Airfield damage carry-over?

@krieghund
ok tks

@Krieghund:

No, it’s not specifically in the rules.  It’s just implied by the fact that the damaged area is on the back side of the card, away from the main sea zone area.  This is more pronounced on the Japanese card than on the American one.  Do you think this needs to be added to the FAQ?  This is the first time it’s ever come up.

A specific update for this is probably not necessary but as part of a bigger FAQ update it probably wouldn’t hurt.

A good rule of thumb to keep in mind is that if someone comes up with a successful “extreme” strategy, there’s usually an extreme counter-strategy for it.

I copy that.
And believe me, I felt quite uncomfortable to write one of my first posts at this group with some sort of “unbeatable strategy”. I’ve seen so many group newbies here doing that, and routinely got their posts pick to pieces … ;)

Of these, bombing an airfield on Choiseul or New Georgia sounds pretty attractive.  It seems the Japanese will be hard pressed to defend both.  Have all these strategies survived your playtesting?

Yes and no. Japan new units and repairing supply tokens are store temporarily at Choiseul. Japan can have one ore two aa gun at Choiseul and always can move fighters after the bombers, so that any bombing raids are hard, because with the ootb rules any hits from air combat are removed before naval/ground combat (the new rule variant with the airplane only air combat I haven’t try so far, maybe it helps).

If the Japanese are buying this many supply tokens, the US should have some benefit elsewhere.

Challenging, as the US player has to run with the Japanese airfield builds to hold step with victory points. Later the Japanese have many units at New Georgia which means the US pays a high price before amphibic assault while the artilley are firing at incoming ships.
Maybe the US can build only two airfields at Guadalcanal and bring more ground units. Maybe not. Maybe it will rain … :)

Understand me right: I’m not want to say that the US player has no chance. I’m not want to say that I have seen all possible moves and counters in the game. I’m not want to say that I have found an “unbeatable strategy”. But at my games it was a very, very difficult task to counter that japanese tactic.

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?

It does.

You can keep control of an airfield as long as you have units on the island even if you don’t control the island for earning reinforcement points.

Once all of one side’s units are eliminated only one side can control the airfields.

Sorry to have been off the grid for a lot of days for me. Dinosaur you bring up a bunch of things that I will give some additional thought to.

Off the top of my head I suggest units have a value for ‘turns from enemy contact.’ This value could be for each phase and then add to some sort of base unit type value.

Also maybe the whole scale should be in some sort of relation to Victory points?

@Krieghund:

Actually, the rules don’t say you can unload onto different islands, but they don’t say you can’t either.  This is a designer clarification, and I am trying to get it added to the FAQ.  This is a perfect example of why it’s important not to let the rules from one A&A game color your interpretation of the rules of another.  We all tend to see things that aren’t there when we’re familiar with a similar subject.

It’s called Chaining and you can.  if your Japan, and you have a ship in F, you can move ART and INF from Bougainville and Choiseul to NewGeorgia without moving the transport.  Frankly the redeploy supply options will allow you to quickly drop land units off at Santa Isabel or Malita quickly.  But if both are focusing on New Georgia, than there will be some big battles there.

Remember, Japan starts with a supply chain, the Allies don’t.

I don’t know that I ever think that victory points aren’t cumulative.  :|

There aren’t many games where points come off the board. Pacific does but since only Japan has them taking points down is the Allies way of scoring.

One of the things I like about BOTB and Guadalcanal are the victory points. Fights to the bitter end always feel a bit static.