Yeah, I agree that a J1 attack isnt all that appealing to me either. I looked carefully at it last night in a game and whereas I certainly saw some advantages, none of them outweighed the gains of waiting to set up a more powerful blow.
The biggest gain that I saw is that you can bag the Brit BB and both TRs at once and prevent them from ever making any significant IPCs. This prevents Britain from massing ground forces and drawing out the ground war in Burma/India. The flip side though is that you can’t land anywhere NEAR as powerful of a hammerblow to China, which in turn makes them more of a draw on the ground troops in the long run. I call that pretty much a wash.
At sea, You can kill a few stray US ships, but the bulk of their fleet will survive in San Fran and be reinforced quickly with a lot of US money. I dont see any major draw here. Against the Anzacs, again you can kill off a few ships but then you are open to an aerial counter-attack. In any case, I rarely see those stray Anzac ships as a major threat making them less of a priority target.
No, I still think the best Japanese attack is on J3. That gives you 2 turns to get all of your duckies in a row and take the maximum amount of territory with the minimum amount of risk. So far, I haven’t seen all that much the Allies can do that gives me pause for this strategy. Britain makes more money this way, but the US makes significantly less. I’m willing to make that trade-off because Britain’s money will soon dry up so there will be no long-term effects of that early burst. Japan’s money remains largely the same either way since she doesnt have forces in place to take the high-value targets on J1 anyways. Attacking on J1 still means that you probably wont have the DEI secured until J3 or J4 anyways.
