China & Japan Thoughts

[brianlala]

This is directed more for multiplayer games:

In 2 ongoing games (admittedly a very small sample size) playing as Japan, I'm wondering if others think China seems to be a little bit too easy of a pushover in the early years.

Maybe this will reverse itself in middle years (1942 & 1943) and the later years but it seems like Japan has an overabundance of powerful attacking units sitting on the map at the start of the game. What I've been doing in the first couple of turns is shipping in armies & special forces from Manchuria & the islands onto mainland China. This makes it easy for Japan to cut through Chinese forces.

It seems to be a combination of a few too many Japanese army units, too few Chinese army units, and too few Chinese MPPs. Perhaps taking out some JN armies in Manchuria & replacing them with corps and/or downgrading some other JN armies for corps will tone down JN. Alternatively, replacing some Chinese corps with armies might also help.

Mitigating some of this perceived early advantage is that this might reverse itself in later years as I'm seeing that a failure to invest in naval units by Japan early on is pretty painful once the U.S. comes into the war. JN seems to get less freebie naval units in this incarnation of SC & obviously has more area to patrol.

Another possible mitigating factor is the lack of resources in China means that the JN player isn't as rewarded for pushing China into the north & mountains as in prior versions of the game.

I'll have to play some more multiplayer & AI games before becoming more dogmatic on this issue but I'm curious to hear what others think about China's ability to fend off Japan.

----------------------

Some other random thoughts on Japan because I think it's interesting:

1) The AI US Allied player is challenging me really nicely. I pulled a pearl harbor & the US promptly brought their carriers into play & sunk 2 of my carriers the following turn. I returned the favor & sunk the 2 US carriers the following turn but JN can ill afford the losses.

A couple of turns later, my convoys from Manchuria were bringing me 0 out of 30 MPPs because the U.S. has stuck 1-2 subs on that route. This is a problem because the U.S. took out 1 of JN's 2 starting destroyers & my other destroyer was sub hunting British/Indian subs near Singapore. If the British AI coordinated their India-based navy better, I'd be in a pickle naval-wise.

Overall, a pretty neat turn of events & different from the more restrained US AI of the past.

2) As China, one strategy that looks promising is to slowly pull back behind rivers & mountains if you see JN is about to launch a large attack from prepared positions. The prepared attack bonus (the bonus that a player gets for launching an attack without moving first) would be negated & that's what seems to help JN the most in preventing large losses in China.

3) I'll be curious to see how the Chinese communists come into play later in the war & if they get a bunch of units to start offensives against Japan. It'll be hard for both the AI Chinese player & a human player to break out of those northern mnts to get to Japan if they do build up in northern China.

4) The trick to playing as Japan against China is to make sure you hit China hard every turn so that their MPP losses are above replacement level (look at the MPP graph to confirm you are meeting this objective). If you can keep this disparity up through 1941, China will probably be on the ropes due to lack of replacement units.

5) If the U.S. hits JN hard (maybe a Pacific first strategy) and consistently, JN will be challenged due to low MPPs earned each turn. I think a U.S. strategy to keep JN's MPP losses above replacement level is feasible & will cause JN to crash.

Finally, I should mention that I'm really enjoying this incarnation of Strategic Command against both the AI & humans. It's a blast! Aside from the WW1 version, I think it's the best value (dollars cost vs. hours I will play it) out of the whole SC series.

[numdydar]

Some additional thoughts on the Far East. Japan (maybe everyone else too) needs to have a lot more samll garrision type units. I realize that this is possible a game balancing issue, but still. I also realize you can use 'soft caps' and get more at increasing costs.

But I think maybe an MP regiment/brigade type unit is desperately needed. If you run out of the Garraision units, you are then stuck with entire divisions as garrision units. While some locations in the world warrented this, there are tons more where a simple company/battalion is more than enough, especially in the Pacific.

The Japanese had almost every island with some form of garrision in RL. Yet in the game, it is impossible for Japan to adquately garrision these places and the Allies can simply land and take whatever they want, even if the entire Japanese Navy is within range (I discuss the naval issues in another thread).

So if landing ships can wave as they sail by, then there needs to be a unit type that can at least delay the attacker so that the opposing navy has a chance to respond. The way thing stand now, the Allies are fully capable of landing units in Japan proper in 1942 and there is nothing Japan can do to stop them.

I realize that this is not something easily fixed, but it is definately a game breaker for me. I completely stopped playing when I realized that Japan had no more troops to build. Again I know that game balance is an issue, but the one thing Japan was NOT short of in the war was men and the equipment for them. So the game needs to find a better mechanic to limit unit builds versus saying you just get these and no more. Some types of units should have much higher quanities by nation than they currently do.

All of this is just my opnion of course

[brianlala]

Some additional thoughts on the Far East. Japan (maybe everyone else too) needs to have a lot more samll garrision type units. I realize that this is possible a game balancing issue, but still. I also realize you can use 'soft caps' and get more at increasing costs.

But I think maybe an MP regiment/brigade type unit is desperately needed. If you run out of the Garraision units, you are then stuck with entire divisions as garrision units. While some locations in the world warrented this, there are tons more where a simple company/battalion is more than enough, especially in the Pacific.

