USA Sub Spam Counter?

1. See it coming and prepare. You should build as many destroyers as you can. Team them up with air units to make safe zones.
2. Push inland. Prioritites getting income from inland areas. China india and russian territories

3. Use space and time. Its a long way for the us to reach say malaya. Prioritise these safer areas first.
4. If us is going all pacific then life should be easier for Germany. If so either ignore west and do russia crush. Or build german uboats and convoy raid western allies. Either way germany profits if us focuses too much on japan.
5. Keep japan sea zone 6 safe at all costs and launch strikes from there. Dont over extend your fleet.( 2cv + 4 dd + scrambles should do for first 5 turns)
6. Build factories not transports. Your ships go sub chasing not escort duties. Major factory on Korea?
7. Use air bases fighters scrambles destroyers and your own subs.

No to a major factory on Korea. It’s too far away from the action. Also, if USA does take Korea, they get a factory for free.

In general, convoying only works if the subs survive the Japanese turn. Therefore the counter is to have several DDs so you can attack all your coastal territories.

It’s been called “War Plan Orange”. If you search, you might find the previous thread.

Take Guam and use the AB along with your DDs.

Japan has 3 turns to act before the USA purchase can attack Phillipines or Malaya.  Adjust your defense as necessary.  Also, subs are the worst defensive unit in the game.  One destroyer at cost of 8 has same attack as 2 subs at cost of 12 have in defense.  If they buy too many subs, move your planes onto the carriers u hopefully bought into range of their sub heavy fleet and make them defend Hawaii or NE Australia.  A lot of times they will either pull back or waste cruisers or destroyers to block, which is a good trade for the 2 or 3 subs at a cost of 6 in your fleet.  Eventually they will run out of destroyers/cruisers to block and pull back or start to buy defensive units.

I like to spend 25-30% of my money on subs as USA during the KJF-SZ6 plan.  Or more.

But like you guys are saying, the fleet cannot defend itself that readily.  The subs make your fleets really intimidating, and can take alot of money out, but eventually I have to switch to buying something else on USA 4-7.  If I buy lots of subs, I didn’t;

1. buy strat bombers to suffocate Japan (but bombers don’t defend fleets either)
2. buy lots of carrier action which helps with tactical strikes and takeovers, even extra empty carriers can be useful as USA/Japan (carriers and planes are expensive)
3. buy lots of transports, which would be a more pressing threat to Japan in the short term (these are also defenseless and add little nothing once they do their run bc SZ 6 is always hostile and you can’t load there)

Going strategic/fleet offensive against Japan, in my opinion, is the easiest and most reliable way to cripple the Axis.

The only effective counter to US sub spam is to kill India and ANZAC. Make up the income from somewhere else. If you play the US’ game as Japan, you’re gonna lose. Force them to react to you and stop reacting to them!

Marsh

50 seems an exaggeration, though on TripAAA people do tend to go for all-in but plodding, long types of play where turn 20 is still “midgame”.  15 seems more likely in the early-mid game.  People sometimes say things like 12-20 fighters on Moscow and 12 US bombers flying all over the board and again, these are not bad ideas just not anywhere close to the ## that we achieve in our house and club games.

Anyways,

“If Japan is buying destroyers, planes and airbases to counter all these subs then there is no expansion on land.  It is not affordable.”

This is your most cogent statement–you have to draw Japan into the trap of spending his $$ to improve and deepen his fleets.  If USA leaves Japan alone, it rages even harder than a Germany left alone.  If the USA does the full court press, on the other hand, Japan absolutely cannot ignore that and has to leave forces to protect SZ 6.

Achieving his full wartime income threshold is not a real problem for Japan–he can still do this while you are building up all around him.  What you want to achieve is a situation where Japan is under immense pressure early in the game (first 5 turns and after war is declared) because it is at that time that he does not have threshold yet and cant’ fuel all his activities at once.

