AI spawning units??

[dwesolick]

Playing the Ironman (T1) scenario as Allies and enjoying it. AndyMac had the Japanese take Coal Harbour (on Vancouver Island) right at the start. Odd strategy I thought as I was able to hammer it from the air from the get-go (finally some realistic training for all those bomber units Stateside). After a month of routinely pounding it into rubble I was shocked when, on 1 Jan 42, there suddenly appeared 34 zeros in the sky over CH, blasting my poor Bolos to bits. After the turn finished I was even more surprised to find that the base now had 65 fighters, 96 bombers, and 68 auxiliary aircraft! In addition, the garrison had grown from 1 brigade to 3 units totaling around 15K. All this on a level 1 AF, level 1 port base (badly damaged in both respects). I have full recon of the base (9 out of 10) and numerous naval search squadrons in Canada and the US covering the whole area. No sign of a fleet of any kind and the next nearest Japanese base (with an airfield) is Paramushiro Jima.

Where the heck did all this come from? Anyone else ever seen this? Can the AI just spawn units wherever? Or is this another glitch with the new patch?

[RangerJoe]

I have never played Iron Man so I don't know the details of the scenario other than it is supposed to be just a little harder for the human. But those aircraft could have been flown from aircraft carriers, CVs, CVLs, CVEs, CSs, AVs . . .

[Platoonist]

Where the heck did all this come from? Anyone else ever seen this? Can the AI just spawn units wherever? Or is this another glitch with the new patch?

Spoiler Alert. But if you look at Japanese air group reinforcements for Ironman, some rather potent Japanese air units are scheduled to appear if Coal Harbor (and other Allied bases) are in Japanese hands. This type of thing happens in the standard game too. Certain reinforcements only show up if their starting base has been captured by their side. Otherwise, their appearance is delayed or cancelled. Ironman beefs this feature up a lot, but then Ironman isn't meant to be historically or logistically realistic. It's meant to provide surprises and challenges.

I was gonna post a picture of the reinforcements, but it'd spoil the future shock.

[BBfanboy]

As for how the aircraft get there, they could have been scheduled to arrive there or they can be magically teleported there by the AI! Because the AI only operates of scripts and some simple reactions to nearby enemy forces, it is not capable of responding well to human player moves. To make up for the inability to plan months in advance, the AI can take units that are at one base and teleport them to any other base it owns. The AI script for Coal Harbour probably had a trigger date for starting attacks on US industry, so the means to do so were warped in.

[dwesolick]

Thanks for the responses! Yep, that all makes sense. I've only ever played the older Ironman versions and never had this happen before. I applaud the concept of giving Japan extra stuff but I also like (LOVE) the historical aspects of this great game and this current version of Ironman seems to stray a bit too far into fantasyland. There are Jap TBs that can go toe-to-toe with CLs and even CAs. One DD I sank had an AA rating of 880! Lost about a dozen DBs sinking the damn thing. An APA had an AA rating over 2000! This is all in Dec 41. God only knows what they'll have in a couple years (SAMs? tactical nukes?). It definitely makes for a challenge, but also robs some of the historical flavor from the game plus forces me to act in grossly ahistorical ways. It's all a bit much.
Anyway, with the latest update which scenario does the best job of giving Japan a boost while also staying at least somewhat faithful to history? The Hakko Icchio (sp) one?

[Platoonist]

Anyway, with the latest update which scenario does the best job of giving Japan a boost while also staying at least somewhat faithful to history? The Hakko Icchio (sp) one?

The Hakko Ichiu scenario gives Japan a modest boost and does stay more within the limits of believability as do some of the scenario mods which assume Japan took a different naval construction path in the 1930s. Another alternative might be making the Allies weaker at the start but nobody has made a scenario along those lines yet.

This is why Ironman has.never really appealed to me. A Japan with the resources to crank out fleets of planes and armadas of super-warships would have never have had to go to war with the Allies over resources other than out of the blatant thrill of conquest. But, in the end, it's a challenge scenario designed to make up for the AI's limitations and keep you worrying over where the next iron shod boot is gonna drop.

[RangerJoe]

Anyway, with the latest update which scenario does the best job of giving Japan a boost while also staying at least somewhat faithful to history? The Hakko Icchio (sp) one?

The Hakko Ichiu scenario gives Japan a modest boost and does stay more within the limits of believability as do some of the scenario mods which assume Japan took a different naval construction path in the 1930s. Another alternative might be making the Allies weaker at the start but nobody has made a scenario along those lines yet.

This is why Ironman has.never really appealed to me. A Japan with the resources to crank out fleets of planes and armadas of super-warships would have never have had to go to war with the Allies over resources other than out of the blatant thrill of conquest. But, in the end, it's a challenge scenario designed to make up for the AI's limitations and keep you worrying over where the next iron shod boot is gonna drop.

Or the Japanese would have built more tanks and taken Siberia!

