SIMPLE THOUGHTS FROM A SIMPLE MIND (1)

[Caliban]

The Japanese MUST increase HI to be successful over the long haul. A early investment of supply into HI during the first seven months of the game is rewarded with increased supply throughout the game. It is not cost effective to expand HI after JULY 1942. It is, however, advisable to continue repairing throughout. HI will be lost via invasion and bombing. What seems like too much now will not be enough later. Expand all bases which have HI to a level of 240. Anything beyond this is not cost effective. DO NOT expand the HI of bases that are already at the 240 level or above for the same reason. Epansion of HI in Kwangtung is especially important because HI there is least likely to be lost through the prosecution of the war. Increased supply in Kwangtung opens up the possibility of pursueing THE RUSSIAN OPTION. Sleep well Brady!

Caliban

[Yamato hugger]

You need to calculate how much oil you have to fuel all these HI plants you building. You will find you cant get enough.

[Vetamur]

Yeah..I understand what you are saying, but the equation is more complicated than what youre saying. I over expanded in my first game and am paying the price now in that supply is getting critically short and I have to really pick and choose my battles in May 1942... Im relatively ok because Ive been lucky enough to sink or seriously damage all Allied aircraft carriers..but on the other hand I cant take full advantage of the situation because I have only supply to support one or two real thrusts at a time.  Early I was using excessive supply during my early,clumsy and inefficient attacks so a more experienced player may get away with more HI expansion early but one has to be very careful. Ive over expanded HI, vehicle production, and probably armaments... sigh.

[LargeSlowTarget]

Vetamur, I made the same mistakes in my first PBEM game. I pulled off a reverse Midway, but cannot take advantage of this because supply levels are low everywhere due to waste during opening moves, excessive HI expansion and tailoring of aircraft factories to produce only a few plane types but in large numbers. Worst handicap for current operations - I have only two bases with more than 20.000 supply points available in order to upgrade / replenish squadrons - say "air group shuffle". Furthermore, my opponent had based heavy bombers in China early in the game and did bomb my factories within reach (Taiwan, China, Hanoi), flying at 30.000 feet and thus beyond reach of any of my early fighters... more supplies needed for repairs. Next time I'll be more prudent with my factory expansion program! [/align] [/align]On the other hand, the Allies seem to have an overabundance of supplies from the beginning - daily raids by a total of about 300 heavy bombers are a bad surprise in mid-42...[/align]

[Vetamur]

Yeah.. thats exactly it. I only ever have one or two SOMETIMES three bases with 20k or more of supplies.. Im actually attacking allied bases purely off of conjecture that I think THEY have supply. Ive heard COLOMBO has a lot of supply from the beginnng so Im sending 5 divisions with most of my expendable south east asian supply to go get it.. HUGE gamble and not a great way to run a war.. depending on the enemies supplies to feed and arm my armies...

[Mike Solli]

I never expand HI factories.  What do you guys think is a "modest" expansion?

[Terminus]

I'd like to hear that too, but we'll probably get 2 more opinions than there are people answering...[;)]

[Mike Solli]

The only "expansion" I ever did was to increase HI in Manchuoko to replace the bombed out remains of the HI in Hanoi.  I guess I did double the 5 HI to 10 in Sakhalin. [:D]

[Terminus]

I'm having problems in Manchukuo now, because it never occurred to me to expand HI there...

[Mike Solli]

Why problems?  I did discover that I chose poorly where to expand and there often wasn't over 10k of supply there.  The expansion went slowly. [8|]

[Terminus]

Erm, because Manchukuo is an active theatre, what with my invasion of Russia...

[Mike Solli]

Aha...

[pauk]

not an expert really...

[jwilkerson]

A case can probably be made for the need to expand "everything" on the Japanese side ... but any expansion has to be done "prudently" and I think maybe there are at least two ways to do things prudently. One way (the way I use) is more of a seat of the pants approach.

I regularly (in theory daily - but not quite ) monitor all the pools. Supply, Fuel, Resources, Oil, HI, Engines, etc. everything. What I want to see, is everything going up, even if just a tiny bit. When I have this situation I call it "green" (oh I track the trends by keying all the pool values into a spreadsheet together with the date so I can see how things are changing over time).

