@AxisOfEvil:
So as far as builds, yes, you are constrained to building at least 2 inf. But a build of 2 inf and 5 tanks doesnt seem too bad.
2 inf, 5 arm is a nice build from the IC’s but in order to build that and still fill 4 TP out of Japan with minimum 8 inf, Japan needs to be earning 55 IPC’s. In my opinion, many people make this very mistake, when they are calculating Japanese builds, as well as another mistake I’ll detail later.
55 IPC’s is hard to come by for Japan. Short of owning Caucasus, it pretty much means that Japan owns all the Pacific IPC’s, Madagascar as well as some other African IPC’s, and either owns or is regularly trading Novosibirsk and Kazakh. That’s endgame kind of money so I never count on it it when I do my build predictions for the majority of Japan’s turns. You could say that you won’t be building 8 units out of Japan to make that 2 inf, 5 arm build happen but, again, that only happens in the endgame when you’re making that final push for Caucasus or Russia. If you aren’t building to max out Japan’s production(in your case 15 units) with infantry first, and then upgrading inf to art or arm second, income permitting, then you are probably doing something wrong.
The second mistake I mentioned doesn’t have anything specific to do with the E Indies IC in particular but it does factor into all of Japan’s IC’s. I kind of cringe when I see people build their Japanese armor in their forward IC’s and infantry in Japan. Armor will easily catch up to infantry but not the other way around. So if you’re building 2 inf, 5 armor out of the E Indies and FIC IC’s, you’re usually hamstringing yourself. Not always, but usually.
@AxisOfEvil:
This begs to question, what does an axis player do about the africa problem?
Well, you already detailed the biggest obstacle for the Axis in Africa. Generally, the US will muscle you out of Africa. There are things Japan can do to make it costly for the US, but don’t ever count on owning more than a few IPC’s once the US gets rolling. Personally, I like to use the 2 BB’s to bleed them with a landing of 1 inf, and use my other TP’s to either land in IEA, Kenya, or SAF to force them to divert units away from the push toward Caucasus.
And that is another drawback with the East Indies IC. You can’t do the 1 inf backed up with 2 BB’s landing because it would mean not landing a full TP out of E Indies. You also can’t land in SAF or Kenya because it’s out of range of the TP shuffle. In both of those cases it would require yet another TP to implement. With the East Indies IC, you’re committed to landing 4 units every turn whether you want to or not. If all you want to do is move 1 unit somewhere, you’re SOL unless you spring for another TP for that flexibility.
