USMC vs Japanese SASL?

[DQuin]

I’d like to start a campaign of USMC on the friendly side versus the Japanese enemy and I have a couple questions.

1- How well do the Japanese translate as an enemy in SASL? Do you ever face bonsai attacks or other pacific theatre only situations? From the enemy random event card it looks like it’s mostly an ETO flavor (??)

2- Has anyone played a campaign with USMC vs Japanese that they’d like to share?

 

[skarper]

Bonsai attacks?!? That's a hilarious image...

Not making fun of your typo - I just want to thank you for the funny image.

 

[DQuin]

LOL autocorrect got me! That’s what I get for using voice to text!

 

[Barking Monkey]

I've started a couple PTO campaigns with varying degrees of success. As you say, SASL is strongly slanted toward non-African ETO action. The good news is SASL is a fine sandbox for customization. I'm attaching a PTO version of the ENEMY RE table you might enjoy experimenting with - the changes to the standard table are in red text. It's still pretty 'beta-version' so caveat emptor. I've also got a PTO game setup chart somewhere but I can't seem to find it at the moment - if I can track it down I'll post it later.

Pay attention to S18.55 bullets 2 & 3, which will partly address your Banzai charge question. Also note that adjacent ENEMY are more likely to advance into close combat if Japanese. If fact I suspect you may find it challenging to sustain a campaign against the Japanese if you play on mostly 'PTO' boards due to their penchant for Close combat, which is the bane of campaign companies, especially if you start with 458 1942 squads. Oddly, the same thing makes it even harder to maintain a Japanese PTO campaign vs. the western allies, although I've had some success with a mainland China company in 1937-38. (If you use the 'personal leader' option, I wouldn't advise getting very attached to your Japanese leaders...)

Having said all that, I encourage you to give it a try. If nothing else it's a great way to enhance your knowledge of the Chapter G rules and makes a very interesting change of pace to games with & against the Germans.

 

[DQuin]

This is great! I’ll give it a shot and report back

thanks for sharing

I've started a couple PTO campaigns with varying degrees of success. As you say, SASL is strongly slanted toward non-African ETO action. The good news is SASL is a fine sandbox for customization. I'm attaching a PTO version of the ENEMY RE table you might enjoy experimenting with - the changes to the standard table are in red text. It's still pretty 'beta-version' so caveat emptor. I've also got a PTO game setup chart somewhere but I can't seem to find it at the moment - if I can track it down I'll post it later.

Pay attention to S18.55 bullets 2 & 3, which will partly address your Banzai charge question. Also note that adjacent ENEMY are more likely to advance into close combat if Japanese. If fact I suspect you may find it challenging to sustain a campaign against the Japanese if you play on mostly 'PTO' boards due to their penchant for Close combat, which is the bane of campaign companies, especially if you start with 458 1942 squads. Oddly, the same thing makes it even harder to maintain a Japanese PTO campaign vs. the western allies, although I've had some success with a mainland China company in 1937-38. (If you use the 'personal leader' option, I wouldn't advise getting very attached to your Japanese leaders...)

Having said all that, I encourage you to give it a try. If nothing else it's a great way to enhance your knowledge of the Chapter G rules and makes a very interesting change of pace to games with & against the Germans.

is great

 

[Barking Monkey]

One other thing I remembered after I made the above post - with G.1-PTO Terrain in effect you're going to run into issues with a fair cross section of missions (presuming you're still doing random mission selection.) This is because several missions rely on a 'road - network' road, and G1 makes all roads paths. S13.71 mitigates this somewhat but does not fully eliminate the issue, especially if you make custom tables A8 & A9 to focus on "PTO-ish" boards.

You can tackle this in a couple ways:
-The easiest is just to keep the Road Network road a dirt road and only apply the road to path conversion to all the non-Road Network roads.
-You can apply G1 normally and just have a "Road-Network Path" replace the road network road (this can cause issues if vehicles are or become involved, especially if the road passes through woods.)
-You can do a hybrid. The Road Network road still exists (as either an 'unimproved dirt road' or a "wide path" or whatever you're comfortable calling it) but the road confers reduced benefit. At a minimum the road would not confer the 1/2 MP road rate or allow a road-bonus move to infantry/cavalry. You could also come up with additional penalties as you see fit (maybe costing 2MP per hex for truck type vehicles, 3 or 4 if they're towing a gun, etc. up to counting it as open ground except that ENEMY follow it like a road) - whatever you think is appropriate.

Also bear in mind even when not playing a mission requiring a road network road - some boards will become almost (or in extreme cases fully) impassible to vehicles w/o any road passage. You might thus consider applying one of the above options to at least one road on otherwise impassible-to-vehicles boards regardless.

You also might want to take some missions out of the mix ('Block Party" and "Tank Attack" come to mind depending on just what part of the Pacific War you're considering).