Mariana Islands: Winning Strategy, the Zero IPC Island Crush

@Baron

I was thinking of creating a new unit airstrip, seabee base using the old wwII pacific icons. Give the airstrip a two scramble 4 movement and the seabee base a one repair +1 ncm or something similar. Have those max damage 4 operable 1 or less. The AB, NB would be unaffected.

@General V

That would bring them into play. I wonder how it might effect game speed or options though?

@Black_Elk:

Seabees would be cool! I mean if they’re good enough for The Duke, then why not!

The John Wayne movie “The Fighting Seabees” (which is short on historical accuracy, but long on gung-ho enthusiasm) has a theme song whose lyrics, as I recall, are:

We’re the Seabees of the Navy
We can build and we can fight
We’ll pave the way to victory
And guard it day and night
And we promise that we’ll remember
The seventh of December
We’re the Seabees of the Navy
Bees of the seven seas!

If you ever get to see the film, watch in particular for the scene where Wayne (initially unarmed) single-handedly fights and kills several rifle-carrying Japanese soldiers in quick succession.

As promised, here’s a summary of the information I was able to find about the zero-IPC islands on the Pacific 1940 map.  The sources I consulted weren’t as detailed as I’d hoped, so the summaries below are basically an estimate of what the general situation was for each island group.  Some of these assessments could be off the mark, so if anyone has access to better data please feel free to correct whatever errors exist or to provide supplementary information.

Aleutian Islands
Important naval base(s)? No, just a US naval station (pre-war and onward) at Dutch Harbor whose facilities were very limited.
Important air base(s)? To some degree.  Several US forward airbases were established (pre-war and onward), with larger bases like Elmendorf in Alaska proper.  The Aleutians have very poor flying weather.

Caroline Islands
Important naval base(s)?  Yes.  Truk was a major Japanese naval base, pre-war and onward.  The Japanese did not make significant use of Ulithi Atoll, but after the American capture of the Carolines the US developed Ulithi into a major forward naval base that was used in the last year of WWII. 
Important air base(s)?  Yes, as an adjunct to the naval bases.

Dutch New Guinea
Important naval base(s)?  To some degree.  Hollandia had a good anchorage which both the Japanese and (from 1944 onward) the US used to some extent, but its facilities were minimal.
Important air base(s)?  To some degree.  Various airfields were built by the Japanese after their occupation began, and were used by the US from 1944 onward.  There was an airstrip at Hollandia.

Fiji
Important naval base(s)?  No, but there was a good harbour at Suva. 
Important air base(s)?  No, just a UK wartime airstrip built after 1941.

Note: The Ellice Islands, geographically located about halfway between Fiji and the Gilbert Islands but not appearing on the Pacific 1940 map, were used as naval and air bases by the US in WWII.  In particular, there seems to have been an important airbase on Funafuti Atoll.

Gilbert Islands
Important naval base(s)?  No.  Port facilities at Tarawa were almost nonexistent. 
Important air base(s)?  To some degree.  An airstrip was built by the Japanese on Tarawa in 1942; it was taken over by the US in late 1943.  The nearby Phoenix Islands, under joint US/UK control, had a number of airstrips established on them during WWII, for instance on Enderbury Island and Canton Island.

Guam
Important naval base(s)?  No.  At the beginning of WWII it only had a small harbour with few facilities, though there were some good anchorages here and there, notably at Apra.  Captured by Japan in December 1941; recaptured by the US in August 1944.
Important air base(s)?  To some degree.

Johnston Island
Important naval base(s)?  No, served only as US sub refueling base.  It had no port and no decent anchorge.
Important air base(s)?  Yes, US, existed pre-war and grew in wartime.

Line Islands
Important naval base(s)?  No.
Important air base(s)?  To some degree.  There was a US naval air station on Palmyra Atoll, pre-war and onward.  Palmyra was well positioned to control part of the airspace lying directly on the U.S.-to-Australia route.  Nearby Christmas Island also had some US airfields.

