Why are there so few war games set in the Pacific Theater of WW II? And what is the best Pacific Theater war game covering WW II?
Is it because, aside from naval battles, nothing about the theater lent itself to the sort of maneuver and strategic problem-solving that makes most war games interesting to the sorts of folks who post here?
My own sense is that, while there was a lot of room for strategic planning in the Pacific (where to invade, when to invade, what you had to do before invading, etc.), once the battles were joined, they were mostly just huge attrition struggles against largely fixed defenses. The levers to be pulled for success involved developing the right equipment/doctrine and getting enough men and materiel into the battle to win the war of attrition. But that's not really the stuff that war games are made of.
I've often observed folks here lamenting the lack of good Pacific-theater war games. But I'm not sure anybody's ever asked why? I thought I'd pose the question in this forum, although it would be just as comfortable in the (less attended) board-gaming forum...
maybe game developers love tank only games....very very little armor vs armor going on there in the Pacific
Quote from: acctingman on January 25, 2016, 03:00:03 PM
maybe game developers love tank only games....very very little armor vs armor going on there in the Pacific
"Armor vs concrete" doesn't quite capture the imagination so much, does it? :o
Does one need tanks to made a good WW II game about land combat? Is that it?
Quote from: FarAway Sooner on January 25, 2016, 03:10:11 PM
Quote from: acctingman on January 25, 2016, 03:00:03 PM
maybe game developers love tank only games....very very little armor vs armor going on there in the Pacific
"Armor vs concrete" doesn't quite capture the imagination so much, does it? :o
Does one need tanks to made a good WW II game about land combat? Is that it?
I did a lot of work on WitPAE scenarios: reading the official US accounts and other secondary sources. It seems like you really have to work to get your
imagination to picture things in the Pacific: Indochina for example. Borneo. The Japanese drive to get that oil from the Dutch. The fact that the Japanese
held off the US, had a huge army in China and got reasonable terms on surrender. There's no real popular imagery for what the Japanese were like.
I think to make good Pacific games, understanding the Japanese is the key. I certainly don't get what they thought they were doing or why they were doing it.
I wonder if it has something to do with the challenges of creating a competent AI?
If you look at the Hearts of Iron series, for example. Pdox has never been able to get the Pacific War right -- I'm holding out some hope that HOI4 might finally break the curse, but I'm not very optimistic. HoI can simulate something like a convincing land-war in the European Theater, but when it comes to the Pacific, it's just a shambles. The difficult of 'island hopping,' programming an AI that knows how to launch proper amphibious operations (a huge bug-bear of Hearts of Iron), the supply and logistics problems, the problems of proper fleet composition for different tasks.... Tanks and troops rolling across the grain-fields of the Ukraine seems a whole lot simpler by comparison.
Or looking at WitP:AE -- the AI does a fairly credible job there, but it's highly scripted, rather than an AI that actually knows how to respond to an evolving strategic situation. I don't blame 2by3 for that, given the enormous complexity of the game. But I again think it goes to the point that creating a dynamic, reasonably competent AI for the incredibly complex Pacific Theater is ... very hard...
Well...from a strategic level there are choices. WitP:AE, Uncommon Valor, SC:Pacific Theater, Storm over the Pacific, HOI3 come to mind. At a smaller level there's Squad Battles Pacific War, the Campaign Series, Order of Battle: Pacific...probably others?
I think this is a matter of perception. There are plenty of WWII PTO games, PC and board. Are there as many as ETO? Probably not, but there are still many to choose from.
This is one of the more interesting board games I've played in the past year, the designer is Japanese and the game definitely has some unique mechanics and components - http://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/14083/fire-sky-great-pacific-war-1941-1945 (http://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/14083/fire-sky-great-pacific-war-1941-1945)
Mirth, that Fire in the Sky board game looks fascinating. I wish I had the money, or anybody to play it with! Maybe one of these days, I'll have both. Always seems to be one or the other...
But the mechanics that the game uses to simulate the challenges of each side are fascinating.
It's a great game, but I don't own it myself. A buddy of mine has it and we played a few times last year. I'd like to revisit it. We really only started to figure it out before we were distracted by something else. That tends to happen a lot :P
Quote from: MengJiao on January 25, 2016, 03:31:11 PM
Quote from: FarAway Sooner on January 25, 2016, 03:10:11 PM
Quote from: acctingman on January 25, 2016, 03:00:03 PM
maybe game developers love tank only games....very very little armor vs armor going on there in the Pacific
"Armor vs concrete" doesn't quite capture the imagination so much, does it? :o
Does one need tanks to made a good WW II game about land combat? Is that it?
I did a lot of work on WitPAE scenarios: reading the official US accounts and other secondary sources. It seems like you really have to work to get your
imagination to picture things in the Pacific: Indochina for example. Borneo. The Japanese drive to get that oil from the Dutch. The fact that the Japanese
held off the US, had a huge army in China and got reasonable terms on surrender. There's no real popular imagery for what the Japanese were like.
I think to make good Pacific games, understanding the Japanese is the key. I certainly don't get what they thought they were doing or why they were doing it.
I'm reading a book right now that Toonces recommended called
The Rising Sun by John Toland. It does a really good job of explaining the Japanese thought process. Highly recommended!
Second Toland's The Rising Sun. One of my favorite military histories ever, if not THE favorite.
War In The Pacific and Uncommon Valor are excellent strat-/op-level games, but I would really, really like to see a Guadalcanal campaign game made by somebody who tackles the naval and air aspects in as much detail as those games do but also has detailed and realistic ground combat. Heck, Guadalcanal is just one island, somebody should be able to map it in detail and make a good ground-combat game.
NO OTHER CAMPAIGN IN HISTORY can compare to Guadalcanal as a well-matched contest between major land, sea and air forces. Of course, there were other land, sea and air campaigns in the Pacific, but Guadalcanal was an extremely balanced affair. Operation Shoestring, we called it from our end.
Carriers At War was a great game...one of my old favorites on the Apple IIc back in the day. Matrix re-did the game a few years back. I have a copy of it and keep meaning to do an AAR or article otherwise on it, but other things keep popping up.
Also, I'd recommend DVG's Fleet Commander Nimitz. I'm doing an AAR in these very forums (http://grogheads.com/forums/index.php?topic=15345.0) if anyone hasn't seen it and wants to check it out. It's not without some issues, but the game overall I enjoy very much.
Another good one that had some of us riveted for a while was Order of Battle: Pacific (http://grogheads.com/forums/index.php?topic=13288.0). Not very detailed and very Panzer General-like, but still, it was a decent game for the 35 hours it had me invested in it.
Because PTO does not lead to balanced gameplay?
I've often wondered about this myself.
I think it's a problem of scale. When you get right down to it, the Pacific war was a naval war that took place over half of the globe. One thing that WitP has helped me appreciate is that the war in the Pacific was a war of logistics. For the Japanese it was seizing the resource areas of the NEI and then keeping those SLOCs open; for the Allies it was securing SLOCs to flow troops and materiel into theater to progressively capture islands to establish land based air support.
Therefore, if you're going to take any kind of meaningful look at the Pacific war from a strategic level you have to give the logistics system a hard look. In land war we tend to just say if you can trace a line of supply from a unit to a base it's "in supply." I don't think that works as well in the Pacific because the nature of naval vessels that can traverse large amounts of territory in a day, and that you can't really hold a piece of ocean like you can a piece of land, means that you need to build a logistics game that rivals your war game. This is something that really took me a long time to appreciate in WitP, but it makes sense.
