Topics created by AA Lover

If you cant play by the rules of the game your not playing AA Guadalcanal, so it stands to reason that the question was directed to those rules, rather than house rules and any appeal to historical realism.

However, if he asked the question: Damaging airfields is not realistic what can be done AND posted it in house rules, then perhaps id expect 5 paragraphs of reasoning why its not realistic.

Here is the question:

I know that it takes 2 hits,but,can ships bombard the airfield,and bombers.do you have to say,like,bombarding airfield or what?I don’t know what to do about damaging the airfields,and the rulebook doesn’t say anything about it.

I don’t see how writing…

in WW2, knocking out an airfield was not easy, unless you could subject it to continuous air or artillery attack over an extended period of time.  To temporarily suppress, i.e. for 24 hours, a Japanese airfield in WW2 required 8 bomb hits per thousand feet of runway length.  To suppress it for a longer period of time took considerably more hits, about 2 to 3 times as many, depending on the runway surface, width, and repair capabilities of the airfield using units, or hits from 500 pound or larger bombs combined with a shallow water table, found mainly on the larger islands such as New Britain, where Rabaul was located.  Henderson Field was never even close to being knocked out by the Japanese, while it took a sustained air campaign along with naval bombarbment to keep the Japanese from using Munda on New Georgia for anything more than a staging base and emergency landing facility.  Vila on Kolumbangara was never more than an emergency strip, as the surrounding area is too badly cut up by ravines to put in an adequate taxi strip network, based on my personal observations while visiting it in 2002.  Munda never had more than a single runway, but did have a fairly complex taxi network.  The fields on Bougainville were used quite a lot, but they were sufficiently distance from Guadalcanal to avoid the sustained bombing and naval bombardment that Munda was subjected too.  Neither Choiseul or Santa Isabel has sufficient level areas for airfields, and I am not sure why they are given airfield locations in the game.  Nor do I understand why there are limitations on the number of aircraft that can be operated from an airfield.  Restricting it to basically a carrier air group is quite odd.  Following the carrier action in October of 1942, where the US lost the Hornet, both sides pretty much pulled their carriers out of the battle, and allowed the land based forces to take over.

…Is in the rulebook?

One way I used bombers once was a cannonfodder. First buy was fighters - then bombers - then by the fourth round Japanese forces were very built up in Asia - I got 6 fighters and 5 bombers into china leading to a japanese counter attack with infantry and fighters. The japanese ‘won’ economically decimating about 150 IPCs worth of hardware. However - they lost nearly all of the infantry they had worked so hard to transport and were bearing down on India at the point. India was never in danger again at that point, and having committed to that strategy at the start Japan had not invested enough in building a navy to hold her victory points.

Big Japanese error had been to leave New Britain unoccupied. That was how I got my fighters into China. (after massing Chinese forces on the coast - which led to Japanese reinforcement of Hong Kong - my opponent thought that was my target!).

I played it again today and I took Malatia and New Georgia on the first turn,and I had four airfields on the second turn to the Jap 2.

@AA:

Hello,I was wondering what is a good AAP Task Force and when it’s good to get your ships moving towards Japan?

UK needs subs, followed by transports guarded by destroyers, plus your starting AC and Battleship if they have managed to survive and move that far.

US needs subs and bombers…your starting surface ships (minus Pearl Harbor), and the occasional loaded transport, are all that are necessary to gain ground against the Japanese. Subs and bombers both serve well in keeping the Japanese from attacking your smaller fleet. Individual subs blocking attack against your fleet by placing themselves between you and the Japanese, and large numbers of subs and bombers force the Japanese to run the risk of a decisive counterattack if they attempt to force the issue…and subs are ideal for retaking convoy routes and denying the Japanese necessary income because they cannot be killed by aircraft alone. Any destroyers that aid in such a fight will fall prey to your bombers unless they are well guarded. Eventually, Japan will have to invest in replacement destroyers just to keep his income up.