Matrix Games Forums

I am in the midst of first PBEM game as Japan player and it is May 1943. How large do people typically build out the Japanese industry and when do they stop expanding? I hope to still be alive well into 1944, but we will see what my opponent says about that. It is Scenario 1, PDU Off, Realistic R&D.

Roughly how many daily HI points should I target to build to?
I currently have a surplus of more than 2,000,000 HI points. Will this be enough to get me to late in the game when the bombing of Japan starts?
How many planes/engines should I target to build each month?

Thanks in advance.

I'll take a stab here, though am by no means an expert.

The short answer is: mileage varies. By May of '43, each game is vastly different. How many tankers have you lost? How much fuel and oil are sitting in the Home Islands? How close are the Allies to cutting you off from the SRA? 2MM HI points feels sufficient, as the primary late game constraints are almost always supply and fuel, in that order. The return on investment for industry expansion IMO is based on those ideas.

Collect and preserve supply so you can fly planes and fire guns.

I don't understand why he even asked here when he already stated that Chat GPT already made these forums obsolete.

Thanks Cheesesteak,

I have done my best to hover up all the oil and fuel in SRA, tanker losses have been minimal and I expect SRA to be under threat in a couple more months, maybe longer. I have about 1 million of oil and a similar amount of fuel in Japan, supplies are getting low so I might be building out aircraft industry to too large a size.
Any thoughts on how many airframes/engines to build monthly as a target?

Good to know the main end game constraints are supplies, then fuel. No more HI expansion for me.

Any other people with thoughts are appreciated about monthly planes/engine amounts is appreciated!

Like may things in the game it depends.

At the very basic level you have approx. 30 months were HI can produce without hinderance were you need to produces enough HI Pts to last the remaining 12-18 months. Keeping it really simple, at the worsest case were HI stops producing anything, you approx. need to produce 1½ times the HI Pts than you use but that's not going to happen as it doesn't just stop.

I've never anaylsed how much damage is done to HI in the last 15 months but it would be gradual and never complete but assuming you loose 5% of your HI production a month by the end of 15 months you will still have 25% functioning HI. Taking this into account I'd say you need to produce approx 1.1 to 1.2 times the HI per month than you use, closer to 1.1 though.

I know it doesn't sound much but in s#2 you start with 500K and produce 10K HI pts per month. If you don't expand anything, have nothing to repair, nor suffer any HI damage it will actually last a long time. In a test I did for something else were little combat took place, no expansion etc but does have some expansion set by scenario then by 9 May 42 Japan still had 350K HI Pts left. Note that if it had been s#1 I was testing were you start with considerable less, 50K but produce 14K per month you would gradually increase HI Pts.

Maybe someone could post their HI situation in mid 44 and again towards the end for comparison.

Mike Solli (who is rarely active on the boards now) is considered one of the IJ production experts - his tagline image even says so! He had charts showing the relation of industry to production of aircraft and engines and lots of discussion on his threads about what is needed for various production goals. I suggest you search the forum for his threads.

You can find Mike Solli's older AAR where he explains things here:

https://www.matrixgames.com/forums/view ... 5&t=168610

Great - thanks everyone for your input. I will check out the links to Mike's production information.