Here’s the links to the Photos:
http://boards.avalonhill.com/showpost.php?p=193237&postcount=12
http://boards.avalonhill.com/showpost.php?p=193402&postcount=28
http://boards.avalonhill.com/showpost.php?p=193405&postcount=29
http://boards.avalonhill.com/showpost.php?p=193407&postcount=30
http://boards.avalonhill.com/showpost.php?p=193409&postcount=31
JAPAN WINS
My Cunning Plan was pretty straightforward; primarily focus on two beaches with ATGs, and cover the middle one with the faster Ha-Gos that could respond to either side.
Everything and anything with ANY AT capability was put on the front; Mortars, Flak, whatever. The goal was to blast away with everything to disrupt as much as I could and grind the invasion to a halt. The best result I could get was to damage a unit; destroying it just causes the next one to arrive (and probably diverts too much firepower), but damaging causes it to take a lot of time to arrive.
Meanwhile the Arisakas job was simple - rush the beach and hold it so the enemy soldiers can’t land. It was fairly successful on the West Beach, and had limited success on the East Beach, but I lacked the infantry to do it on the North Beach. Still, even throwing the Arisakas into a meat grinder was good enough; it kept the marines in the open so my MGs and Mortars could rip them apart.
The Ha-Gos lasted longer than I had expected, and did fairly well. The ATGs were even more impressive, damaging two tanks and destroying another.
A Mortar shot down a plane. They laughed at me when I declared the attack - I laughed at them when I counted the 6s
A Sniper managed to shoot and disrupt a plane every round until it died.
The between an SNLF Fanatic and aa Japanese Hero, they managed to tie up all the Infantry on the North Beach; only the tanks were able to break through.
The Naval Bombardment was terrible, the only results being friendly fire (typical americans… :P). However a large party of this was just due to bad rolling. If even one of those attacks had hit it would have had a huge impact on the game. We have some ideas on how to change it a bit.
So what were the End Results?
The Japanese held the island, though admittedly it wouldn’t have taken too many more turns for the Americans to secure it. But more importantly, the Japanese inflicted horrend casualties on the Americans; more than their army was worth counting kills alone.
Though the next few turns may have gone differently, at the time the game ended Japan still controlled the Island and had inflicted more casualties than the Americans could possibly do back.