[Bella]

I noticed something like this in my regular campaign game. I sent a Bombard TF to hit Rabaul two turns after they took it. It destroyed/damaged 60 Vals, 50 Zeroes, 65 Kates, 20 Nates, 30 Oscars, 20 Bettys, and a bunch of odds and ends search craft, all on a level 3 airfield. Where did they come from? Good thing I didn’t send in the carriers!

[Platoonist]

Or the Japanese would have built more tanks and taken Siberia!

Better be prepared to let some IJN warship production go then. In Japan, all the high-quality steel was allocated to the navy, with the next best allocated to IJA/IJN air services, leaving the lower grades to the armored corps. Frankly, I wouldn't want to be tangling with someone as ruthless as Zhukov in that type of tank.

[Platoonist]

IWhere did they come from? Good thing I didn’t send in the carriers!

Some Japanese planes are blessed with superlative range, especially with drop tanks.

[RangerJoe]

Or the Japanese would have built more tanks and taken Siberia!

Better be prepared to let some IJN warship production go then. In Japan, all the high-quality steel was allocated to the navy, with the next best allocated to IJA/IJN air services, leaving the lower grades to the armored corps. Frankly, I wouldn't want to be tangling with someone as ruthless as Zhukov in that type of tank.

If you read about the previous Japanese and Soviet combats, the Japanese tanks at that time were better and suffered fewer losses. Send some German armor designs, samples, and then have STG IIIs, Mark IIIs, and Mark IVs manned by the Japanese along with mobile artillery. The Soviets also send their best units to fight while the Japanese division was not the best and had not been fully equipped and trained.

[Platoonist]

I dunno. To me Japan's golden opportunity to have grabbed eastern Siberia was in 1920 when some Japanese units intervening in the Russian civil war got as far west as Irkutsk on Lake Baikal. They had occupied Vladivostok. You've got it, now you just have to keep it. But politically the Japanese military just wasn't as dominant then and they were withdrawn with the Bolsheviks hounding them all the way.

[RangerJoe]

I dunno. To me Japan's golden opportunity to have grabbed eastern Siberia was in 1920 when some Japanese units intervening in the Russian civil war got as far west as Irkutsk on Lake Baikal. They had occupied Vladivostok. You've got it, now you just have to keep it. But politically the Japanese military just wasn't as dominant then and they were withdrawn with the Bolsheviks hounding them all the way.

If they would have set up the White Russians in a puppet government and supported it, they may also have had help from other countries as well.

[Platoonist]

If they would have set up the White Russians in a puppet government and supported it, they may also have had help from other countries as well.

Who knows? Maybe the League of Nations would have looked the other way on this one.

But Japan wasn't able to keep financing this Siberian expedition due to a postwar economic crisis in 1920 and so without international financial support it had to cut its losses. I imagine later on in the 1930s the generals in the Kwantung Army viewed it ruefully as a missed opportunity.

[PaxMondo]

The rationale behind the Ironman series is pretty simple: survivability. I'll use one of the oft cited AI issues: PM.

So, Port Moresby is a target for the AI because historically the IJ attempted to take it. Not attempting to take PM would NOT be historically accurate, so the AI has to try. The issue is that unlike the IJ who never really supported the attack and left units stranded in the mountains for months, the AI will actually dedicate resources to actually accomplish this. The problem is that taking PM is at the very limit of IJ's capability; a good human player can pull it off, and average player will struggle a bit and likely suffer some rather large losses. The AI is not even that good, and will likely fail ... repeatedly ... until the script ends.

So, to get an AI game beyond mid-42, Andy (All Hail the ANDY MAC) created the ironman series that will replenish a lot of the IJ losses and get the game into '43 pretty successfully. Is it historical? Of course not, that's what scenario 1 is for. Will it allow a player to get into '43? Most of the time yes. Players can even get into '44 in the ironman scenario. Scen 1? VERY, very hard to get past 6/42 as a competent player against the AI. Why? because as a player you know too much, hindsight alone is a HUGE advantage that a player can take advantage of whereas the AI can't.

Many of us AI-only players have taken versions of the Ironman and made our own personal scenario. My version uses the Ironman Tier 3 insane (it was only on the server for 3 days, Andy took it down once he recovered ...) and I've added to it a LOT to get the AI into '45 and sometimes '46. Why? All the cool toys that both sides get in the late game are fun to play with. Again, historical only in that P-51's are flown by the allies and BB Yamato is an IJ ship. Beyond that, not so much. But, it is fun.