Quote from: Toonces on January 26, 2016, 07:47:15 AM
I've often wondered about this myself.
I think it's a problem of scale. When you get right down to it, the Pacific war was a naval war that took place over half of the globe. One thing that WitP has helped me appreciate is that the war in the Pacific was a war of logistics. For the Japanese it was seizing the resource areas of the NEI and then keeping those SLOCs open; for the Allies it was securing SLOCs to flow troops and materiel into theater to progressively capture islands to establish land based air support.
Therefore, if you're going to take any kind of meaningful look at the Pacific war from a strategic level you have to give the logistics system a hard look. In land war we tend to just say if you can trace a line of supply from a unit to a base it's "in supply." I don't think that works as well in the Pacific because the nature of naval vessels that can traverse large amounts of territory in a day, and that you can't really hold a piece of ocean like you can a piece of land, means that you need to build a logistics game that rivals your war game. This is something that really took me a long time to appreciate in WitP, but it makes sense.
+1 I've just this past month begun to wrap my head around WitP:AE so I understand what you are saying. An incredibly deep game.
The problem for any realistic simulation of the Pacific War is that it all comes down to oil.
I think the best example is the IJN attempts to knock out Henderson Field on Guadalcanal. During the night of October 13, the Battleships Kongo and Haruna bombarded the airfield with 14" shells. This wrecked most of the airfieldl, most os the planes, and almost all the avgas.
Logically, the plan should be to bombard Henderson as often as possible to destroy it and isolate the island. However, the next sortie of Battleships to do that was on 12 November. Why wait a month?
Remember that Japan went to war over oil.
t comes down to fuel. To avoid air attacks during daylight, it was necessary to sprint to Guadalcanal during a limited timeframe. Get in, do bombardment, and get out before daylight. The problem is that when you put all the boilers on line and run the ship at flank speed for hours, your fuel consumption doesn't go up, it goes up exponentially.
Cruising at normal speeds, say 12 - 16 knots, by rule of thumb takes only approx 20 % of an engineering systems total power. The fuel needed for this would be about twelve tons of oil per hour for a Battleship.
The Yamatos were hogs and needed sixteen tons per hour. To sprint in to attack Guadalcanal at night, they would need to operate at about 60%, and this would be a fuel usage of NINETY_SIX TONS perhour. A complete operation would need about 1,800 tons for one Yamato to make a roundtrip .
The real fuel hogs, by percentage, would be the destroyers, A typical Japanese destroyer carried 500 tons. At cruising speeds, they burned somewhere around 1.7 tons an hour. At battle speed, their usage jumped to about 16 tons an hour.
Now consider, a task force of say two battleships, four cruisers, and ten destroyers.
The IJN didn't send in their battleships to bombard Guadalcanal more than they did, because for each sortie it took them two to four weeks to replenish the fuel used up.
No wargamer would consider a plan with these limitations. All the great Japanese naval successes were raids. The first Air Fleet goes in, hits hard, and then leaves. They could not stay off Pearl Harbor because the logistic base did not exist. After two days of attack, the carriers would be out of bombs and torpedoes. To replenish, they had to go back to a logistics hub. To even get to Pearl Harbor, the Fleet was refueled halfway in, and then again on the return trip. The IJN did not have the Service Squadrons/Fleet Train that the USN developed to conduct a deep penetration.
And invading Australia? Once again, you don't have the cargo carriers to keep any invasion force in supply. To support the army on Guadalcanal, the navy couldn't get slow, but effective, cargo ships in through the air attacks, and then get them out. The had to fall back on the Tokyo Express, using destroyers to carry troops and supplies. This was a huge consumer of oil.
Forgive my rant, but my old man was an engineer during the war and we discussed fuel a lot.
Professionals discuss logistics. O0
Task Force 1942 from Microprose, did a decent job, I thought, of simulating the naval action of the Tokyo Express, even though it necessarily lacked the important air contributions, and the ground game was completely abstracted. But I was pretty fuzzy about how often the Japanese side could really afford to send naval forces out.
For a tactical PTO land (and amphibious) game, it's hard to beat Rising Sun in the Tiller Campaign Series collection from Matrix. But necessarily a lot of the important strategic elements are ignored or heavily abstracted.
Quote from: jomni on January 25, 2016, 11:04:35 PM
Because PTO does not lead to balanced gameplay?
Well, the ETO isn't balanced either. German railroads were falling apart before the war started due to the priorities of using so much steel for
re-arming. The Germans took France and Belgium, but except for coal, really never got much of any economic use out of it.
Oh, and German Agriculture was fantastically inefficient in terms of labor AND they blew their best chance to fix that up when they let two or three milion Russian POWs starve to death in 1941-42. That labor was the last chace the Germans had to get their economy to some level of sustainability.
Overall, the Japanese did much, much better than the Germans. They entered the war when their equipment had the best lead over what their foes were fielding. They took all their objectives and then some. And they effectively surrendered on terms and were not overrun by the Russians (except in Manchuria, but its not like the Russians took Tokyo or anything.). So in many ways the ETO is even less balanced than the PTO.
60+ cities equivalent to the 60+ largest cities of the US, practically and literally nuked > being overrun by the Russians.
That actually seems legit.
Quote from: JasonPratt on January 26, 2016, 10:33:18 AM
60+ cities equivalent to the 60+ largest cities of the US, practically and literally nuked > being overrun by the Russians.
That actually seems legit.
I still think the Japanese fought much better man-for-man than the Germans. Also given the weakness of the Japanese economy and the fact that they
expanded into even less economically structured areas, the Japanese did very well with what they had.
So given the relatively un-industrialized nature of the whole Pacific, the PTO is much more balanced than the ETO, where the Germans really never got their act together at all in terms of sustainable production.
Excellent points Bes. And they beg the question of how you would game something like that, and would it even be interesting?
I think I've talked about this before. What would be an ideal way of modeling the entire Pacific war would be to use some sort of telescoping time system like Herman uses in the board wargame Pacific War. My biggest gripe against WitP is the incremental snail-pace of operations, weeks when really not too much is going on and you're making tiny incremental steps towards some goal.
For example, in my last game of WitP I was playing before I lost the save, I was planning an invasion of Espirtu Santo early in 1942. In order to conduct this invasion I had to 1)collect my transports and cargo shipping in the same locations as my troops, 2)load troops, 3)load aircraft and otherwise move them into the AOR, 4)collect fuel and supplies from other locations, 5)collect all of these ships in some central location while, 6)doing the same for the escorting warships, 7)plan replenishment requirements for the warships, 8)and then finally sail all of this huge mess to Fiji to replensh it before making the assault onto Espritu. Figuring that this whole process took at least a month, or 30 turns, at 20 minutes a turn, we're talking 10 hours of gaming time just to get the logistics of this one simple invasion collected such that I could actually get to the fun part of fighting the ships and troops into there.
Ideally I'd like to see this process completely streamlined. You plan an operation, allocate resources, and let the computer crunch everything and bring everything to the point where you're ready to push into the invasion. The enemy is suprised, or has neutral initiative, or perhaps suprises YOU, and this determines the starting conditions for the operation. Then, both sides drill down to an operational-tactical level for the fight.
What would be extremely interesting at this point is to have an actual tactical layer similar to Carriers at War or, this will sound crazy, export things to a flight simulator to allow you to actually fly in the most critical strikes of the battle!