For the reasons you bring up, I don’t attack SZ 26 or Hawaii because it tends to weaken the US a little and Japan a lot.  Plus, it brings USA into the war, pushing up his income at the same time that you slowed Japan’s income curve because as you point out, you’re splitting your forces to achieve a bunch of objectives at that juncture

As I said the problem with the sub strat is they cant defend.  Say for instance the USA puts 6 subs on 6 convoy spots.  And you counter with 6 destroyers each backed by 2 or 3 planes.  In about 5 out of those 6 spots, a destroyer will be left that the next wave of subs has to beat.  And the destroyer defends at 2 so its an even fight 1-1 when it’s attacked by subs.  Given that JApan starts at +13 planes over USA, this favors Japan.  Also, without any USA pressure, Germany should be running wild.

Thats why the opening move could start with 10- 15 subs against sz 6. Even on a 1. Thats still a hard battle with dds plus 3 scrambles.

Those 10 can cost japan a stack of ipcs and still be fairly safe.

@sjelso:

If Japan is buying destroyers, planes and airbases to counter all these subs then there is no expansion on land.  It is not affordable.

Quick point on this one. Japan doesn’t need to buy planes. It starts with 21. It only starts with 4DDs IIRC. It also doesn’t need airbases. Floating airbases (CVs) and DDs are what it does need. A few subs help but they are far less critical for Japan.

If you do the math, if you have a CV group with 1CV, ftr, tac, DD and 24IPCs to spend, you might think that buying 3DDs would give you a better defence but actually 4 subs work better against a mixed attack (ftr/tac/3DD/3sub) because of the extra hit soak. The 4subs also give a much better attack so long as you aren’t shooting at a scramble only.

You have to consider the dynamic of how the subs move and some of the other rules.  The subs are very intimidating in a pack with a mixed fleet.  They are not at all intimidating by themselves, they can be picked off or ignored.

We played a game recently (G42) where Dave had to keep falling back, I took SZ 6.  Japan was well turtled.  SZ 6 is a dangerous place to be, since he can kami your carriers there.    The only way the subs can get past is if these zones are clear, which they are only during noncom.  And now we are away from our NBs, so they are crawling around.

Even with like 10 subs sitting on his income, the randomness of the rolling meant he still had like 50+ a turn, and Sydney.  Once the subs all split up, they are no longer available to soak regular hits in the defense so your fleet defensive security drops.

We ended up fighting over the VC win and without strategic bombers (I had subs, then mostly transports), I had him in a chokehold but couldn’t finish him.  Japan had 28+ infantry and 4 fighters at game end (T10), taking it over was never an option because again, I didnt’ have things like air and support shots, as long as Japan buys 1 DD per turn, you cant.

Eventually Germany took my Iraq node, like 45 units to 25, and Egypt was next, VC vic on the other board.

My two IPCs…

If the US is dropping 12 subs per turn into the Pacific, Japan is will essentially have no coastal income. The solution for this would be building multiple ICs on the continent (no more than your income can feed of course) and acquiring as much territory as possible. If you know your opponent likes to do sub spam in advance, you can build an IC on J1 and plan on doing a Crussia strategy (which gives you interior income that cannot be convoyed away and frees your navy to contest the Dutch East Indies. Not only does the additional interior income help you, but it also helps Germany (which should be going whole hog on Russia now because the US is ignoring Europe) by taking money away from Russia.

On the other hand if the US is spending only a minimal amount of subs per turn in the Pacific (say, 3-4 subs per turn) you can fight this with one destroyer purchase each round and using strategic bombers in combination with your destroyers to clear subs.  Since the US player is so kindly not building up Hawaii defenses, you can reward that by taking Hawaii and India (which more than counter the income loss from the sub dribble). This approach does limit Japan to going on J4 (but it is possible to bait UK and ANZAC into an early attack sometimes).

Marsh

@sjelso:

Well, lots of things to consider…I will try some different things.  I think the subs are a threat in a pack or spread out.  If spread out, then one has to hunt them down one by one and they just keep coming.  Take one out, then 2 or 3 come from 2 spaces and sink destroyer.  Losing IPC$ battle for the Japanese.  Depletes precious $ on destroyers and prevents lightly defended transports from taking crucial islands.

