The Short Victorious War Trial Balloon

[el cid again]

Actually, that is the Japanese name for the Russo Japanese War. And I don't use it in that sense - either the historical campaign or any Russian focused way at all.

But rather to imply the Japanese Way of War - surprise attack on the enemy fleet at the start (done three times, v China, Russia and US) - and more than that - have a plan including exit strategy (brilliantly done re Russia - but not the case in WWII).

What if Japan DID have a plan?

Technically what I mean is - get rid of the out years we don't usually see in play anyway - gaining lots of slots. Just cutting out 1946 gained us a lot. What if we do a UV kind of thing - say end the war at the end of 1943 - and evaluate at that point? We would about double our slots for ships, air groups, land units, gain a few devices - but no land location slots unfortunately. So we keep the map - fine.

IF we could solve the problem of plane art filmstrips - we could break planes up into smaller packages. For example the B5N could be B5M (longer range) and B5N. We could have more planes in each series. The Vildebeeste and Vincent could split - one being a land plane - the other a seaplane - into their proper types.

Questions here are

1) Is there interest in a short campaign during the contested part of the war permitting more detail?

2) What would a Japanese plan to win early look like?

3) What plane types might be most interesting to see represented?

[el cid again]

We could separate out the Ki-30 and Ki-32 into different slots. In this case art is not a problem.

We could create a dedicated Recon B-18 (R-2). Same for the Recon P-40. This sort of change gives the recon birds more range - and more appropriate mission options for players in recon air groups. In these cases art isn't a problem.

The ROCAF could get more appropriate numbers and art - assuming we can redo a filmstrip - with more dedicated ROCAF slots. Right now they fly some planes (e.d. Dutch Demon fighters or Lysanders) that have the wrong art. Later in the war there are upgrades to US planes with the wrong art. Same for Australia and New Zealand and the Netherlands - which upgrade to wrong art planes - we could upgrade with more control over the date per air force to planes that "look better" with the right markings. That also would permit more historical control of plane numbers to such air forces.

This sort of thing can be done right now in YPO - which ends sooner - and has plane slota available in it.

[Bogo Mil]

Some other ideas to make some room:

* Most players agree that night air combat is broken in the game engine anyways. Why not remove all night fighters from the game and add a house rule that night missions are not allowed? This would free several aircraft slots.

* All home defense units for the USA could be deleted. Jap players never attack the continent anyways - just make this a house rule and remove all these units. The only thing they need is some air support at the coast and some obsolete bombers for ASW patrol. They don't need fighters, LCU and similiar stuff. This should free slots for air units and LCU.

* You could make a scenario completely without Russia. Remove everything there - bases, airforce, LCU, ships. This would free a lot of slots of all kinds and it wouldn't change the gameplay much for most of the time. I think this would be a very good option for the AI oriented scenarios - Russia never activates there anyways. It only rattles the AI occasionally. (In my current game, the KB is in the Japanese Sea for weeks now, heavily reconing Vladivostok...)

[el cid again]

ORIGINAL: Bogo Mil

Some other ideas to make some room:

* Most players agree that night air combat is broken in the game engine anyways. Why not remove all night fighters from the game and add a house rule that night missions are not allowed? This would free several aircraft slots.

REPLY: In general, my assignment is, get the data right - and (someone else) will make the code right. I don't think navigation radar works either - lots of stuff - but someday it may. We try to get the data right. If I can dream up a workaround - I give it to you in spite of the code too. I HOPE night fighters work - I have put a lot of work into getting them right - and they matter - for Japan.

* All home defense units for the USA could be deleted. Jap players never attack the continent anyways - just make this a house rule and remove all these units. The only thing they need is some air support at the coast and some obsolete bombers for ASW patrol. They don't need fighters, LCU and similiar stuff. This should free slots for air units and LCU.

REPLY: You obviously don't play Nemo. Lots of units were added - in India for example - because aggressive players WILL attack. We have not removed the right of Japan to attack or raid North America (or even Panama) - so defense units are needed. There should be even more than there are. For the record - I might invade Seattle - just to mess up the enemy - if things went well enough - and I always intend to take Alaska.

