Is SH IV Historical? | Forums

[hbrsvl2007]

Hi-Playing latest v, '41,Career, Asiatic, with USS Sargo just north of Aparri, 13 Dec.'41.

Does the game follow history? There should be a major Japanese invasion force going into islands north of Aparri, as well as Aparri itself by now. So far, I've had one good size merchant to sink. Rest of target convoys are too far away.

Also, should I anticipate invasion of Lingayen Gulf later on?

Many thanks, Hugh Browne

[hbrsvl2007]

Hi-Playing latest v, '41,Career, Asiatic, with USS Sargo just north of Aparri, 13 Dec.'41.

Does the game follow history? There should be a major Japanese invasion force going into islands north of Aparri, as well as Aparri itself by now. So far, I've had one good size merchant to sink. Rest of target convoys are too far away.

Also, should I anticipate invasion of Lingayen Gulf later on?

Many thanks, Hugh Browne

[catlegwest]

Yeah, it's pretty hysterical, like when DDs don't want to play with you after you've blatantly attacked their convoys, or the ships of the convoys themselves not zig zagging despite the explosions all around. That's comic gold!


</snark>

[dgrayson]

<BLOCKQUOTE class="ip-ubbcode-quote"><div class="ip-ubbcode-quote-title">quote:</div><div class="ip-ubbcode-quote-content">Originally posted by hbrsvl2007:
Hi-Playing latest v, '41,Career, Asiatic, with USS Sargo just north of Aparri, 13 Dec.'41.

Does the game follow history? There should be a major Japanese invasion force going into islands north of Aparri, as well as Aparri itself by now. So far, I've had one good size merchant to sink. Rest of target convoys are too far away.

Also, should I anticipate invasion of Lingayen Gulf later on?

Many thanks, Hugh Browne </div></BLOCKQUOTE>

Some history is coded into the game, but I'm not sure about invasions. However, the battle of MIdway is there. I found myself just west of Midway on June 2, 1942 and decided to find out if Midway was in the game. I headed NW toward the spot where the IJN carrier force was iin real life. I began to see Jap search aircraft headed to and then back from Midway. I plotted their direction and headed that way. I spotted the 4 IJN fleet carriers on the 4th, sank three of them and a Mogami class CA, slipped away from the 16 DDs and all in all had a great time participating in the IJN defeat. I believe Coral Sea is in the game and I plan to be in the area of Leyte Gulf in time for that battle.

[GerritJ9]

SH4 includes a mission against the Japanese invasion force off Balikpapan in January 1942, and a submarine DID attack that invasion force. However, the attacking submarine was not an American S-boat as featured in SH4, but a Dutch submarine, K.XVIII. She sank a transport and possibly a subchaser, but was heavily depthcharged in return and had to limp back to Soerabaja for extensive repairs. Unfortunately, these had still not been completed by the time of the Japanese landings on Java and she had to be scuttled to prevent her capture.
As an aside, the four American four-stackers which also attacked the invasion force sank three transports which is a pretty poor return for the expenditure of 48 torpedoes against stationary targets. No doubt those torpedoes were as full of bugs as the American submarine torpedoes were.

[Tater-SW-]

Very little is historical. There are a few engagements scripted, but even when the forces are more or less in the right place, the forces themselves and the formations they are in are invariably wrong.

Note that I'm not nit picking using one CA to sub for another that is not in the game, or using Shokaku for Akagi, etc. I'm talking about the fact the Kido Butai at Midway has 3 CVs, not 4. The CV force is in a tightly packed group (hundreds of meters apart instead of 8,000m between ships*), with the wrong number of escorting ships, and not even the right kind---even though the right ships are actually modeled in SH4.

*In a post a while back in here I explained that CV doctrine for the IJN was a 7000m CV spacing, but on the morning of the 4th at Midway they were actually 8000m apart (Parshall & Tully, 2005).

Anyway, there is much that could be done to improve the historical, scripted part of SH4 in terms of at least putting combatants in the right area. The battles themselves are pretty awful if it comes to that, even the strictly surface enagements since the IJN units are hobbled by the lack of their most important weapon, the Type 93 torpedo.