200k troops at Saipan?

[doktor1957]

Hi guys:
In my game against the AI, things are going well. Mid-January 1943, most of KB sunk or heavily damaged for the complete loss of Wasp, and Yorktown in the yards for at least 6 months. Singapore retaken, as well as all of Indochina. I've decided to forgo the invasion of the Philippines and instead to take Saipan and then either Okinawa or Formosa. I've initiated weekly bombardments of Saipan and launched one very successful carrier strike. I loaded 2nd USMC Div on transports with a couple of army divs as a follow on force. Aerial recon had spotted only a few thousand combat troops and a few dozen guns.
Imagine my shock when SIGINT suggested that there were 200000 enemy troops on Saipan! Is that possible? Does SIGINT ever get the numbers wrong?

Dave
San Diego

[Feinder]

Aerial recon not as good as Sigint (in my experience).

And Sigint can be off by as much as double (as in, potentially double the number you see on Sigint).

[*waits for the firey debate about sending in a few squads via sub*]

-F-

[Ron Saueracker]

Glad to see you are having such a hard time vs the AI[:D].

[AmiralLaurent]

What aerial recon are you using ? PBY or heavy bombers at long range ? Or real recon AC ? The first give awful results, the second are rather good. But here in your case the SIGINT number is probably closer of the truth.

By the way, if you want to exploit the AI weaknesses, it usually sends everything it had on Saipan and left Guam and Tinian mostly empty, so you can land on these two islands, take them and then close Saipan with LBA and turn it into a giant POW camp.

A CV raid over Saipan may give you some more precise data about the number of units here, even if you bomb the airfield or the port. You can also land an advanced detachment on Rota and then fly recon aircraft from here.

[Dereck]

ORIGINAL: doktor1957

Hi guys:
In my game against the AI, things are going well. Mid-January 1943, most of KB sunk or heavily damaged for the complete loss of Wasp, and Yorktown in the yards for at least 6 months. Singapore retaken, as well as all of Indochina. I've decided to forgo the invasion of the Philippines and instead to take Saipan and then either Okinawa or Formosa. I've initiated weekly bombardments of Saipan and launched one very successful carrier strike. I loaded 2nd USMC Div on transports with a couple of army divs as a follow on force. Aerial recon had spotted only a few thousand combat troops and a few dozen guns.
Imagine my shock when SIGINT suggested that there were 200000 enemy troops on Saipan! Is that possible? Does SIGINT ever get the numbers wrong?

Dave
San Diego

In my AI game I invaded Saipan first and it took me almost two months before I completely captured the island. Best bet would be to capture Tinian and use that as a staging area for invading Saipan. When you invade Saipan include ALL the combat engineers and armor units that you can because they seem to do more against the ultra-strong Japanese defenders than just a few Marine divisions alone (which is definitely not right in my opinion - and me being former Navy I should be putting grunts down instead of standing up for them).

You'll still be in for a fight but Saipan is capturable. FYI - you'll need at least 3 divisions in the first wave along with combat engineers to reduce the fortifications, artillery units and all your armor units you can.

The D-Day invasion of Normandy is said to be the biggest invasion ever but it should also be noted that within a week of that invasion the Americans invaded Saipan with just about 40,000 troops less than the total of the Normandy invasion. So be prepared for a big invasion.

[Admiral DadMan]

ORIGINAL: doktor1957

Hi guys:
In my game against the AI, things are going well. Mid-January 1943, most of KB sunk or heavily damaged for the complete loss of Wasp, and Yorktown in the yards for at least 6 months. Singapore retaken, as well as all of Indochina. I've decided to forgo the invasion of the Philippines and instead to take Saipan and then either Okinawa or Formosa. I've initiated weekly bombardments of Saipan and launched one very successful carrier strike. I loaded 2nd USMC Div on transports with a couple of army divs as a follow on force. Aerial recon had spotted only a few thousand combat troops and a few dozen guns.
Imagine my shock when SIGINT suggested that there were 200000 enemy troops on Saipan! Is that possible? Does SIGINT ever get the numbers wrong?

Dave
San Diego

HEY! You got your game back up and running?

[doktor1957]

Still not able to run the save on my laptop. I did, however, install the game on another drive on my 64 bit machine. It won't run the save either. I suspect the original install is corrupted. The C drive consists of 2 72 gig raptors in a RAID. I don't know if that has anything to do with the problem.

[testarossa]

ORIGINAL: doktor1957
on my 64 bit machine.

Did you manage to start WitP on Win64? I tried numerous times and failed.

[Captain Cruft]

The AI, in its vast incompetence, seems to operate a system of "hubs". These are bases where it will concentrate large quantities of units. Saipan would seem to be one of those.

What is most disturbing is that sometimes one of these hubs is a base owned by the other side.

At least that's my experience.

Also, remember there is no stacking limit so there could actually be 2 million troops there.

[Captain Cruft]

I won't even mention the 32-bit/64-bit issues. You'd have thought they would have learnt by now. Or maybe they haven't got enough money to address it [8|]

That's referring to MS BTW, not Matrix.