A pack of subs is pretty vulnerable unless they’ve got some other fleet to defend them.

Sounds like you don’t have enough destroyers. Generally, Japan can split its fleet into two or even three and still counter the USN in the early rounds. I guess if the USA have a main fleet at the Carolines and 10 subs with it, they could be hard to stop but fleets at SZ35 and SZ6 will generally make life for USA pretty difficult. Airbases help at both locations.

On your point about the losing IPC battles. Say that USA puts a sub on SZ19 which is killed by 1DD+planes. Japan’s expected value is a bit under 5. If USA attacks with 2 subs and they both live, they still die on the retaliation for the cost of 1DD. If they only attack with 1 sub, that’s a coin flip which is about 2/3IPC in USA’s favour. Not positive in the long term. I guess that was a long winded way of saying that so long as you can counter attack their attack, sub spam isn’t positive IPC for USA unless they get to do some actual convoying.

There are some situations where this strategy can turn the tide but the game has to be pretty finely balanced in the Pacific for that to occur.

Here is the issue with the USA going all in on a sub tactic against Japan.

Iam going to look at it from the Japan POV

Sea Zone 6 and 13 are the two big IPC sea zones.

The money islands are areas they need to defend also.

So, Japan really has 7 sea zones to defend against subs.

IF the USA goes all in on subs, that naturally means they are very light on surface ships besides their starting fleet. The USA starting fleet is inferior to the IJN starting navy so iam not very concerned.

Japan needs to only engage the subs in Japan, Caroline Islands and Phillipines, this is the reason. All three SZ have a harbor and a Air Filed. So they can scramble 3 FTR and any capital ships like BB can repair for free. This is one of the scenarios where it might be a good plan for the IJN to build up some BB.

IJN DD are built not for defense but offense and you do not need that many. Any USA sub off the coast of China or money islands gets a DD + air power to kill them.

USN subs going into your fleet which has air base and naval base, well, the BB take the hits which are free, they repair at the start of you next turn. You can even use your CV to soak up some hits because the planes can land and then the CV repair.

The flip side of using subs is that Japan can ignore them and just move through any SZ they are in. As long as you have a DD and FTR protection Japan can stave off a counter attack in the USA turn.

Japan only takes interdiction on the convoys in their turn. You can look at the board and determine the best places to stop the USA subs. Having 2 USA subs in SZ 6 or 13 is no need to go crazy on how to stop them.

All you need to do is build one dd and place in SZ6 against 5 USA subs on your build turn. USA on their turn decides to attack……Japan defends on a 2 and 3X4. They will destroy the USN sub fleet in short order if they continue to engage your sole DD.

As a Japan player you want the USA to plan on a all in sub plan because it is easily � countered.

Japan needs to be careful if considering sitting on the Carolines. They can be hit from both Queensland and Hawaii. It also doesn’t protect the money islands.

Convoy raiding Japan to death is indeed a very effective plan.  People underestimate the difficulty of holding off a distributed group of US+ANZAC subs that get supported by other surface ships and a few bombers.  It becomes virtually impossible to build new destroyers in SZ6, even with the option to scramble three fighters.  The US can easily match with three or more bombers from Hawaii or Carolines; straight-up trades of planes for planes is not a winning outcome for the Axis.

Very quickly the only option is for Japan to build destroyers in mainland Asia.  With limited capacity, that takes away from their ability to march on India.  Japan will come out slightly ahead in the fleet exchanges, but America and ANZAC usually willing to accept a minor loss of TUV.  The key part is having the air support to properly retaliate against Japanese destroyers.

The only real counter of the USA sub spam plan is for Germany to march down into the Middle East and threaten to capture Egypt.  That will force the Americans to spend more heavily in the Atlantic, giving Japan a bit of breathing room.

^ Sounds like you aren’t holding SZ6. I always try to do so, or at least build several DDs in a turn that I am holding it if it looks like I’m going to leave it.