Marianas
Important naval base(s)?  No.  Tinian lacked a proper port. 
Important air base(s)?  Yes.  It had a Japanese pre-war base.  Tinian was captured by the US in mid-1944 and was developed by them into a massive airbase.  Fleets of B-29s operating from Tinian bombed Japan extensively; the two A-bomb missions took off from there.

Marshall Islands
Important naval base(s)?  Yes.  Japanese naval and air bases of various sizes were established there in the late 1930s, notably at Kwajalein, Majuro, Eniwetok and Bikini, but the Japanese did not develop them to the extent that they could have.  After the capture of the Marshalls by the Americans in January 1944, the US Navy used Majuro as a major forward naval base. 
Important air base(s)?  Yes.

Midway
Important naval base(s)?  No, except as a US submarine base.
Important air base(s)?  Yes, US, existed pre-war and grew in wartime.

New Britain
Important naval base(s)?  Yes.  Rabaul, which has an excellent harbour, was the largest Japanese base in New Guinea during the 1942-1945 occupation.
Important air base(s)?  Yes.

New Guinea
Important naval base(s)?  To some degree.  Allied-controlled Port Moresby apparently had limited use as a port, but the town itself and the bases around it were important Allied staging areas.
Important air base(s)?  Yes, several, established both by Japan and the Allies (who controlled different parts of the island) during the war.

New Hebrides
Important naval base(s)?  To some degree.  Espiritu Santo only had a small port and a small airfield, but it saw a lot of use by the Allies during the war.  Nearby Free French-controlled New Caledonia (which is not part of the New Hebrides, but is located nearby to the southwest) was an important Allied forward base in the early stages of the war; it had a small pre-war French naval and air base, good anchorages in the area and a small port at Noumea.  The Santa Cruz Islands, northwest of Espiritu Santo, were not used by the Allies despite their advantageous position because the local strain of malaria was too virulent.
Important air base(s)?  To some degree.

Palau Island
Important naval base(s)?  No.  Peleliu had no port facilities.
Important air base(s)?  No.  There was a Japanese airfield on Peleliu, though apparently not an extensive one.  The US captured Palau in late 1944, but made little subsequent use of it to support its operations in the western Pacific.

Samoa (American Samoa and New Zealand Samoa Mandate)
Important naval base(s)?  No, just a minor US naval station that existed (pre-war and onward) at Tutuila; harbour traffic increased for the first half of the war but decreased thereafter.  The principal port of American Samoa, Apia, only had limited facilities. 
Important air base(s)?  Yes. US Tafuna Airfield (in American Samoa) existed pre-war and grew in wartime. The US built Faleolo Airfield (in New Zealand Samoa Mandate) in 1942; it was used by US.  There was a decent airfield at Apia.

Solomon Islands
Important naval base(s)?  Yes.  Little or nothing exietd pre-war, but the US and Japan both established several naval bases in the area from 1942 onward.
Important air base(s)?  Yes.  Little or nothing existed pre-war, but the US and Japan both established a large number of airfields in the area from 1942 onward, Henderson Field on Guadalcanal being perhaps the most famous one.

Wake Island
Important naval base(s)?  No.  It had no anchorage.
Important air base(s)?  No, just a airfield useful for reconnaissance planes and Marine garrison aircraft. Captured by the Japanese in 1941; surrendered in September 1945.

Good work CWO!

@Black_Elk:

Subs are relatively inexpensive, and more than other ships are designed to operate somewhat independently of other ships. I wonder if a submarine advantage could be built into all valueless islands as a way to encourage people to fight over them?

In a general sense, there were probably all sorts of places in the Pacific that were potentially valuable in one specialized role or another.  To give just one example: French Frigate Shoals, a small, uninhabitable lagoon located (as I recall) about halfway between Midway and Honololu, figured in a couple of Japanese plans that involved sending long-range flying boats there from Kwajalein, refuelling them by tanker-submarines, and having them fly onward to Hawaii on bombing or reconnaissance missions.  (One such mission was supposed to be carried out in the run-up to the Battle of Midway, but it was scrapped because the Japanese discovered that the US Navy, who’d gotten wise to the enemy’s interest in FFS, had started posting one or two small warships there to keep an eye on it.)

