WW II in the Pacific and Wargaming

[besilarius]

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.

[JasonPratt]

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.

[MengJiao]

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.

[JasonPratt]

60+ cities equivalent to the 60+ largest cities of the US, practically and literally nuked > being overrun by the Russians.

That actually seems legit.

[MengJiao]

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.

[Toonces]

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.

[Toonces]

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.

[BanzaiCat]

Seems Pacific sims are either super-complex or super-simplified, with little middle ground.

We should design one, starting a new GrogHeads publishing house.

[Toonces]

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.

[mirth]

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.

[Toonces]

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.

[MengJiao]

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.

[sandman2575]

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.

[BanzaiCat]

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?  :)

[berto]

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".