Stalemate - China vs Japan

[Warhammer: 3025]

Japan has been pushed off the mainland, and is now stuck on their home islands. While Japan still has superior naval forces, my own Chinese Air Force controls the skies, both over the nearby waters and over Japan itself.

Every attempt I make to do a naval invasion fails - all forces are immediately surrounded and destroyed at the landing zone. Paratrooper drops meet similar fates, even when executed simultaneously with the beach landings.

The year is now 1952, and the China-Japan War sits at 50%, despite Japan losing all of their mainland holdings and all of their allies/puppets surrendering.

Any suggestions how to break this stalemate?

 

[Blastaz]

Are you attacking ports? So troops can get resuplied?


If it's 1952 I would suggest nukes and assume you had a superior navy as well...

 

[Warhammer: 3025]

I've taken Nagasaki, along with the Kyushu Naval Base, but no supply is coming through. What little supply I've been receiving has been from the handful of victory locations I managed to capture.

Strangely, all the captured territory now belongs to the Japanese State, the Democratic uprising I instigated on Taiwan.

 

[Blastaz]

I've taken Nagasaki, along with the Kyushu Naval Base, but no supply is coming through. What little supply I've been receiving has been from the handful of victory locations I managed to capture.

Strangely, all the captured territory now belongs to the Japanese State, the Democratic uprising I instigated on Taiwan.

That's probably the problem. Check the supply map mode to see how much your troops are getting. If you can fake an invasion past a superior fleet you should be able to roll up a broken Japan (or early Sealion).

General tactic is launching several assaults of 3-4 divisions on 3 ports then immediately shippping over as many divisions as you can and face rolling the home isles.

If you can capture a port you should win.

 

[Dalwin]

Where is the capital of the Japanese State? If it is on Taiwan, you need to send them some convoys so they can ship supplies.

 

[Warhammer: 3025]

Somehow, I managed to grind my way to Tokyo. Thing is, I have no idea what changed and allowed me to do that. I still had no supply coming through the first port, but eventually the Japanese fell back and I took a couple more ports.

Can transport planes do resupply missions? I seem to recall they could in HOI3.

 

[Dalwin]

Somehow, I managed to grind my way to Tokyo. Thing is, I have no idea what changed and allowed me to do that. I still had no supply coming through the first port, but eventually the Japanese fell back and I took a couple more ports.

Can transport planes do resupply missions? I seem to recall they could in HOI3.

Air supply is a feature they chose to leave out of HOI4. To be honest it never took place historically to the same scale that one was able to make use of it in HOI3.

 

[Misaka_Complex]

Its much harder when you don't own the territory because you can't build more infrastructure and increase your supply so that is probably the main problem.

 

[Alex_brunius]

Air supply is a feature they chose to leave out of HOI4. To be honest it never took place historically to the same scale that one was able to make use of it in HOI3.

You can argue that the Berlin Airlift from 1948-49 ( which used only WW2 era technology airplanes and surplus transports from the war ) was a good demonstration of the capabilities of airsupply on a larger scale.

After some months fine tuning they were able to deliver an average of 8000 tons of supply per day via the air-bridge.

Historical infantry divisions required around 120 - 540 tons of total supplies per day for normal operations, with the lower end representing a Soviet Rifle division in 1942 and the upper end a US Infantry division + it's full divisional overseas support slice in 1944 ( a total of 43000 men ).


This means that if you can: Secure total air dominance, Ensure the enemy can't disrupt the flights with AA, have a size 10 airport in the area being supplied and have 700+ Transport planes available, it could actually be feasible to supply over 60 minimal infantry divisions, or 15 larger heavily supported divisions via air supply.

Those conditions however would be exceptionally rare in wartime (as demonstrated in WW2), so rare we can question if it's worth modelling at all.

 

[Dalwin]

However, in the Berlin airlift the transport planes were not being fired upon. They landed in an airport instead of simply dropping the supplies via parachute. A number of nations focused upon just this one operation. It is really not a fair comparison to supply by air during the war.

 

[icedt729]

I use paratroopers every time and I've been able to conquer mainland Japan as early as 1942. I drop them around Kagoshima or Nagasaki and have them assault the port, then I rush troops from the Korean peninsula into the captured port. Much faster than an amphibious invasion, with correspondingly lower risk of interception by the Japanese navy. One you've got a firm grip on Kyushu you can have those airborne divisions jump into Kansai to set up for a massive envelopment.

As an aside, an airborne-heavy approach is one way to actually get some use out of the Mass Warfare doctrine. Supply grace can make a very big difference for your forward-deployed paratroopers.