Things like that could, in principle, be used to confer individually customized advantages to the various IPC-less islands in the Pacific.  There would be an upside and a downside.  The upside is that it could make each island territory attractive to capture in its own unique way, probably with some islands being valuable to both sides and with others being valuable only to one side (or differently valuable to each side), which could make for some intriguingly asymmetrical dynamics on the game board.  The downside is that it would potentially be quite complicated, given that there are 18 such island groups on the map.  A system that simply uses just two potential standard advantages (naval base, yes or no?  airbase, yes or no?) would be easy enough, but a system with up to 18 different advantages would be a whole other story.

There might, however, be a way around the problem of remembering so many potential advantages.  To borrow a concept from (among others) Young Grasshoper, what if each IPC-less island had its own distinctive “advantage card” which stated, in simple terms, what advantage(s) each IPC-less island confers?  There could be a single (identical) advantage given to whoever has a particular island, or there could be separate (distinct) advantages for the Japanese and US players, given that the two sides didn’t always make the same use of the same islands when they changed hands.  The individual island cards would be handed out at the beginning of the game to the players who initially control them, and as the game progresses the respective cards would be surrendered to the conquering player whenever a change of ownership takes place.  There could, in addition, be a printed list of these advantages that any player could consult at any time, so that a player contemplating the conquest of an enemy-held island could, without having to check the other guy’s actual cards, see what advantages each island offers.

Thank you CWO !  Will keep for record for sure and use.

@Black_Elk:

We have right now 18 island groups in the Pacific that need some help, but 18 distinct advantages would be major overkill. How about something more like 3 or maybe 6 at the upper limit? What sort of ideas might be cool to bring an otherwise valueless island into play?

Yes, those are two good ideas: keeping the number of island-based advantages reasonably small (in order to keep things simple and practical), and extending the concept from its original Pacific location to the similar IPC-less named islands on the Europe side of the map (to make it more attractive for those islands to see some action).  Giving all the islands identical advantages would be boring, and giving every island a completely distinctive advantage could be too complicated (and probably unrealistic), so shooting for something in the middle would be ideal.  And it would only take a small number of advantage types to produce several possible combinations.  Just the two that we’ve considered, for example, can yield four possible combinations: no naval base and no air base / a naval base but no air base / an air base but no naval base / an airbase and an naval base.  A third advantage type (whatever that might be) would yield eight possible combinations; four advantage types would give sixteen possible combinations, which is more than enough for practical purposes.  And although the IPC-less islands, in general, didn’t produce much economically in the real world, some of them could perhaps be given a +1 IPC as one advantage type if a plausible reason could be found for it.  I seem to recall, for example, that some areas (I’m not sure which ones) in the southwest Pacific had specialized economic value because they produced things like rubber or quinine that weren’t common elsewhere.

This is what I have so far.

AIRBASES            NAVAL

Caroline            Caroline
            Midway        Dutch New Guinea
          New Guinea      New Zealand
            Okinawa          Philippines ( west side only )
            Formosa            Singapore
            Malta                  Java
                                      Gibraltra

@Black_Elk:

Excellent info! It’s also very interesting to compare with the OOB set up, as there seems to be a few instances where the board doesn’t really agree with the history.

The idea of a sub refueling station is rather cool. I wonder if some of these otherwise unimportant territories might be more significant if they had a role in sub or anti-sub warfare? Since it seems like even islands that weren’t suited for much else could at least be used for refueling. I wonder how that might be represented in game? A movement bonus +1 for any sub that starts in a sz with a zero ipc island?

Subs are relatively inexpensive, and more than other ships are designed to operate somewhat independently of other ships. I wonder if a submarine advantage could be built into all valueless islands as a way to encourage people to fight over them?