The Japanese had almost every island with some form of garrision in RL. Yet in the game, it is impossible for Japan to adquately garrision these places and the Allies can simply land and take whatever they want, even if the entire Japanese Navy is within range (I discuss the naval issues in another thread).

So if landing ships can wave as they sail by, then there needs to be a unit type that can at least delay the attacker so that the opposing navy has a chance to respond. The way thing stand now, the Allies are fully capable of landing units in Japan proper in 1942 and there is nothing Japan can do to stop them.

I realize that this is not something easily fixed, but it is definately a game breaker for me. I completely stopped playing when I realized that Japan had no more troops to build. Again I know that game balance is an issue, but the one thing Japan was NOT short of in the war was men and the equipment for them. So the game needs to find a better mechanic to limit unit builds versus saying you just get these and no more. Some types of units should have much higher quanities by nation than they currently do.

All of this is just my opnion of course

That's a pretty neat idea. I like it. Japan gets a garrison unit once it captures Singapore & Japan proper (Honshu, Hokkaido, etc.) gets free units to defend it once the allies approach but you're right that it would make for a more dynamic game if there were more of these garrison units & divisions either popping up or available for purchase to protect key island islands.

[Hubert Cater]

This came up in testing and in fact is pretty much the two sides of the concerns regarding Japan, i.e. too strong early on but at the same time not enough units overall (especially Garrison units) for the entire war.

The problem is of course that if you provide Japan with an too many Garrison units then early on they are even more powerful and can really throw the war in China out of balance, i.e. as they can use all of their stronger units for combat as opposed to having to use them for any Garrison or Anti-Partisan duty, but on the other hand once the war in the Pacific heats up Japan can really use additional units to hold islands and so on.

With the game mechanics in mind, there is no easy solution and so for the most part we erred on the side of caution so that Japan is not too strong early on but we did add more units to arrive later in the P/Q as well as a DECISION event to help provide Japan with additional Garrison units if they choose Yes to the decision.

We can look to add more for later on in the war but it is not always an easy fix as simply adding in Garrison units without warning, i.e. like having them appear after the fall of Singapore is not always a good solution unless we convey this to the player as a message/popup in game so that they do not prepare for this on their own only to find out that they get a free unit anyways.

Somethings to think about for sure and thanks for the feedback and we'll see what we can do

Hubert

[numdydar]

That is fine that it is done that way. But then you need to eliminate all partisan activity since it is impossible to garrision all the places you need to. It seems a little much to not provide enough garrision units while at the same time you allow all these partisians to pop up. The balance is definately off.

Ideally when a city/mine/etc is captured the player should be given a choice if they want to pay the cost to garrision the location. If they do, then no unit will appear, but then no partisians can affect it. This way the balance is not affected.

[Hubert Cater]

Hi Numdydar,

I've usually found that there are enough units to man all Partisan positions if you use all your available unit types, but of course the tradeoff is that you then at times need to use some stronger units that then weaken your offensives in China.

If so this is partly by design as it requires you to make some of the tougher choices in China (much like in the USSR with the Germans), i.e. man all Partisan positions or use all available units to assault Chinese positions.

Is this not the case?

Hubert

[numdydar]

Yes that is the case. The issue is that once you run out of divisions/garrisions you have to start using corps. As a 'normal' corp has three divisions and each division has roughly 15K men (execpt Russia of course), you are forcing the player to use 45K of manpower to just prevent a few thousand men from affecting you. Not only is this unrealistic (execpt in the Balkins) but not a good system. Depending on where the anoyance appears, you may actually may need to take an entire army to deal with it.

So maybe you can give each unit an anti-partizian range. Garrisians just the square, divisions maybe the same, coups one square radius, and armies, 2. I still think it is easier to just add a global event every year, anti-partisian. If you can base the cost off the amount of enemy territory controlled, even better. Otherwise, to keep it simple, you could say 100 PP/turn for the year.

Of course you would need two events, one for Germany and the other for Japan. As there would be times where you woud only want one to pay versus both or none. The cost could even go up if the Allies started getting closer to Germany and Japan proper.

Using a turn over turn cost for an entire year, achieves the goal of slowing down the number of units to be able to be purchased while eliminates the unrealistic nature of the way things work now. The cost also represents the non-front line activities, like MPs, security forces, etc. which were important to the anti-partisian efforts.

Of course an even simpler solution would be to just have a game option to turn partisians on or off. I know which one I would pick lol.

[Bill101]

The question this brings up is: should it be possible to prevent literally all partisan activity without significantly weakening your main fighting forces?

Also, would Garrison units always be sufficient to deal with partisans? I immediately think of parts of Russia and Yugoslavia, and Warsaw too, where this wasn't the case.

[numdydar]

That is true, but those are the execptions and not the rule. Plus execpt in the Balkens, those troops were not needed all the time. The Warsaw uprising took a lot of troops to put down, but those were not there from 1939 on.

The issue is that everyone wants partisians in these games, but no one seems to be able to model them corrrectly. Partisians are a local problem 90% of the time. Only on rare occasions did they have an impact at the level this game represents. So maybe reduce the ability of partisians to appear to better reflect a strategic impact versus a local one?