But, ultimately, what this does is capture the important parts of the Pacific war without the extraordinary minutia required in WitP. While logistics is critical, there have to be ways to make both sides feel the pinch without actually having to go through the pain of moving the little boats on that huge map; be allowed to allocate resources to degrading your enemy's logistics in an absract way, and use resource "points" to determine the operational tempo you can bring to bear on an operation.
Why somebody hasn't built this layer-upon-layers model into a game I don't know. I suspect that programming an AI that can handle this type of telescoping timeframe and planning would be very daunting. And, if you're going to build a pure two-player game, you already have excellent board games that do this on Vassal.
Still, I think there is worthy meat here for computer wargaming, but the amount of space you have to cover, the timeframes involved, and the fact that naval warfare is inherently more difficult to model (in my opinion) than land warfare, makes the task challenging.
One more quick example: In WitP you have great control of your submarines. You can push them to certain hexes, assign them patrol areas, have to figure out where to hub them, where and when to replenish them, etc.
It's very satisfying when you see your sub put a torpedo into an AK. But really what you're doing is allocating a percentage of your submarines into a certain area to degrade your enemy's resources. Rather than have to micromanage 40 submarines around a map, why not just spend "submarine points" in a wide geographical area, and use some mathematical equation to determine the attrition rate of the enemy? In the end, you're accomplishing the same thing by both means, but one takes exponentially more time.
Shortcuts like this would make WitP more enjoyable, and more approachable.
Seems Pacific sims are either super-complex or super-simplified, with little middle ground.
We should design one, starting a new GrogHeads publishing house.
I've been toying with the idea for a few years.
My idea for a game, and it's not just Pacific war although that's one area I'm leaning, would do exactly what I describe.
You'd have a given timeframe, say 3 months. You choose your major operations for that time frame. Allocate resources from a list to apply to that operation. Once you've done that, you press the turn button and the game moves to an operational/tactial map and from there you fight the operation. At the conclusion of the operations the results are fed back into the strategic layer and you continue from there.
I can picture the outline of the game in my head, but I have no idea how to program it.
Quote from: Toonces on January 26, 2016, 12:16:17 PM
I can picture the outline of the game in my head, but I have no idea how to program it.
You just summed up every IT project ever.
This may be the year I finally start to tackle some of my good ideas. I just need to actually start, and I'll bet I could get somewhere.
One of those thought threads Brant posted talked about this, about just starting is the first step to doing.
Quote from: Toonces on January 26, 2016, 12:21:35 PM
This may be the year I finally start to tackle some of my good ideas. I just need to actually start, and I'll bet I could get somewhere.
One of those thought threads Brant posted talked about this, about just starting is the first step to doing.
WitPAE is a good start. Of course it has to be reprogrammed from the bottom up. One thing I found is that tribal loyalties (which fluctuated more
than most accounts seem to note) have no good way to be simulated in WitPAE -- but in New Guinea the amount of labor the local tribes provided could be pretty crucial. And of course there were pro-Japanese tribes that you never hear about on the Rabual - Fischhaven Axis as well as out toward Bougainville.
Quote from: Toonces on January 26, 2016, 12:16:17 PM
You'd have a given timeframe, say 3 months. You choose your major operations for that time frame. Allocate resources from a list to apply to that operation. Once you've done that, you press the turn button and the game moves to an operational/tactial map and from there you fight the operation. At the conclusion of the operations the results are fed back into the strategic layer and you continue from there.
My dream WWII strategy game would be a game that is actually, literally organized around operations. I don't know of any computer game that actually accomplishes this, or even really approximates it. In all the strategic-level WW2 games I can think of, 'operations' are entirely notional -- you have to imagine their parameters or, as in WitP, keep track of it with pencil and paper. Nothing *in* the game really 'implements' the operation, so to speak.
Quote from: Toonces on January 26, 2016, 12:16:17 PM
You'd have a given timeframe, say 3 months. You choose your major operations for that time frame. Allocate resources from a list to apply to that operation. Once you've done that, you press the turn button and the game moves to an operational/tactial map and from there you fight the operation. At the conclusion of the operations the results are fed back into the strategic layer and you continue from there.
You know you're kinda describing Fleet Commander Nimitz, right? :)
Quote from: Toonces on January 26, 2016, 12:08:44 PM
One more quick example: In WitP you have great control of your submarines. You can push them to certain hexes, assign them patrol areas, have to figure out where to hub them, where and when to replenish them, etc.
It's very satisfying when you see your sub put a torpedo into an AK. But really what you're doing is allocating a percentage of your submarines into a certain area to degrade your enemy's resources. Rather than have to micromanage 40 submarines around a map, why not just spend "submarine points" in a wide geographical area, and use some mathematical equation to determine the attrition rate of the enemy? In the end, you're accomplishing the same thing by both means, but one takes exponentially more time.
Shortcuts like this would make WitP more enjoyable, and more approachable.
But to many WITPAE grognards, that kind of abstraction would make the game
less enjoyable. What to some people is the micromanaging "hell" of WITPAE is to others micromanaging "heaven". :crazy2:
^ Sure, I get that. The thing is, I don't know that you're getting a better simulation using WitP's approach. At the end of the day, you're accomplishing pretty much the same thing with both methods, but one takes far longer.
Granted, if you're grooving on the micromanagement then that's the thing, but I think an argument could be made that players are deluding themselves if they think the micromanagement accomplishes anything different that some useful abstractions could equally accomplish.
Anyway, that's my idea- something that focuses on operations. I actually started with this idea for a medieval-type game, where players would focus on operations and the logistics of campaigns. I only have an idea, though, nothing on paper.
Back to our Pacific example, imagine that there is an interface that allows you to set up an operation, allocate resources, etc., and then you still get the WitP shooty-shooty but only on, say, a week to month timescale. That's kind of my idea. You can micromanage to some extent, but only at the operational level; the rest is highly streamlined and abstracted.
What you are describing is that tact paradox attempts to take on the HOI series.
The only way to game the PTO would do it as seperate operational battles.
The problem with any game of the whole oceanic campaign, including WiTPAE, is that the real situation has to be ignored.
For example, in the last three months of 1942, the Japanese produced 1,194,000 tons (almost totally from the Dutch Indies). In that same time frame, only 643,000 tons made it to Japan to be refined. So they had approx 215,000 tons of fuel oil per month.
At that time, the IJN's operations were consuming about 302,000 tons. In effect, Japan was operating at an 85,000 ton loss from the fuel reserves per month. And this is just considering the navy's usage.
To let the IJN do all it would like to do (in say, the AAR right now between UCG and Kybp), the historical reality has to be manipulated.
Paul Kennedy's, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers gives a very good breakdown of the differences the two sides faced. But ultimately, oil, and moving oil, was the decisive factor in the naval war in the Pacific.
Couple of points.
I've seen some very good naval sims that capture WW2 Pacific combat. Carriers at War is a good example among many.
There are several good land based WW2 Pacific sims.
I would like to see a medium complexity game of land combat in Asia (China, Korea, Indo-China, Burma, etc.....) and suggestions would be welcome. That would seem to be a conflict which could be done.
But if you look at the map, the distances are massive. Logistics, air warfare, and naval warfare over massive areas of the planet are more difficult to simulate.
The old Pacific General tried to combine naval, air and land combat in a low-medium complexity game - and did it poorly.
Quote from: airboy on January 27, 2016, 10:03:11 AM
Couple of points.
I've seen some very good naval sims that capture WW2 Pacific combat. Carriers at War is a good example among many.
There are several good land based WW2 Pacific sims.
I would like to see a medium complexity game of land combat in Asia (China, Korea, Indo-China, Burma, etc.....) and suggestions would be welcome. That would seem to be a conflict which could be done.