* You could make a scenario completely without Russia. Remove everything there - bases, airforce, LCU, ships. This would free a lot of slots of all kinds and it wouldn't change the gameplay much for most of the time. I think this would be a very good option for the AI oriented scenarios - Russia never activates there anyways. It only rattles the AI occasionally. (In my current game, the KB is in the Japanese Sea for weeks now, heavily reconing Vladivostok...)

REPLY: This is sort of the opposite of my design philosophy. I didn't add two whole air forces, the entire navy, and lots of Russian units (Airborne, the naval infantry, lots of armor) because I think Japan should be free to ignore Russia - or its forces. I want the Japanese to have to have a force to deal with Russia - and I also want them to be tempted to "strike North" for the rich assets up there - both of which are inseparable from the historical strategic situation.

Aside from that attitude - I do not know HOW to remove Russia from the map? It would look ugly - but aside from removing locations - what do we do about the Kwangtung Army, its supporting air force, and Japanese naval units in that area? Remove them too? Do that we skew up the logistics of the North - so what - we remove industry from Japanese locations as well? Whatever the answers - it is a LOT of work - and not worth doing to get somewhere I don't think we want to go in the first place. Japan is then free to KNOW something Japan can not know IRL - that there is no Russian threat. Here is a quote to give you a sense of it: it is from Foreign Minister Togo:

"Every night I go to sleep worrying 'what to do about Russia?' Every morning I wake up - with no answer." I did preserve Russian passive scenarios for players who cannot separate themselves from the Matrix solution - which I consider unfortunate and unrealistic. Using the Matrix solution a Japanese player can send every last plane out of Manchukuo - never mind it is gamey and unrealistic - and he certainly will not upgrade the planes with the best as early as he can - which is historical. Using the Matrix solution the Japanese have the intiative - they can invade Russia ANY TIME they want to - but the Russians have to sit and wait for it - and sometimes they are STILL frozen even after the attack comes in.
At the same time - distant Russian locations cannot be fed - nor their resorces taken out - and construction and deployment cannot be controlled by the Allies. But going farther than that - at great effort - is not something I want to do: Russia is inseparably part of the theater - and its presence should be a factor in both side's strategic considerations. If it is messy - fine - it really was.

[Bogo Mil]

It always hurts to take things away, I know. But the limited slots hurt, too. These are only ideas how to free some slots. Forcing an end of the war in 1943 is an act of "crippeling", too.


I know your motto "Get the data right - and (someone else) will make the code right". But be realistic: Nobody will ever fix night fighting in witp. Maybe it will be fixed in AE (I don't follow all these threads there closely), but in witp it won't. So I think removing the defunct night fighters is a viable option if you have some other plane types in mind, which could add more to the game. In AE there will be enough slots, so you can put them in again anyways.


I think attacking the US continent (beyond Alaska) is against the "primary house rule". It could never be done in real live - even the PH attack was a shoestring operation. A landing in Seattle was never possible. If it can be done in the game, then it's because the game engine is no perfect simulation of reality. If you remove the right to attack there, you remove nothing but a gamey exploit. Especially for the "historic scenarios" this would be a very viable option, imho. In EOS type scenarios it might not be desired.


Removing Russia hurts most, that's true. I'm a natural born Soviet fanboy - in all games I play Soviet first if that's an option. But there are so many of the precious slots of all kinds to get, one can become greedy... It's a wholesale trade - pay a lot, get a lot.

The Kwantung area would not be changed, of course. The minimum garrission had to be enforced by house rules (which could also include minimum garrision of aircraft, engineers, AAA...)

[el cid again]

I have used YPO for a demonstration of this. In the 7.958 update

You get a seperate B5M1 and B5N2 - the B5M is land only - and has more range.

You also get a seperate Ki-30 and Ki-32. The former is faster - and has less range. The names also
are split - now Mary and Ann are used seperately instead of together.

It is more difficult than it seems: on must police ALL air units to avoid issues of wrong upgrade paths. But it works fine.

I also split the late war B7N into torpedo and dive bomber variations.

