I digress.

There are new things being discussed in a closed beta about a new mechanic that by chance addresses this indirectly.

I ended up moving the convoy lanes in my test scenario. Otherwise they MS just get pounded into dust in no time.

Removing the Japanese oilers helped that alot...I used to get to the US convoy lane on turn 3 and sink 10 to 20 MS...then they would stop...


What the US or UK would do is move their shipping lanes further away...BUT that would make the trip take more time.
Sadly there is no mechanic for that.

ORIGINAL: kennonlightfoot


Historically Japanese carriers would never spend their time chasing cargo ships. I don't know whether that is because its beneath a "warrior" or they couldn't afford to waste fuel doing it. But if a carrier group of six fleet groups decided to camp on a convoy route I could see them doing hellish damage.

In March-April 1942 as an adjunct to the Indian Ocean raid the Japanese did send a CVL task force to conduct a commerce sweep in the Bay of Bengal. The raiding force was commanded by Admiral Jisaburo Ozawa and consisted of the light carrier Ryujo, six cruisers, and four destroyers supported by a force of five submarines. There was no meaningful opposition and Ozawa's force sank 23 Allied merchant ships.

However, that's probably about the only instance in the war in which the Japanese did effective commerce raiding. Carriers or no.

The reason the current Convoy system creates so many problems is you can attack it at almost no risk. Both the US and UK have to use the Indian Ocean convoy route or India dies. Japanese usually take Ceylon and use it as a platform to camp the Indian route with plenty of LBA cover. The UK and US have the choice of watching their Merchant fleet melt away or cut off India. Either choice fulfils the Japanese objective of taking India off the map.

CVL's would be the logical carrier type for commerce raiding. They also don't seem to do much more damage than surface fleets. I don't know why. In the AAR when it was only the Japanese Indian Ocean fleet on the Convoy route I usually saw only 1-4 Merchant kills. But when they had enough CV's that they could argument that fleet it jumped up considerably.

For example:
Jan 18, 43 Kido Butai for the first time moved on the S. Pacific route. It got 17 kills for that turn.
Feb 15, The Indian Ocean fleet (3 CVL's) moved on to the Indian route. 2 Merchants sunk.

Luckily my opponent didn't see how damaging this was to me. Not just the sinking's which kill both ships and what they were carrying. But the threat they would be still sitting on those route the next turn, made me shutdown all my convoys. I didn't have to do that for the CVL attack but the threat of having a hit even worse than the 17 was sufficient. The disruption was short but it took another month to get enough oil to the UK to get their fleet operational again.