But if you look at the map, the distances are massive. Logistics, air warfare, and naval warfare over massive areas of the planet are more difficult to simulate.
The old Pacific General tried to combine naval, air and land combat in a low-medium complexity game - and did it poorly.
Mind sharing what those good land based sims are? (for the Pacific Theater)
Thanks
Quote from: acctingman on January 27, 2016, 10:47:52 AM
Quote from: airboy on January 27, 2016, 10:03:11 AM
Couple of points.
I've seen some very good naval sims that capture WW2 Pacific combat. Carriers at War is a good example among many.
There are several good land based WW2 Pacific sims.
I would like to see a medium complexity game of land combat in Asia (China, Korea, Indo-China, Burma, etc.....) and suggestions would be welcome. That would seem to be a conflict which could be done.
But if you look at the map, the distances are massive. Logistics, air warfare, and naval warfare over massive areas of the planet are more difficult to simulate.
The old Pacific General tried to combine naval, air and land combat in a low-medium complexity game - and did it poorly.
Mind sharing what those good land based sims are? (for the Pacific Theater)
Thanks
Operational Art of War
http://www.the-strategist.net/RD/scenarii/browse_scenario.php
Operational Art of War for land based.
Strategic Command - Pacific Theater was a pretty good intermediate simulation.
Hmmm... Lots of ideas thrown out here and most of them good! But it's also worth qualifying that there are more Pacific Theater games than folks readily give credit to. Off the top of my head, I can't think of any major commercial successes, even by wargaming standards...
If I had to sum up what I'm hearing in a few points, they might be:
- There's a real disconnect between the strategic elements of the game (macro-industrial resource allocation and supply management with supply lines thousands of miles long) and tactical elements of the game (infantry fighting each other in jungles and fixed positions where the line-of-sight was often 30 yards or less). Trying to reconcile these two elements into a single game seems awfully difficult.
- Wargamers like tankses! Yes we do...
- Limited opportunities for tactical cleverness in land battles or air battles. Sea battles get better treatment, and seem to have produced better wargames for the Pacific theater, than their land- or air-based counterparts.
The Japanese certainly underestimated the importance of logistics, just as they underestimated the American's willingness to fight AND their ability to deliver logistical superiority.
It's interesting, because the Germans--although much more cognizant of these things than their Japanese counterparts (who still largely held beliefs that others abandoned after WW I)--were equally shocked and overwhelmed at the sheer volume of stuff that the Americans brought to bear. Shells, bombs, airplanes, gasoline, trucks, food, the list went on and on and on.
After looting American supply depots overrun in the wake of Kasserine Pass, Rommel is reported to have confided that he knew America would win the war when he learned that they had the resources to ship fresh butter to troops fighting 4,000 miles from home. Writing in his somewhat revisionist history,
Invasion: They're Coming, former SS Lt. Colonel Paul Carell uses the term
materialschlacht to refer to the way Americans conducted the Normandy campaign.
Are there any wargames out there actually invoke logistics management as a fun part of the game?
Unity of Command does a nice job of modeling supply in a way that's easy to manage but a vital part of the game. However, it's very abstracted and uses the same "supply lines" concept that's been in hex-based wargames for 40 years or more now...
Quote from: acctingman on January 25, 2016, 03:00:03 PM
maybe game developers love tank only games....very very little armor vs armor going on there in the Pacific
That... and specifically the Reich Fanboys. Lotsa wargamers & simmers who prefer playing ze Nazis. Some even complain about games in which they cannot, and start asking for such a version. ::)
Germans have the coolest toys and Hugo Boss uniforms.
Quote from: jomni on January 28, 2016, 04:16:08 AM
Germans have the coolest toys and Hugo Boss uniforms.
It is hard to beat the Panther and Tiger where WW2 Tank Sexy is concerned, let's be honest.
Still, from a totally little boy viewpoint that all these years later I still haven't outgrown -- one of the things I love about WW2 is that all the major 'factions' have a couple uniquely cool toys!
USA: hard to beat the P-51 or the P-38 in the awesome category. Also the B-29, the most awe-inspiring bomber of the war.
USSR: the IS tank destroyers are completely bad ass
Japan: the Zero, still in my mind the most aesthetically pleasing fighter of WW2
UK: more of a stretch for me -- the Spitfire, obviously. It's like the Aston-Martin of WW2 fighters. If Bond had fought in the Big One, Q would've rigged up a super-special Spitfire for him. And I've always had a soft spot for the completely ridiculous but somehow cool Churchill tank...
Quote from: jomni on January 28, 2016, 04:16:08 AM
Germans have the coolest toys and Hugo Boss uniforms.
QFT
Quote from: sandman2575 on January 28, 2016, 09:48:50 AM
Quote from: jomni on January 28, 2016, 04:16:08 AM
Germans have the coolest toys and Hugo Boss uniforms.
It is hard to beat the Panther and Tiger where WW2 Tank Sexy is concerned, let's be honest.
Still, from a totally little boy viewpoint that all these years later I still haven't outgrown -- one of the things I love about WW2 is that all the major 'factions' have a couple uniquely cool toys!
USA: hard to beat the P-51 or the P-38 in the awesome category. Also the B-29, the most awe-inspiring bomber of the war.
USSR: the IS tank destroyers are completely bad ass
Japan: the Zero, still in my mind the most aesthetically pleasing fighter of WW2
UK: more of a stretch for me -- the Spitfire, obviously. It's like the Aston-Martin of WW2 fighters. If Bond had fought in the Big One, Q would've rigged up a super-special Spitfire for him. And I've always had a soft spot for the completely ridiculous but somehow cool Churchill tank...
Don't forget Italy....they had......uhm....they had the....er, they had.....uhm.....??
Some of the Macchi planes were pretty sexy though :D
Quote from: jomni on January 28, 2016, 04:16:08 AM
Germans have the coolest toys and Hugo Boss uniforms.
But the Allies had fully functioning economies and agricultural sectors that were not nearly as labor-intensive and all Axis countries (including Finland, Italy, Rumania, Hungary, Bulgaria and Japan) except Germany managed to surrender on some kind of terms. I suppose you could count the surrender of the German armies in Northern Italy as surrendering on terms, but when armies have to work out their own terms, it seems the central design agency with its cool toys has not done a very good job.
But still..... Me 109 - if the Germans had won we'd have at-ats by now
(https://www.grogheads.com/forums/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fcdn.hiconsumption.com%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2F2014%2F10%2FStar-Wars-Meets-World-War-II-1.jpg&hash=d6b824f219126635b42a5c78eb247ee494a718fd)
The ME-109 was a fine plane once it was airborne. Landing it was too hard. And, like all the other high-performance stuff the Germans designed during WW II, it suffered from maintenance problems. I'd now like to turn my attention to the German Tank Glamour Syndrome.
The Tiger and the Panther were great tanks. But they also reflected a design philosophy that didn't do a very good job of balancing performance versus supply demands, reliability, or economy of function.
When they designed the Sherman, the Americans intentionally opted for quantity and reliability over performance quality. To the extent that grown men fantasize about driving a tank in WW II, they want the best single tank out there, and the Tigers and the Panthers get all the glamour there. But they're the really high-maintenance girlfriends who expect you to wait 45 minutes while they get ready, want a fancy dinner with really expensive wine, and then might still just want to call it an early night afterwards.
If anybody designed war games where you also had to maintain your tank between battles, the Panthers and Tigers would be a lot less popular.