[Terminus]

As regards your original question #2, I think the Japanese thought they'd win early with the plan they put into effect in December of 1941. Classic case of "no plan survives initial contact with the enemy".

[el cid again]

One might refer you to Admiral Yamamoto's "I will run wild for six to eighteen months, after that I promise you nothing" and hundreds of IJN officers saying after the war "I knew there was no chance" - to which IJA officers replied "you should have told us."

[Terminus]

That's called after-the-fact rationalization.

[el cid again]

Certainly Yamamoto cannot be faulted for 20-20 hindsight: he never lived to have any, and his remarks were made before the war began, during the planning/run up to it. When the reports came in of Pearl Harbor and the unexptected degree of success there, one staff officer offered congratulations for being a great naval strategist. To which Yamamoto replied "A great strategist would have found a way not to go to war. I fear all we have done is to awaken a sleeping giant and fill him with great rage." [Slightly more literal rendering than usually done into English] His 20-20 hindsight came two days later when he concluded he should have listened to staff advice - and invaded Hawaii - a plan he rejected for the last time on 1 November, 1941. Why probably answers my question - so thank you very much. Such a scenario would look a lot like EOS - but with strictly historical equipment.

Commander (later captain) Takhishi Hara, on hearing the news of Pearl Harbor (he was not involved in planning for the war) - estimated Japan would have to sink about eight US destroyers for every one it lost just to break even. This is an optimistic estimate - but still one in the range of reasonable opinion (both US and Japanese planners estimated the relative size of the two nations at about 10:1 - remarkably identical estimates). Both Hara's estimate, and that of the Imperial General Staff, imply something other than 20-20 hindsight.

Japan's historical attitude since the restoration has been that one should start a war with an attack on the enemy fleet base - a surprise attack with no warning (Hawaii was actually intended to be different - but not because of Japanese attitudes - because Yamamoto insisted - they cut it too thin - and neither delivered the notice on time nor worded it properly). But historically Japan also had a plan to win. The war with China (the 19th Century one that gave Japan Okinawa and Formosa) and the war with Russia (the 1906 one) were superbly executed. The Battle of Mukden was faught with the oldest and last draft of IJA (55 year olds) - after which the exit strategy was implemented (earning Teddy Roosevelt a Nobel Peace Prize for the Treaty of Portsmouth). WWII notably lacked an exit strategy - or indeed a way to force the issue - which was Yamamoto's objection: "Don't they realize that if we start this war, we will have to take Wachington DC and dictate peace terms in the White House?" He didn't mean Japan should or could do that - he meant it was the only way to beat the Americans - and it was so impractical it meant there was no way he could think of to win the war. Having lived in Washington DC as naval attache, and deliberately toured the whole USA (I think related to his participation in the Washington Naval Treaty) he had a sense of the size of the US and its inherant industrial capability. His view that a war with the US could not be won was widely shared in the Navy - which had spent most of its planning on the assumption it would have to fight the USN some day. Japanese planning was the inverse of War Plan Orange - they would engage the fleet as it crossed the ocean to whittle it down - seeking a decisive battle somewhere in the Western Pacific - finally battle fleet to battle fleet. Sheer distance was going to be used as leverage - and indeed USN assumed it takes two ships to keep one on duty in the Western Pacific. See Kaigun and Sunburst (USNI companion histories of IJN and JNAF) for details of the planning process; Cruisers of the Imperial Japanese Navy for a good deal more of this as details of how classes were planned. In fact IJN was overspecialized - entirely too focused on a great classical naval battle of battleships - seeking to offset numerical weakness with tactical advantages in ships (more speed, class for class; better gunnery due to superior optics; better torpedoes and reloads for them; and - interestingly - less range - since the decisive battle would be fought near Japan - and since Japan lacked engines as efficient as the US - it wasn't practical to try to outrange the USN anyway). All the details of the evolution of ship and aircraft design and doctrines to implement these designs imply a fairly good sense of the relative scale of the problem. Things turned out to be worse than hoped for - but not very much worse than understood to be. No estimate of Pearl Harbor was close to the mark: much less success was anticipated - that is - success at a much higher cost.