Japan - No Ships

[Peekee]

There's a bunch of techs you can research to reduce the attrition rates - mountain/jungle warfare tech, first aid, combat medecine... are those not helping?

I got the Jungle one ages ago, I have started making sure that first aid, combat medicine and agriculture are always being researched. However, it is much harder to tech rush in 1.3.

Ho much manpower do you have? How much is the daily gain? How many para divisions do you have? What difficulty are you playing on?

Manpower is hovering between 0 and 100. Not sure about the daily gain, but before war with America the monthly increase is about 77. So I make that to be ~ 2.5 manpower per day.

I ended up halving the size of all the divisions defending the Japanese mainland. I originally had a division of 4 infantry brigades on each port. Now there are only 2. I used the manpower from that to build more paratroopers taking my total to around 78 divisions of 5 brigades each (390 Brigades). (Need to double check that I am not 100% certain). I think I only have 2 more divisions in production just now.

Difficulty is normal.

I played through quite a bit last night and got screens but did not have time to write it up. Basically Haiti -> Bermuda -> Florida... Was very good fun, quite epic. LOTS of USA troops but most of them under strength. Some nice encirclements and the first time I have had to retreat paratroopers from a battle that was going sour.

I am very glad there was not much time between DoW and getting troops attacking USA mainland. If all the divisions I faced were 100% strength instead of 25%... I will try to post details and screens tonight.

[Enewald]

That's a quite huge manpower growth!

[Peekee]

Japan attacks Haiti : 25th -> 29th April



Build up in Bahamas : 30th April -> 5th May
From Haiti the Japanese could attack the British held Bahamas which contained an airfield and port within range of the USA. It took several days to capture the port from the british Garrison and build up troops.

5th of May : Invasion of USA starts



The Japanese did discover against the USA that unguarded transports were not always a good idea, interceptors and fighters from Japan were brought over as quickly as possible.



11th May : Florida Encirclements



17th May : Japanese Push west along coast.

With most of the USA's troops appearing in the east Japan decided to avoid the big fight and instead push west where there was less opposition.

[Peekee]

May 1940 : Japan advances into South-east USA

(Map as of 28th May 1940)

* Black lines show encirclements.
* Blue arrows are major Japanese air assaults.
* Thick red line shows the concentration of USA troops.

The Japanese tactics during this period are best described as a jumping for airfield to airfield encircling where convenient. The Major encirclements shown on the above map were :

-1- Miami 5th -> 10th : The original landing

-2- Jacksonville & St Augustine 6th -> 23rd May : Planed as part of the original landings it took over 2 weeks for the pocket to be defeated. This contained the entire original response force of the USA to attack the Miami landing. It contained dozens of brigades. In St Augustine alone 17,000 USA troops eventually surrendered to the Japanese.

-3- Louisiana & Eastern Texas Pockets 11th -> 26th May : As the Japanese flew west to take the Texan 2 groups of USA troops were spotted and surrounded. The Louisiana pocket contained 4 US divisions the Texan pocket 3.

-4- Memphis 20th -> 21st May : While there were many units and a theatre HQ based in Memphis the infantry divisions were newly deployed and had minimal strength and organization. Also the Japanese managed to keep the surrounding paratroopers in supply allowing them to attack from all sides. Taking the vital airfield would allow the Japanese to attack further north.

-5- Encirclements of opportunity : A small number of US troops arrived from the West. As they reached Japanese lines they were promptly encircled and defeated.

-6- 27th May : The Japanese push north. Again nearby US units that are easily surrounded are picked off.

-7- 20th -> ... Attempt to encircle the bulge : There was an obvious bulge in the US line in the East which was threatening to cut off the Japanese troops in South Carolina. The Japanese plan was to encircle these units. However this was the area where the American troops were strongest and the Japanese had some very tough fighting to close the gap.

-8- 28th May Plans for a grand encirclement : In the north east the Japanese spotted a break in the US lines and launched a massive encirclement. The plan was to crush a massive section of the American army allowing the remaining US troops to be more easily picked off and defeated. If formed the pocket would contain at least 65 US brigades.


(Another pic this time from the 26th May)

[Enewald]

Btw, do you get many supplies from the local Yankee supply trains?
Or how hard it is to supply all those armies`?

[Peekee]

Btw, do you get many supplies from the local Yankee supply trains?
Or how hard it is to supply all those armies`?

Quite a few of them at any time will be out of supply. However, it is not too bad as:

1) I can use transport planes to get air supply to critical areas. This triggers at 0:00 each day so you can set an air supply at say 18:00. Let it drop once. Then at 0:00 the unit has supply and can attack. This is useful when trying to quickly take down an encircled unit attacking it from all sides.

2) You can strategically redeploy back to an airfield even if you don't have supply. Again for strategic deploy to work the route has to exist at 0:00. If units can move before then I set them heading towards the airfield and then at 0:00 start to SR them. As the movement they have counts towards the SR move.