The Americans intentionally designed the Sherman so that it could be maintained by less educated crews and even mechanics. The Americans instituted a whole "asset recovery" system in Western Europe that would tow destroyed Shermans back to central junk yards and cannibalize them for parts. In many instances, refurbished Shermans went into battle two or three times with different crews. And the abundance of spare parts made it much easier to fix casual damage.
That performance give-up worked fairly well for the Americans, in part because the best tank destroyer they ultimately developed was probably the P-47 Thunderbolt...
Quote from: MengJiao on January 28, 2016, 01:28:07 PM
Quote from: jomni on January 28, 2016, 04:16:08 AM
Germans have the coolest toys and Hugo Boss uniforms.
But the Allies had fully functioning economies and agricultural sectors that were not nearly as labor-intensive and all Axis countries (including Finland, Italy, Rumania, Hungary, Bulgaria and Japan) except Germany managed to surrender on some kind of terms. I suppose you could count the surrender of the German armies in Northern Italy as surrendering on terms, but when armies have to work out their own terms, it seems the central design agency with its cool toys has not done a very good job.
Germans are underdogs. Must support the underdogs.
Quote from: FarAway Sooner on January 28, 2016, 04:50:30 PM
I'd now like to turn my attention to the German Tank Glamour Syndrome.
;D
O0
We seem to be off-topic, but this thread inspired me to start putting some of my ideas onto paper today.
I seem to have designed a game that is a cross between Harpoon and HPS Midway. Must try harder... ::)
I was just thinking I would love to see a game like Task Force Game's Battlewagon (or Star Fleet Battles) made for the Pacific War. I wonder if SFB could be converted? Carriers, searching for task forces, WWII SSDs... :smitten:
Quote from: sandman2575 on January 28, 2016, 09:48:50 AM
Quote from: jomni on January 28, 2016, 04:16:08 AM
Germans have the coolest toys and Hugo Boss uniforms.
<snip> --> Japan: the Zero, still in my mind the most aesthetically pleasing fighter of WW2 <--<snip>
The Yamato! (And Musashi and Shinano.) Not to mention Takao-class super-cruisers, Long Lance torpedoes, and world-class night-optics. And since we're talking about
equipment, how about the balls it took to sucker-punch the U.S.?
Quote from: jomni on January 28, 2016, 05:23:51 PM
Quote from: MengJiao on January 28, 2016, 01:28:07 PM
Quote from: jomni on January 28, 2016, 04:16:08 AM
Germans have the coolest toys and Hugo Boss uniforms.
But the Allies had fully functioning economies and agricultural sectors that were not nearly as labor-intensive and all Axis countries (including Finland, Italy, Rumania, Hungary, Bulgaria and Japan) except Germany managed to surrender on some kind of terms. I suppose you could count the surrender of the German armies in Northern Italy as surrendering on terms, but when armies have to work out their own terms, it seems the central design agency with its cool toys has not done a very good job.
Germans are underdogs. Must support the underdogs.
And so the ETO is in fact less balanced than the PTO. At least the Imperial Navy had reasonable aircraft carriers. Germans -- Nothin'
Quote from: glen55 on January 28, 2016, 09:23:47 PM
The Yamato! (And Musashi and Shinano.) Not to mention Takao-class super-cruisers, Long Lance torpedoes, and world-class night-optics. And since we're talking about equipment, how about the balls it took to sucker-punch the U.S.?
Yamato for sure. The Godzilla of battleships. Yet somehow for me, its bad-ass factor doesn't register as highly as it should, if only because the IJN was essentially too reluctant to commit Yamato and Musashi for fear of losing them, and so they ended rather ingloriously.
I do love the dreadnaught-type battleships like Kongo, obsolete though she was by WW2...
Quote from: FarAway Sooner on January 28, 2016, 04:50:30 PM
I'd now like to turn my attention to the German Tank Glamour Syndrome.
The late Panthers, and the Tigers, were undoubtedly high-class; but the Panzer IV kicked an excessive amount of ass in various variants, much closer to the volkswagen concept of the Sherman while still being better quality. But in the last years of the war, it wasn't unreasonable to armor and gun up to the Panther and Tiger, to help keep experienced crews alive and to function as a force multiplier, simply because Germany couldn't afford to compete in losing even half as many PzIV (and crews) as Shermans. From a logistical efficiency standpoint, though, and for force application, I'd rather have a division of Pz4s than a brigade of Panthers. (Maybe even moreso than a division of Panthers.)
Add in the various German tank destroyers, many of which were frighteningly brilliant but overlooked by leaders focused on the glory of the tank. Stugs and Elefants? YES PLEASE! And the iconic tracked APC, which had a high survival rate partly because it could FREAKING DODGE SHOTS!
German armor had its problems, but their kit and their tactics were generally ace.
Quote from: JasonPratt on January 29, 2016, 01:19:58 PM
Quote from: FarAway Sooner on January 28, 2016, 04:50:30 PM
I'd now like to turn my attention to the German Tank Glamour Syndrome.
The late Panthers, and the Tigers, were undoubtedly high-class; but the Panzer IV kicked an excessive amount of ass in various variants, much closer to the volkswagen concept of the Sherman while still being better quality. But in the last years of the war, it wasn't unreasonable to armor and gun up to the Panther and Tiger, to help keep experienced crews alive and to function as a force multiplier, simply because Germany couldn't afford to compete in losing even half as many PzIV (and crews) as Shermans. From a logistical efficiency standpoint, though, and for force application, I'd rather have a division of Pz4s than a brigade of Panthers. (Maybe even moreso than a division of Panthers.)
Add in the various German tank destroyers, many of which were frighteningly brilliant but overlooked by leaders focused on the glory of the tank. Stugs and Elefants? YES PLEASE! And the iconic tracked APC, which had a high survival rate partly because it could FREAKING DODGE SHOTS!
German armor had its problems, but their kit and their tactics were generally ace.
Like many things about the Germans in WWII, most of this falls appart under close scrutiny. For example, by 1944, most Shermans were more combat-capable than most PzKW IVs. AND the Shermans with bigger guns (Firefly and the US 76mm) were much more effective than Panthers (mostly because position rather than armor determines battles between tanks of roughly equal firepower and Shermans were more likely to get there firstest with the mostest).
I have a review coming soon to the front page here on the iOS game Tank Battle Pacific. It's a light wargame with not very many missions, but it's cheap (two dolla) and you can buy additional campaigns made up of multiple scenarios for 0.99 each.
If you know Hunted Cow/Hexwar games, you'll know this one.
Jason, in the WTO from 1944-1945, assuming they could actually get them running, the biggest challenge for the German tanks' kit and tactics seemed to be that their phone lines to HQ were forever being cut by Allied bombing and artillery.
I read an interesting fact in a Paul Carell book I finished recently that indicated that Americans had 10 times as many staff as the Germans who were dedicated to intelligence at the divisional level.
Quote from: Banzai_Cat on January 29, 2016, 03:44:54 PM
I have a review coming soon to the front page here on the iOS game Tank Battle Pacific. It's a light wargame with not very many missions, but it's cheap (two dolla) and you can buy additional campaigns made up of multiple scenarios for 0.99 each.
If you know Hunted Cow/Hexwar games, you'll know this one.
Tank Battle Pacific???? Was there such a thing?
Quote from: FarAway Sooner on February 01, 2016, 01:16:29 AM
Jason, in the WTO from 1944-1945, assuming they could actually get them running, the biggest challenge for the German tanks' kit and tactics seemed to be that their phone lines to HQ were forever being cut by Allied bombing and artillery.
