Island Hopping evaluation
I'll reiterate what is becoming somewhat of a mantra to
me: approaching the tutorial campaign as an iron-man prelude to the U.S.
Pacific doesn't do it justice.
The designer steers you towards what he feels is
important in re force composition: two destroyers and one cruiser on the naval
side, to be augmented by an additional destroyer after winning the first naval
battle; two regular infantries, one engineer, one (light) tank and one
artillery on the land side, with two additional infantries (one of them an
Heavy) after taking the first VP, two Marines after the first enemy destroyer
is eliminated and a third Marine plus a second engineer once the southernmost VP is taken.
Where the additional units are made available is also
important: the first two infantries appear in the Southwest corner of the map,
shielded from the enemy destroyer, the Marines and the third destroyer at the
Southern edge of the map close to the nearest beaches, the last two units at
the middle of the West edge of the map where they can be sent towards the
Paratrooper's Island or towards the middle of the Eastern Island bypassing the
southernmost river.
The choice of which units are added to the Core Force is
again important: two regular infantries and one artillery. Vanilla infantry can
easily be dismissed by the "oh shiny" player and artillery is an
expensive support branch that doesn't do much direct damage.
The player is also provided with sixteen Land Command
Points to experiment with, eight of which can be used with the units provided
in the first mission and up to five more if there were units purchased then.
There's also six Naval CP to experiment with: one cruiser/battleship/aircraft carrier,
up to two destroyers, up to three PT Boats/submarines or a combination of
these.
Organizing a beach landing can be a daunting proposition
if you're trying to be efficient: while units can move through one another,
there can only be one ground (either naval or land) unit in each tile so moving
each unit in a manner that doesn't block the other's paths is a non trivial
matter especially when they can only move three tiles per turn. There's also
the necessity of leaving point(s) of access for supply ship(s) because supply
does indeed play a role and cannot be ignored or cavalierly dismissed.
The player is also faced with new unit types that s/he
has to learn how to deal with, particularly tanks and artillery. At this stage
I handled the OPFOR artillery by suppressing it with longer range artillery of
my own or with naval gunfire until the point where I could reach it with my
infantry and/or tanks. The Red Team's tank I handled by placing my infantry in
close terrain, (mostly) keeping my artillery out of its reach and brute-forcing
my attacks with little regard for casualties. In the tutorial the Red Team's
tanks don't really pose enough threat to merit Core Anti-Tank units and
(spoilers) when the Japanese field tanks in the U.S. Pacific campaign there's usually
an auxiliary AT available.
There's one new tactical problem introduced: how to cross
a river that is defended. I brute-forced the crossing on the Western coast
leveraging the M3 Stuart's ability to split its movement in two pulses. On the
Eastern coast river crossing I did something for the first time in seven years:
I had an Engineer build a pontoon bridge that bypassed the defender's ZoC,
mostly because I wanted to showcase that ability and the 2D World Map's quirk.
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