3) You don't need to be in supply (or even fuel) to load paratroopers onto a plane. You can then re-base them somewhere that does have supply very easily.

4) Often when jumping onto enemy provinces some units will land on territory with supplies.

5) An airfield does not need to be in supply (only fuel) to launch an air assault.

6) When launching airborne assaults paratroopers never suffer from out of supply penalties.

Supplies have not been an issue when attacking the USA so far. I have built 2 additional level 1 ports to get supplies close to airfields along the coast. However I doubt they make much difference.

[Black_Shade]

This AAR is hilarious. Im definately going to try this out. Good work

[Peekee]

29thMay -> 8th June : America starts to falter

By the 2nd of June the bulk of the America army facing the Japanese forces was at risk of being completely over run.



But while the American's were struggling to stop the Japanese. The Japanese moved more if its troops from Texas and the western provinces to attack behind the main American lines.

3rd June : Norfolk captured with minimal resistance
4th June : Washington DC Surrounded, with less than 4000 armed men to defend the city the battle was quickly going well for the Japanese
6th June : The grand encirclement was complete Another encirclement of the remaining troops between Washington was closing in. There would be no rescue for Washington.

8th June : Washington falls Further Japanese landings in many major cities in the Eastern USA.

[Enewald]

Heh, Americans taste the feeling of getting conquered.

[Peekee]

9th June -> 17th June : America's Defeat

With the majority of the USA's army encircled. The Japanese now had easy pickings over the rest of the Major USA cities. As such they adopted a policy of just jumping straight into the cities. Save a few issues with troops getting stuck on rooftops everything went very smoothly for the Japanese.



By the 17th of June the USA's East coast cities had fallen. Los Angeles, San Francisco, And Seattle. On the 18th the USA officially surrendered and became part of the Japanese Empire.

The Japanese did face a sudden unexpected problem. Canada (The Leader of the Allies after the UK government went into exile) had massed its troops along the US border, coast to coast. They also had troops from other Allied countries In particular Netherlands, and Yemen troops were stationed towards the east coast. Furthermore, they had had a lot more time to prepare for the fight with the Japanese than the USA.

[Enewald]

Yemen saving the day?

[Peekee]

Looks like I may have some issues with save corruption Possibly caused by swapping between the 1.3 public beta and 1.3 a while ago. There is considerable weirdness going on I will try a bit more to get the save games working but it could be that this is dead. (Or maybe my computer is being screwy...)

A shame because it is just getting to the point where I would attack Axis. Which would be sure to offer a interesting battle.

[EvilFishtank]

Beautiful maps and a great concept, what program do you use for the maps?

[Peekee]

Beautiful maps and a great concept, what program do you use for the maps?

I assume you don't mean the ones quickly drawn by hand

Typically I am using :
* f11 and f12 in game to take screen shots.
* Gimp for opening the raw screen shots of the game and doing basic cropping, changing colors etc.
* Inkscape for adding any overlay. I have .svg images for the port and airfield icons I might be able to attach them to the wiki as they would certainly be reusable.

[Ciryandor]

Can somebody post the HoI 2 US Para-spam AAR? BTW, gamey as hell, but it's working perfectly.

[delta23]

I have conqured china, Communist china, and shanix, in the last game. How ever this is not easy as they will come at you in mass. Remember concider this war total comitment becuase once you start it you have to win or you lose the game. Make sure your in good standing with the British, Russians and Americans. They are the only ones to worry about. They can feild a navy to crush you if your not wise were and when to deploy. Once you have etablished this, I deployed my actions in this order.
1) Tech went into Industry straight off as much as i could research safly and bombers.
2) Politics, keep British and Russians happy, then the Americans.
3) Build transport and cargo ships with escorts. as many as you can do with out causing a deficit. 1 to 5 ships a run is safe.
4) Research supply as well.
5) Once you have the balances working good and your able to cause enough disfucntion in portugal though policics and intellegence declare war on them and take out that single main land port province. Place all your troops in that province and have at her. Commitment is a big YES! do or die. Your taking out chinas southern nabours first as they are not aligned to any one to worry about. once you have them surrendered you do not annex you place them under a puppet state and use them as an ally. now you just almost doubled your defence army on the main land and you will be able to crush them easyer.
6) Optional plan is portugal then taking the porgese islands east of sumatra and west of autralia. WHY? becuase you next step will be Australia. They are a huge allied ancour if allowed to join them. Once i seen them trying to align to the allies i declared war and landed on there main taking out all there ports first your navie is still larger then theres, but you cant do that without that portugese port or you need to take Rabul!! any of you want to chat about this game let me know my e-mail is neilrhill@yahoo.ca

Any how its all in fun and i love the game, its better then chess!!!