I read an interesting fact in a Paul Carell book I finished recently that indicated that Americans had 10 times as many staff as the Germans who were dedicated to intelligence at the divisional level.
I knew a guy (he's now been dead for 30 years) who was on the Divisional intelligence staff of a US armored division. Being a young whippersnapper, I once asked him how the US defeated those superior German tanks. He said, "We always knew where they were and we always had gas."
Later I found out more. He also killed some Germans with his .45, which he found very upsetting AND (at a different level), the German armored formations were very easy to track by radio intell/sigint, whereas American armored formations could (and did) completely absolutely and totally disappear from the radio emissions world and run silent run deep if they needed to.
I think I've played ever world war II game available and have not yet found the perfect game. While complicated and time consuming I really like War in the Pacific Admirals Edition. Can't get in to most hex based counter games but really want to just can't hold my interest though - among those flashpoint campaigns red thunder is the best to me. I own hearts of iron 3 and supreme ruler ultimate too, but just can't get in to either. Like the hex games I really want to like HOI3 but tried multiple times and can't get in to it, same with Supreme Ruler, the tactical combat is so bad it ruins everything great about the game.
I also like Combat Mission games in increments. Anyone else own so many games but not yet found the perfect game, I spend about an hour a week looking for the perfect war game I never heard of but have yet to find it - I too would prefer the ww2 theater like the OP.
Quote from: MengJiao on February 01, 2016, 09:47:01 AM
I knew a guy (he's now been dead for 30 years) who was on the Divisional intelligence staff of a US armored division. Being a young whippersnapper, I once asked him how the US defeated those superior German tanks. He said, "We always knew where they were and we always had gas."
Later I found out more. He also killed some Germans with his .45, which he found very upsetting AND (at a different level), the German armored formations were very easy to track by radio intell/sigint, whereas American armored formations could (and did) completely absolutely and totally disappear from the radio emissions world and run silent run deep if they needed to.
Yeah. I think the Germans learned a lot of good habits, but they also picked up some very bad habits fighting the Russians.
In an interesting comparison, when the RAF brought a bunch of veteran pilots back to the South Pacific to fight the Japanese in late 1942, they tried to use the same dogfight tactics that had worked against the Germans and got butchered.
There's just no winning if you're trying to out-turn a Zero. Go head-to-head with it, trading bullet-for-bullet the way the Americans learned to do, and you'll win most of the time. What drives success in one situation can prove lethal in another.
Quote from: MengJiao on February 01, 2016, 09:47:01 AM
I knew a guy (he's now been dead for 30 years) who was on the Divisional intelligence staff of a US armored division. Being a young whippersnapper, I once asked him how the US defeated those superior German tanks. He said, "We always knew where they were and we always had gas."
Later I found out more. He also killed some Germans with his .45, which he found very upsetting AND (at a different level), the German armored formations were very easy to track by radio intell/sigint, whereas American armored formations could (and did) completely absolutely and totally disappear from the radio emissions world and run silent run deep if they needed to.
Yep, there you go. Eisenhower in
Crusade in Europe made a similar point about how the command and control structure for the Allies, despite their multinational composition, was vastly much better than the screwy, competitive, and murderously suspicious C&C for the Nazis.
Hey shodan. Welcome to the Grogs if we haven't already said 'Hello'. I've always lusted after the perfect WWII strategic game and haven't found it yet either. The top of my list currently is the Decisive Campaigns series though War in the West looks like a winner too but I've not tried it. There just doesn't seem to be the perfect combo of Air, Land and Sea elements in any game.
Quote from: FarAway Sooner on February 02, 2016, 12:33:57 AM
Quote from: MengJiao on February 01, 2016, 09:47:01 AM
I knew a guy (he's now been dead for 30 years) who was on the Divisional intelligence staff of a US armored division. Being a young whippersnapper, I once asked him how the US defeated those superior German tanks. He said, "We always knew where they were and we always had gas."
Later I found out more. He also killed some Germans with his .45, which he found very upsetting AND (at a different level), the German armored formations were very easy to track by radio intell/sigint, whereas American armored formations could (and did) completely absolutely and totally disappear from the radio emissions world and run silent run deep if they needed to.
Yeah. I think the Germans learned a lot of good habits, but they also picked up some very bad habits fighting the Russians.
Apparently, when the Germans evolved their armored doctrine in the 1930s, radio was all the rage and they were ahead in Communications and
in sigint And this paid off hugely up until late 1942, when the allies pretty much all the sudden pulled ahead -- having learned it all the hard way from the Germans. The Russians were notoriously inept at using their radios through all of 1941 and most of 1942, but then they too suddenly got much better at the whole comms and sigint game. In the five-volume "Stalingrad Trilogy" (Gantz), one on-going theme in STAVKA's attempts to get things working is a steady insistance on getting army commanders to use their communications as needed. Though some times that amounted to : Where is the commander? Can you tell him that STAVKA is going to call him soon?
My take on this is a little different than some here.
Take a globe of 1939 and look at the US,GB and the USSR and even throw in China.
Than explain to me how two small countries almost won WWII? With both of them not really having too much in the way of minerals or oil.
We can Monday morning quarterback all we like, but they had to be doing something right.
If Hitler goes for Moscow in September instead of Kiev, I think they win or at least get a peace where the USSR is behind the Urals.
Of course what would have happened if the did not have the disgusting idiotic racial policy that they did. Would the scientists stay in a greater Germany and build it for them?
The abscence of the racial policy would have probably made the war in the east that much easier.
I saw "five-volume Stalingrad Trilogy", and then I saw "Gantz" and I knew why such a thing exits. :D
See, FarAway Sooner? Even this thread devolved into a discussion on non-Pacific WWII. Is all hope lost? :(
Quote from: Sir Slash on February 02, 2016, 09:57:13 AM
Hey shodan. Welcome to the Grogs if we haven't already said 'Hello'. I've always lusted after the perfect WWII strategic game and haven't found it yet either. The top of my list currently is the Decisive Campaigns series though War in the West looks like a winner too but I've not tried it. There just doesn't seem to be the perfect combo of Air, Land and Sea elements in any game.
Thanks Slash, yep I keep looking though like I'm going to find something new one of these times :)
Have you tried any of the Schwerpunkt games?
I haven't. Are they any good?
No but I am familiar with them from reviews and looking at the games site, thanks for the suggestion.
I just can't get in to hex games and counters, maybe it's the graphics or the static feeling. Most of the hex games really don't seem big enough, counters just line up on the front and reach from coast to coast - I've tried many times to enjoy war in the east style games but they just don't hold my interest for long, I've just come to the conclusion outside of flashpoint campaigns I don't like hex based war games.
I'm really looking forward to operational art of war iv with updated graphics but I understand they just pushed development time out further due to issues.
I think the perfect game for me would be a combination of hearts of iron 3, war in the pacific, supreme ruler ultimate all mixed in. What I like about WITPAE is it does not feel like a hex game even though it is and I love the battle animations even if I escape out of them a lot of the time, it breaks up the hex game feel. Supreme ruler is awesome but the combat is horrific and ruins the whole game, and hearts of iron 3 has a lot to offer too but here I just can't get in to the hex combat and if you don't play a major power it feels like it's pointless in playing. Other games like battle academy 2 are good, just not as deep or complex as I'd like.
Quote from: bbmike on February 02, 2016, 06:41:41 PM
See, FarAway Sooner? Even this thread devolved into a discussion on non-Pacific WWII. Is all hope lost? :(
I hear you. No one really likes to talk about and play the Pacific.