[PaxMondo]

Playing the Ironman (T1) scenario as Allies and enjoying it. AndyMac had the Japanese take Coal Harbour (on Vancouver Island) right at the start. Odd strategy I thought as I was able to hammer it from the air from the get-go (finally some realistic training for all those bomber units Stateside). After a month of routinely pounding it into rubble I was shocked when, on 1 Jan 42, there suddenly appeared 34 zeros in the sky over CH, blasting my poor Bolos to bits. After the turn finished I was even more surprised to find that the base now had 65 fighters, 96 bombers, and 68 auxiliary aircraft! In addition, the garrison had grown from 1 brigade to 3 units totaling around 15K. All this on a level 1 AF, level 1 port base (badly damaged in both respects). I have full recon of the base (9 out of 10) and numerous naval search squadrons in Canada and the US covering the whole area. No sign of a fleet of any kind and the next nearest Japanese base (with an airfield) is Paramushiro Jima.

Where the heck did all this come from? Anyone else ever seen this? Can the AI just spawn units wherever? Or is this another glitch with the new patch?

Pretty sure Platoonist is correct, these are units setup to arrive as reinforcements if you cross a line. There are several areas where this will happen in Scen 1 (India, AUS, USA to name the 3 most common). The units can be just a few, or in the case of the USA they can be 10's of DIV's and many 10's of air units. Think of these as the National Guard being called up. These wouldn't show normally as active units, but they can be called up pretty quick and outfitted with equipment in local armories.

[dwesolick]

Have some additional questions for Ironman players:

1. Does the AI get a dispensation when operating from damaged airfields? I know that reduced ops are possible in general from a damaged AF, but the AI managed to launch 34 fighters from a (level 1) airfield with 85 damage (at least according to my recon, which may have been faulty).

2. Since the AI (AndyMac ) has already seized some bases deep in my rear areas, can I safely assume that those will spawn units as well? Or is it only limited to very specific bases, like Coal Harbour?

3. Does the AI need to keep those bases supplied with regular convoy runs, or do they remain auto-supplied? I know the AI gets supply help on hard/very hard settings, but I'm playing on normal (I won't say "historical" ).

[PaxMondo]

Have some additional questions for Ironman players:

1. Does the AI get a dispensation when operating from damaged airfields? I know that reduced ops are possible in general from a damaged AF, but the AI managed to launch 34 fighters from a (level 1) airfield with 85 damage (at least according to my recon, which may have been faulty).

2. Since the AI (AndyMac ) has already seized some bases deep in my rear areas, can I safely assume that those will spawn units as well? Or is it only limited to very specific bases, like Coal Harbour?

3. Does the AI need to keep those bases supplied with regular convoy runs, or do they remain auto-supplied? I know the AI gets supply help on hard/very hard settings, but I'm playing on normal (I won't say "historical" ).

1. Not aware that it does. It is all about odds, Gary's games inherently do allow the "improbable" to occur.

2. The "spawn" that you refer to is not related to AI, as Platoonist stated (and I agree with) it is scenario design feature. In Ironman, Andy expanded it somewhat compared to Scen 1. So the answer is: depends upon what he designed into the scenario.

3. The AI cannot create explicit supply TF's; so the AI has built into it the ability to get supply to all bases. In other words, a player could do it, so that AI is enabled to do it. Think of it as supply subs, fast supply TF's, or long range Tina/Mavis/Emily air supply.

[PaxMondo]

A lot of players get hung up on HOW the AI works instead of WHAT the result is. If you do, forget playing the AI. Really that simple.

Example: Supply.
A player supplies islands through a variety of means: subs, TF's, air transport. This combination is VERY hard to stop. As the opponent you need to dedicate far more assets stopping it as compared to what is used to break it. This agrees with reality quite well, blockades are, and always have been, notoriously difficult to put in place. More-over the examples of when effective are very few and far in between. So the devs could have spent 100's of hours coding up the all the ways of breaking blockades OR simply state that they will be broken, insert 2 lines of code and use those hours on other things like the A2A model.

Is it perfect, NO. You can create some examples in game that are unreal; capture Regina via air drop from Anchorage and the AI will be able to supply when in reality this would be relatively easy to blockade. OK, I agree not realistic. But then I would also go with "not likely to occur in a game" and move on.

Almost all of the other "issues" with the AI can be dissected with this same logic. The devs were incredibly brilliant about this. So, if it bugs you, then PBEM. If it doesn't, then you can play the AI. Simple.

[Platoonist]

2. Since the AI (AndyMac ) has already seized some bases deep in my rear areas, can I safely assume that those will spawn units as well? Or is it only limited to very specific bases, like Coal Harbour?

Yes. It's like in the regular campaign game where when Japan captures Rabaul it gets these three air units there in late 1942 whose arrival is marked in red if it still holds it. But we usually expect Japan to capture Rabaul so we don't think of it as spawning. We think of it as the place where the components of this air group have formed up and become operational for the first time.

Rabaul reinforcements.jpg (27.33 KiB) Viewed 668 times

In Ironman, Japan gets these red reinforcements in a lot more (and unusual places) if it captures and holds those bases. Plus, some of them are mighty powerful and they tend to arrive not long after capture. But if we were to show you these locations it spoils the Ironman surprise factor. However, if you want to peek you can always start Ironman from the Japanese side and take a look.