An interesting thing for Subs and Islands could be:
If you owned a given Island and have a Sub in the surrounding SZ then the Sub can act as a blocker unit similar to a DD.
If too strong, you may require that at least 1 ground occupied the island territory.

Just for your info - we have played about 4 times since August on my new custom map that has every territory (including islands) worth at least 1 IPC. So far no one has tried to take any of the islands or territories that formerly had no value.

So it seems to me there needs to be further incentives like you are discussing. For example, Gibraltar gets action at times because one side or the other wants surface ship access to the med.

General V had a idea earlier which required controlling certain territories before being able to attack others. I think it has some merit although the US bypassed a lot of places, new britain for one, so IDK how you would decide what was needed or not. Trial and error I guess.

If one ipc isn’t enough boost it to two for foreign owned territories. You could still keep it one for your own or not. Throw in some ABs and NBs and see what happens:)

If you wanted to keep it simple you could give them all 2 ipc’s. Wait until rd 5 to activate them. That would prevent japan from using extra dough to blow out india or china early.
Two bucks should create some intrest.

@Der:

Just for your info - we have played about 4 times since August on my new custom map that has every territory (including islands) worth at least 1 IPC. So far no one has tried to take any of the islands or territories that formerly had no value.

So it seems to me there needs to be further incentives like you are discussing. For example, Gibraltar gets action at times because one side or the other wants surface ship access to the med.

Thanks to bring your experience about it.

Another active thread gave me this idea to increase the impact of taking Pacific Islands.

1. Keep the 1 IPC/each Pacific Island groups as regular or as National Objective according to what suit you best.
2. In addition, each captured Island with at least one active unit on it (including Operational AB or NB), also cost to the original owner a 2 IPCs penalty taken out during the original owner Convoy Disruption Phase.

So, a captured Pacific Island will give 1 IPC to the conquerer but will be a minus 3 IPCs for the original owner for a total swing of 4 IPCs.

To rationalize it, consider that each Pacific Island is part of the owner’s Convoy shiping lines.
Capturing one, affect economically the original owner much more than it brings new ressources to the conquerer.

For example, IJN wanted Solomons and built an airfield on it, to be able to wreak havoc on Convoy shipping between US and ANZAC. It would have extended the Allies cargo ships time to make a safe travel via a more indirect travel route.

What do you think of this everyone?

@ Baron

I can see the logic of taking ipc’s away as an incentive also. However in my two test games japan seemed to benefit the most. Especially early on. Maybe that was because I was more focused on the islands, but they still got india and china as well.

I think that might hurt the allies a lot more.

Giving all the islands a starting value of 1 would really help the allies more than the axis. Japan really can’t afford to take the random islands, except maybe Guam. Interesting idea…

@barney:

@ Baron

I can see the logic of taking ipc’s away as an incentive also. However in my two test games japan seemed to benefit the most. Especially early on. Maybe that was because I was more focused on the islands, but they still got india and china as well.

I think that might hurt the allies a lot more.

@theROCmonster:

Giving all the islands a starting value of 1 would really help the allies more than the axis. Japan really can’t afford to take the random islands, except maybe Guam. Interesting idea…

Can’t tell which side gets the benefits but the main point is that Global gives a way (via Convoy Disruption Phase) to give zero IPC for having an Island but to penalize with IPCs malus (-1, -2, -3?) if a Power lose it.
So it will not add a lot more of IPCs but can provide an incentive to keep Islands.

@Der:

Just for your info - we have played about 4 times since August on my new custom map that has every territory (including islands) worth at least 1 IPC. So far no one has tried to take any of the islands or territories that formerly had no value.

So it seems to me there needs to be further incentives like you are discussing. For example, Gibraltar gets action at times because one side or the other wants surface ship access to the med.

How do the extra ipc’s impact your games? Can the allies get by with a lower bid?

@barney:

How do the extra ipc’s impact your games? Can the allies get by with a lower bid?

I have a custom map and setup so we don’t bid. Kind of a cross between AA42 and AAAE. The impact is that everyone has more IPCs to spend - a few more units on the map. No complaints so far.