The Japanese had sexy destroyers. Destroyers. Not cruisers. Not battlewagons. Not dive-bombers. Destroyers.
Like a Sherman, who wants to command a single destroyer in a naval warfare sim?
Quote from: magnus on February 02, 2016, 04:47:57 PM
My take on this is a little different than some here.
Take a globe of 1939 and look at the US,GB and the USSR and even throw in China.
Than explain to me how two small countries almost won WWII? With both of them not really having too much in the way of minerals or oil.
We can Monday morning quarterback all we like, but they had to be doing something right.
If Hitler goes for Moscow in September instead of Kiev, I think they win or at least get a peace where the USSR is behind the Urals.
Of course what would have happened if the did not have the disgusting idiotic racial policy that they did. Would the scientists stay in a greater Germany and build it for them?
The abscence of the racial policy would have probably made the war in the east that much easier.
You are looking at the whole thing from the wrong end of the telescope; the small nations attacked because their policies doomed them unless they attacked. They trapped themselves by being militarists long before they went to war.
For example, the best move for the Germans to have made, would have been to pay what they owed the USA and accepted some inflation in the early 1930s. They could have built up their economy and kept their trade going despite the depression. Instead they chose to simultaneously make every possible bad move: avoid inflation, not trade advantageously with the USA AND build up their military on a fast-crumbling economy. The racial policies were just icing on the cake of totally bad economic decisions.
But the Pacific is much more balanced and interesting. Japan had played its cards from 1894 on very well. The China thing was a mistake, but they had things humminng in Manchuria, Korea and the surrounding puppet Chinese warlords. Again, of course a deal with the USA would have been the best move, but they were nowhere near as pre-destined to total defeat as was Germany. For example, Germany would have had to have made its deal with the USA in 1931 while Japan could have made some good deals in 1941. I think McArthur thought they were going to deal, but he was more rational than the Japanese turned out to be.
I think we are discussing two different matters. Your premise seems to be in the last post of what each country should have done optimally to remain as complete countries and not looking for domination of any kind.
I can agree to disagree about Japan and Germany in WWII and these are my reasons.
The Japanese army was very hidebound to WWI. Their weapons while good enough against the Chinese were shown to be very poor against most other countries WWII weapons. Their machine guns were pretty bad from what I have read and their tanks, lets not even go there. Had Russia wanted to, without having to worry about Hitler, they could have steam rolled them right out of Asia. The Russian army that did so poorly against Finland in 1940, kicked butt against Japan in 1939.
The Japanese had an excellent navy and ships. Their aircraft were very good, except for one caveat. There aviation fuel even by 1943 was much inferior to the US gas. As can seen by the much better performance in the US after being captured and tested. Their infrastructure for building new ships and repairing them was abysmal compared to the US alone without counting in GB.
The war in the Pacific was over by 1944 for all intents and purposes. The US navy could sit where ever it wanted and destroy whatever it felt like at the moment.
I take a different view of the kamikaze than most. At the time the kamikaze where thought up it was the only rational thing to do unless they wanted to surrender. The Japanese pilot training was geared for about 200 pilots per year before the war and into it for awhile. The was no way on this earth that the pilots that the Japanese had in 1944 were going to get closer than fifty miles to a carrier command, without being shot down. That is if they were using ordinary tactics. If you still want to fight on you have to come up with some sort of game plan. The pilots were dead anyway. Look at the Marianas turkey shoot.
The one plane that is always talked about is the Zero. The one thing that is almost always forgotten is against the 109 and Spitfire in 1940 it was a mediocre aircraft. The thing that made it amazing was it was a carrier aircraft in 1940 when everyone else's carrier planes were miles behind it.
I don't see any spot in the Pacific war where Japan had any chance to win. On the other hand it is conceivable at certain times that Germany might have won in Europe.
This does become a moot point with the game changer of the A bomb. Contrary to some lurid semi-history books neither Germany or Japan was remotely close to building one. The consensus was years ago that Germany was miles ahead of the allies with poison gas technology. They also did have a delivery system. I believe some historians are now questioning if Germany had as much a lead as was once believed with poison gas.
Now back to Pacific wargames, I long for one that actually works on land and sea. I am always hoping the next game will feel right or get it right.
Quote from: magnus on February 03, 2016, 05:07:13 PM
I think we are discussing two different matters. Your premise seems to be in the last post of what each country should have done optimally to remain as complete countries and not looking for domination of any kind.
I can agree to disagree about Japan and Germany in WWII and these are my reasons.
The Japanese army was very hidebound to WWI. Their weapons while good enough against the Chinese were shown to be very poor against most other countries WWII weapons. Their machine guns were pretty bad from what I have read and their tanks, lets not even go there. Had Russia wanted to, without having to worry about Hitler, they could have steam rolled them right out of Asia. The Russian army that did so poorly against Finland in 1940, kicked butt against Japan in 1939.
The Japanese had an excellent navy and ships. Their aircraft were very good, except for one caveat. There aviation fuel even by 1943 was much inferior to the US gas. As can seen by the much better performance in the US after being captured and tested. Their infrastructure for building new ships and repairing them was abysmal compared to the US alone without counting in GB.
The war in the Pacific was over by 1944 for all intents and purposes. The US navy could sit where ever it wanted and destroy whatever it felt like at the moment.
I take a different view of the kamikaze than most. At the time the kamikaze where thought up it was the only rational thing to do unless they wanted to surrender. The Japanese pilot training was geared for about 200 pilots per year before the war and into it for awhile. The was no way on this earth that the pilots that the Japanese had in 1944 were going to get closer than fifty miles to a carrier command, without being shot down. That is if they were using ordinary tactics. If you still want to fight on you have to come up with some sort of game plan. The pilots were dead anyway. Look at the Marianas turkey shoot.
The one plane that is always talked about is the Zero. The one thing that is almost always forgotten is against the 109 and Spitfire in 1940 it was a mediocre aircraft. The thing that made it amazing was it was a carrier aircraft in 1940 when everyone else's carrier planes were miles behind it.
I don't see any spot in the Pacific war where Japan had any chance to win. On the other hand it is conceivable at certain times that Germany might have won in Europe.
This does become a moot point with the game changer of the A bomb. Contrary to some lurid semi-history books neither Germany or Japan was remotely close to building one. The consensus was years ago that Germany was miles ahead of the allies with poison gas technology. They also did have a delivery system. I believe some historians are now questioning if Germany had as much a lead as was once believed with poison gas.
Now back to Pacific wargames, I long for one that actually works on land and sea. I am always hoping the next game will feel right or get it right.
But if Japan has no chance of winning as stated above, what's the point?
As someone else said, I would much rather have separate campaigns in the Pacific than the complete war.
I really don't see the point in playing two the three years on my life in WITP, to only find out you will lose in the end.
I believe WIF starts in 1936, so with that game you might be able to do something about either Germany or Japan and their infrastructure problems.
In HOI3 you should be able to also.
I assume there are victory conditions in WITP that make it so the Japanese can "win". Much like games where if you play Germany and can last into 1946 you win.
Quote from: magnus on February 03, 2016, 05:07:13 PM
Now back to Pacific wargames, I long for one that actually works on land and sea. I am always hoping the next game will feel right or get it right.
I played WitPAE for years. No more big Pacific games for me. I'm not sure what king of Pacific game I'd really want to play other than something totally tactical with float planes and PT Boats. While I think Japan generally is underestimated and that they had far more options than they bothered to consider, at the moment I'd rather play the Combat Command "Last Blitzkrieg" (battle of the Bulge) than any other WWII game except maybe any game that features a nice p-40 (like battle of Moscow?).