So once I am "green" .. I look things over and decide what is most important to change and make that change (or those changes). This then usually creates a "non-green" sitatution, which I then over time, manage back to the "green" state. Sometimes you have to shut a few things down for a while to let equilibrium recur. But in general I use the process "Get Green" .. "Make Change" ... "Get Green" to incrementally manage change to my production system. This does usually result in gradual increases in many areas, which areas are the highest priority probably depends on play style. But for me at least Merchant Ship points are critical to increase early on as are Armaments. But early expansion of HI is not something I've done or think I would do, you just don't have the Resources and Oil to make much use of an early expansion. By late '42 some increase in HI should definitely be considered.


And of course most Japanese players learn one way or the other about making too many changes too fast. As LST has pointed out you will starve yourself out of supply. I certainly did it in my first game and then did it again in my third. Hopefully, I've learned my lessons!!! But (near) daily monitoring of the pools is best, because this will get you reacting early to fix the situation instead of getting to the point where production shuts down involuntarily (which happened to me big time in my third game).

Oh, the second way to manage production is to try to track all the points and all the formulas and try to predict exactly what will be happening down to the point. While in theory, this might be possible, for me this is just too much work, hence I use the "daily monitoring - with adjusting and correcting" process instead.

[RUPD3658]

Don't expand HI, capture it. It costs 1000 supply to repair a single expanded /damaged HI thus it takes 1000 days befoe you turn a profit and that is if you have enough oil to run it for 1000 days. Same thing with damaged resources. Only oil is worth repairing since it will turn a profit in 167 days.

AC and arm factories should be you #1 choices for expansion.

In my current PBEM I am into December 43 and still have an 80 day surplus of HI and I dramatically expanded AC and Armament factories early in the game. If you need HI points, start shutting off what you don't need (Excess AC production, Nav/Merchant shipyards/Repair yards/ect).

[bilbow]

I will only expand HI in Saigon,Singapore and Bangkok. I figure I can always get oil to them even late in the game after the allied sub campaign has made it difficult to move oil and resource to the Home Islands.

[USSAmerica]

ORIGINAL: RUPD3658

Don't expand HI, capture it. It costs 1000 supply to repair a single expanded /damaged HI thus it takes 1000 days befoe you turn a profit and that is if you have enough oil to run it for 1000 days. Same thing with damaged resources. Only oil is worth repairing since it will turn a profit in 167 days.

That's one of the best summaries of Japanese HI/Resource/Oil expansion I've seen to date! 1000 days is a loooong time. Have to remember that one if I ever end up on that side of the table. Thanks![8D]

[Icedawg]

To what level did you expand your armament factories? In another thread, I asked folks how much they thought it would be necessary to expand these to meet the costs of incoming reinforcements. I got a range of answers from no expansion to upwards of a final value of 700 or 800.

Are you getting reinforcements at full or reduced strength? Are you taking replacements to fill loses in existing units?

[jwilkerson]

ORIGINAL: bilbow

I will only expand HI in Saigon,Singapore and Bangkok. I figure I can always get oil to them even late in the game after the allied sub campaign has made it difficult to move oil and resource to the Home Islands.

But the trade off with building up in the South, is that they are more likely to be earlier targets for the Allied 4EB. Just about every decision has trade-offs. Heck I've had Allied players knocking out capacity at Bangkok and/or Hanoi in the first week of the war!

[treespider]

A more appropriate venue for this erroneous post by me in an earlier thread about armaments...
 
You may want to consider how many oil and resource points you are going to get to feed the HI...

An off the cuff analysis of my game with Spence. I have all ofthe SRA and Burma, oil and resources 95% intact, it is April 1942.

I produce roughly 13,000 HI a turn, 16,000 oil and 20,000 resources.

You need 2x oil for HI to function then you burn 1x oil.

So assuming I decided to raise HI to 16,000 to meet oil production...

To expand 3,000 points would require 300,000 supply points.

Then to repair would cost another 3,000,000

Total cost to expand 3,300,000.

Considering I only have 3,562,000 supply points on map ... I think you can do the math.

EDIT: By the way current estimated supply use is 36,000 estimated supply production is 29,000. In 1000 days I will be out of supply. But this will change after some of my aircraft factories and repair yards come back online..