Japan 45 - Japanese kill too many tanks?

[nealsmith1763]

Hi all,

New member and new to these games.  I own Japan 45 and that's it so far.

I played through the "historical" 195 turn campaign game.

It seemed the Japanese were very effective at killing US tanks through fire.  They didn't have man-portable AT to speak of and they just didn't have that many AT guns to justify what I was seeing.  Their "doctrine" was going to be to rely on close assault and suicide attacks.

I checked the values in the ob editor.  The have a hard attack rating of 8-9/1!!!   The US, with bazooka, etc. are only rated 2/1...

8 or 9 might be more valid in an assault, but at range?  We are talking about 2 kms here... lol

Any thoughts?  Has anyone gone through the effort of changing all of these units?

Thanks,
Neal

[typhoon]

I think you will find here that most people agree with you that the hard attack value at range is indeed too high.That said however when playing the Japanese in PBEM games it’s one of the small joys the Japanese player gets.You are carpet bombed napalmed shelled by Naval guns then assaulted by Marines. So a little American tank hunting in the woods is some welcome relief and a good deal of fun

[Plain Ian]

Is there nothing in the Designer Notes about unit ratings?

[Mr Grumpy]

Welcome to the club! 

[nealsmith1763]

Thanks Mr. Grumpy!

Typhoon - I can understand that... lol

Plain Ian - No. They cover the land/sea/air kamikazes a lot, but not really this particular aspect of ratings.

I'd also be interested in ideas on how to merge current fog of war with no fog of war.

FOW for the units themselves and maybe disappearing units at night makes sense, but there would be a lot more information available, during the day, about formation locations.

I'm toying with turning off FOW during day and ignore unit information. Then turn it back on at night.

[wildb]

FYI:

According to this article:

https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/m...dge-138897

Yet in fact, Japanese guns and mines still inflicted considerable damage, despite the former struggling to penetrate a Sherman’s frontal armor. According to Zaloga, each Marine tank deployed to Okinawa was knocked out four times on average during the 82-day battle. And of those, a total of 51 Marine and 102 Army M4s were destroyed.

Steven Zaloga in U.S. Marine Corps Tanks of World War II,

[LordDeadwood]

I think the other thing to remember is that when you see "X Vehicles" destroyed as a result of combat, that doesn't correspond to X vehicles permanently destroyed. Due to the replacement system in these games, units can be brought back from the brink of elimination given sufficient time. This represents vehicles repaired as well as actual replacements. This is most notable in the full campaign games; in the shorter 20-50 turn games it is not as significant or noticeable.

[krmiller]

"Yet in fact, Japanese guns and mines still inflicted considerable damage, despite the former struggling to penetrate a Sherman’s frontal armor. According to Zaloga, each Marine tank deployed to Okinawa was knocked out four times on average during the 82-day battle. And of those, a total of 51 Marine and 102 Army M4s were destroyed."

Japanese infantry hard attack value has nothing to do with tanks being taken out by mines or guns. IJN infantry battalions had no inherent AT guns. If allowed to assault tanks their attacks with AT mines was effective but they had nothing on the order of the bazooka or the panzerfaust. The hard attack value is nothing more than a play balance construction by the designers.