UGeek currently has a very good chance of winning his WitP campaign against Kyz. Successfully invading Australia while the Japanese are on a roll through early 42, will do that.
How realistic is that? Eh. Hard to say. I feel like the Japanese would have a lot harder time in Australia against partisan forces (at least) than the game is giving credit for, keeping in mind that Anzac forces were busy elsewhere on the globe. But there ARE winning possibilities.
Also, any theory of a real-life win by one or both of the major Axis powers (Italy was doomed no matter what -- which makes trying to neutral them, or perhaps Spain, in a game very fun ;) ) is I think feasible, simply because an enemy only has to be annoyed or scared out of continuing to fight.
This was partly, of course, what the Axis Powers thought the remaining Allied Majors would do: they'd fold under pressure. That was a hugely mistaken estimation, based largely on their (somewhat identical) racial and cultural ideologies, but the theory was sound in principle.
Any Axis win theory, then, has to broadly contend with two options -- or three, come to think of it.
1.) Can one or more Allied Majors be convinced to fold? (And if only one or two, would that make enough difference to beat the remainder in a fight to the death?)
2.) If they don't fold, can the Axis win their theaters militarily?
3.) Would it make enough difference in any given scenario if the Axis Majors actually cooperated with each other?
Quote from: JasonPratt on February 05, 2016, 09:27:24 AM
This was partly, of course, what the Axis Powers thought the remaining Allied Majors would do: they'd fold under pressure. That was a hugely mistaken estimation, based largely on their (somewhat identical) racial and cultural ideologies, but the theory was sound in principle.
Any Axis win theory, then, has to broadly contend with two options -- or three, come to think of it.
1.) Can one or more Allied Majors be convinced to fold? (And if only one or two, would that make enough difference to beat the remainder in a fight to the death?)
Taking a USA-centric point of view, the USA had every reason not to fold and to support anyone who fought Japan or Germany for the following simple reasons:
1) neither Japan nor Germany could really mount a serious threat against the USA UNLESS they knocked out either Russia or the Commonwealth
2) so the most cost-effective US policy was to support Russia and the Commonwealth as much as possible AND
3) if necessary go to war to avoid having Japan or Germany mount a serious threat
There were wheels within those wheels -- for example, McArthur in the Philipines might have thought that building up forces there would deter the Japanese, but the build up probably helped push the Japanese into attacking
AND once the Japanese attacked -- notice what happened -- the USA undertook its main thrust against the power (Germany) that posed the largest threat against the Commonwealth and Russia. Ie the USA maintained the strategy of reducing threats to itself by keeping other allies in the war. It was a very cost-effective strategy.
The critical mistake from the Japanese and German perspectives was underestimating the resolve of the United States, especially after a catastrophic sneak attack. Like so many authoritarian regimes, they didn't understand the rambunctious nature of democracy, and they therefore badly estimated just how dangerous a foe a democracy can be when it is (finally) unified.
The Germans and even moreso the Japenese thought the Americans were decadent, hedonistic whimps who would settle for any kind of peaceful solution if you just gave them a bloody nose. The Americans underestimated the Japanese just as badly, but (fortunately for them) they had the materiel to easily correct for that error after the war got going.
The South Pacific from mid-42 until mid-43 makes for an interesting study, because it's about the only time in WW II where the Imperial and Allied forces were evenly matched. It turned into a grinding war of attrition that chewed up the best the Japanese had to offer (especially in terms of the air war), while only serving to season the Allied forces that would spent the next 2 years knifing through the Japanese defenses like a hot knife through butter.
In terms of the Japanese invading Australia, the Japanese Army was never going to spring for that. Their designs were in China, much closer to home.
Had they been willing to get out of China, I'd be curious to know if the Japanese logistical apparatus could have held up, but my own sense is that it could not have done so. The Japanese were woefully short on freighters and even shorter on destroyers and escorts--once the Americans got their torpedo woes sorted out, the Japanese logistical situation went from poor to terrible. You look at the sort of logistical shoe string that they were operating on in the Coral Sea, in New Guinea, and then on Guadalcanal in the middle half of 1942, and you realize just how limited their options were for a full-scale offensive against Australian troops 7,000 km from home.
My sense too is that Australian terrain would have highlighted the inferiority of Japanese weapons systems outside of their planes and their capital ships. The Japanese showed great fighting spirit, but I don't think those banzai charges would have worked so well across open terrain...
But what if the result at Midway had been 180 degrees opposite and the Japanese had eaten the American carriers, burped and turned to the next meal? Then what? That was at least as likely as what actually happened.
Would the Americans have just walked away from the Pacific for 2 years until they could return with overwhelming force - allowing the Japanese to have their way with whatever else they didn't have yet - or would they have fed new forces piece-meal into the grinder?
It's sheer speculation to say how that would've played in America politically, because America has never faced that sort of situation. Given that, I'm not inclined to make the blanket statement that Japan could never have won that war.
Quote from: glen55 on February 05, 2016, 01:12:15 PM
But what if the result at Midway had been 180 degrees opposite and the Japanese had eaten the American carriers, burped and turned to the next meal? Then what? That was at least as likely as what actually happened.
Would the Americans have just walked away from the Pacific for 2 years until they could return with overwhelming force - allowing the Japanese to have their way with whatever else they didn't have yet - or would they have fed new forces piece-meal into the grinder?
It's sheer speculation to say how that would've played in America politically, because America has never faced that sort of situation. Given that, I'm not inclined to make the blanket statement that Japan could never have won that war.
I'm not sure I'd concur with the bolded part above. It was the first major setback for the Japanese. But it wasn't a long shot by any stretch.
Aside from the Coral Sea, Midway was the first time that the Japanese carrier forces had faced the American "A team" (no disrespect intended to the men in harm's way elsewhere in the Pacific who fought bravely in those early months of the war). More importantly, Midway was the first time since Pearl Harbor that the Japanese carrier forces had operated inside an area dominated by Allied land-based air power.
Nimitz had the intel drop on the Japanese and correctly surmised that he could catch the Japanese carrier force with their pants down, and that's why he risked his entire Pacific carrier fleet to defend an island of very minimal strategic importance. He got there with more planes, an unsinkable carrier (Midway), and the benefit of surprise.
That said, if the Japanese had sent the entire US carrier force to the bottom, it's unclear what they could have done next. The invading force they had for Midway had never practice an opposed amphibious landing, and they were outnumbered 2:1 by American defenders on Midway. Had they captured that, there's no way the Japanese would have had the logistical muscle to sustain ground operations on Hawaii. But, if the Japanese had sunk the
Yorktown, Hornet, and
Enterprise at Midway, I don't think the Japanese would have had the logistical stomach to take on Australia.
It likely would have impacted Operation Torch, but it's hard to know what Roosevelt and Marshall would have made of that situation.
Assuming no further losses in Japanese carriers advancing into the face of land-based Australian air power, the Americans would still have achieved carrier parity by September 1943 and superiority by mid-1944. There's a great analysis projecting the carrier force pools and production timetables if the US had suffered a disastrous defeat at Midway, available at http://www.combinedfleet.com/economic.htm (http://www.combinedfleet.com/economic.htm). That site is maintained by Jonathan Parshall, who's the co-author of a great Midway title by the name of
Shattered Sword, if you haven't run across it.
Excessive usage of Japanese terminology aside, it's literally the best WW II book I've read in the last 10 or 20 years!