ORIGINAL: spence
I am an unabashed Allied only player (the blush is way off the rose as far as production is concerned). I've only reached June of 1943 in any of my games twice and in both games long range recon of several ports over several turns showed a whole bunch of merchies just sitting around doing nothing. To me it is notable that none of those responding to this thread, all of whom do play the Japanese, has said that they keep 'every merchie employed all the time' instead of squirreling a bunch away in safe rear area ports.
I have seen your first comment about keeping merchies in port but didn't want to reply for fear of triggering another flame war.
But well... I usually keep 'every merchie employed all the time'.
In my current PBEM my entire merchant fleet is busy hauling as many resources as possible to the HI to create a stockpile before increasingly effective Allied subs take their toll and Allied actions close the convoy routes.
My experience with "classic WitP" was that in the later stages of the campaign, I lacked resources but still had ample fuel/oil late war.
Maybe it is different in AE and I'm wasting precious fuel in shipping resources from the SRA.
More experienced players may have fine-tuned the industry management to a point where imports from China / Northern Japan are enough to sustain the economy up to and during the endgame while optimizing fuel consumption.
But I'm not a numbers-cruncher and I prefer to take no chances - better to have too much than too little resources stockpiled.
Dunno if there are AARs of Japanese players who have run-out of resources in the Home Islands?
However, I do have unemployed shipping - my tanker fleet. Even before the Allies started to bomb / take back / cut off oil centers in my current game, I had more tanker capacity available than oil / fuel to ship home.
In my present PBEM (Feb 44) I will lose Sumatra soon, so I plan to cut-back on shipping resources home and will have to lay-off a large part of my merchant fleet in order to preserve fuel - this is by necessity, not by choice.
I am not using the mystical "magic highway" because I consider it "gamey" (i.e. exploiting a game mechanism that allows unrealistic behavior).
I should add that I do play DBB-C exclusively, the mod has reduced cargo capacities of transports, merchant-ships and tankers by 30%.
What is the situation on the Allied side?
I have read comments from Allied players that they have so much shipping and supplies later in the game that they don't need to employ all available ships because front bases are already swimming in millions of supply points.
Probably the consequence of having full supply production on Day 1 (in stock and many mods).
To me it is notable that Allied players don't complain about 1944/45 production levels on Dec 7th, 1941 and the luxury of unemployed shipping later in the war