It would be impossible at this point to do a blow by blow playback but the general trend has been that Japan can simply mass up a fleet in the DEI area and have a hardpoint at Truk and a hardpoint in Japan and spend the rest of her time mopping up the Chinese and Brits. Japan has so much airpower that she can throw it away for time. Once she reaches the tipping point for the econ, the game is over. There is no ‘late game comeback’ for the Allies if Japan is making as many or more IPCs and has more forces surviving in the field (as well as superior position and coordination).
Unlike AA50, Japan is not totally dependent on getting her bonuses. They are nice, but not required IMO. That means she has little need to spread out to defend. The ‘scramble’ rules mean that take to a defended island airbase requires massive overkill of firepower. It’s VERY easy to stall for time as Japan vs the US and that means the Brits/Chinese are pretty much on their own. We still havent seen much that the US can do to annoy Japan for quite a while in the game. In one game the US tried to move into the SoPac area and was quickly killed off (he exacted a toll, but then he was back to square one rebuilding). In another game, the US player took Iwo and put an airbase their with which to threaten Japan’s home waters in an effort to drag the Japanese fleet away from the DEI area. This failed because of the ‘scramble’ rules. In previous A&As, you needed CVs to have airpower defend a navy. With Scramble, that is not necessary for Japan. A pile of plane (which she starts with plenty which rarely die if the Japanese player has an IQ above room temperature) can make any attack prohibitively expensive.
Dont get me wrong, we obviously have not explored the game fully enough to make a 100% judgement call on balance, but given the length of the game (due to ridiculous win conditions) it’s going to be tough for this game to see repeated play. Without repeated play it’s tough to see if simply bad luck was the cause early on of the Allies’ demise or if alternate strategies might have helped. Yes, the Allied players have made mistakes in our games but so have the Japanese players. The difference is that the Allied mistakes are usually fatal whereas Japan has a very large cushion to play with.
To answer one of the above questions I think we played between 10-12 turns in the games and player fatigue was becoming a factor towards the end of each game. Everyone saw that a comeback might have been possible before the end, but it would have required a lot of luck, some mistakes by the Japanese, and about another 4+ hours of play.
To me, something needs to be done to force the game to a conclusion earlier. In A&A50 we never actually played it out to a ‘real’ win either, but it was easy to see the writing on the wall after a few hours. A&AP40 take a LOT longer to get to that point. The incomes are so high and the individual territory contributions are so low that the game becomes an attritional grind-fest. There is little that the Allied players can do to force the Japanese into a bad spot since there are VERY few places on the board that are worth defending at a disadvantage. This leads to a lot of jockeying but not a lot of outcome. To me, the game needs more decisive areas where the Japanese MUST make a stand. Currently there are not enough of them to stretch Japan out (which is what historically happened). In A&AP40, Japan simply seems to have enough combat power to meet all of her needs for quite a long time. This is the exact opposite situation of what she really faced and leads to the inability of the US to mount a counter-attack that Japan cannot crush out of hand (for at least the first 5-6 hours of play).
Anyways, thanks for the input. I’m realizing in typing this that due the ‘unscripted’ nature of the game it’s going to be very hard indeed for players to relate to each other about how to play. There are simply too many variables involved and once luck enters in at this scale any attempt to relate will be nearly impossible. Ah well. ;)