ORIGINAL: Mike Solli
Thanks Tony and John, now you got me doing some calculating again. [:D] When does the Tojo become obsolete? I still use them and they are still effective. But, my IJA fighters are mainly the Frank and a few Tony sentai for bomber defense. I'm also building more Nicks too. I'm going to look at the Tojo monthly losses over the past year (yeah, I have all the turns [X(]). I want to try and estimate how many I'll need (including the Helen bomber and transport, which I use) and do a final production run. I have a single size 360 factory for the Ha-34 engine. I'd like to convert it to something else, but it'll take a year to repair. [X(]
Right now I have 674 Ha-34s in the pool. I'll bet I can live with that for the war. I'll have to look up my Helen bomber pool. I suspect I have ~100 of them. I will need to reserve some engines for the transport, which is my IJA transport plane. At any rate, I'll pull up the numbers in the pool and go from there. Maybe it's time to phase out Tojo production.
You can stretch the Tojo in to 1944 if it's relegated to second line CAP duties, or China/Manchuria, but my outlook is that they should be gone in favor of the Frank by 7/43. This gets the Tojo out of the field before the Mustangs, Corsairs and Thunderbolts start to appear, and the Tojo just can't compete.
I checked the aircraft comparisons in tracker, and the Tojo IIc model compares reasonably well to Soviet fighters, so if the Manchurian air force is still using Nates before August '45, give them the Tojo's that you're stuck with.
The Tojo is a common trap for IJ players IMO: it's a great airframe for a decent section of the game, but it's performance goes right off the cliff after the end of 1943.