@Bunnies:
J1
J1 strategy: 14 IPC of transports moves up to 4 units from islands to Asia (as opposed to a 15 IPC industrial complex that can only produce 3 units).
Transports let Japan hit any number of targets on the Asian, and later African coast, making it very hard to defend against Japan’s attacks. As a final dealbreaker, Japan’s infantry on its islands are pretty useless, and it has 10 of them - that’s 30 IPC worth of unused material, that Japanese transports can bring into the game. For all these reasons, transports are Japan’s answer to pretty much anything and everything.
There’s a little more to that math. 2 transports are more cost effective than 1 IC for Japan, if they are used to offload units to Buryatia/SFE/Kwantung/Manchuria (transports move nothing or 1 SZ to pick up units and land them). In the case of FIC you really need to have 4 transports to be able to land 4 units on FIC each turn (using a shuck shuck with 2 transports each on FIC’s SZ and SZ60).
And 4 transports is the bare minimum if you are planning on delaying an IC purchase until you really need it (i.e. Japan’s production is above 40 and you want to spend all money on land units). If you want to hit other targets (Australia, Africa) then you’ll need even more transports if you want to keep those 8 units flowing into Asia.
