I think the Pacific Air War is difficult for anyone to do well, because with the exception of a handful of frenzied battles, there wasn't much of a competition at all. Basically, after 1942 the theatre was dominated by the Allies (i.e. the USA) with Japanese opposition varying from ineptly weak to non-existant.
There were a couple of exceptions (Phillipines and Okinawa) but generally the pattern was for TF58 pull up next to an island, destroy all enemy air opposition in one or two days, then the marines land 6 months later with no fear of aerial opposition. Campaign-wise most of the maps in PF are good for about 3 days of air-to-air action. From then on most aerial activity was of the ground attack sort, which again can't be replicated because instead of attacking tanks, trains and road convoys, the F4U's and F6F's spent most of their time routinely bombing caves and anonymous bits of jungle on the remote chance that they might kill the occasional jap.
For all the glamour of the photographs, B-25 gunships, PBJ's, P-38's, Mustangs, F4U's, F6F's etc. spent most of the Pacific war travelling huge distances to do fairly mundane (though dangerous) work. A historically realistic Pacific simulator would probably be a very dull affair.
I sometimes think that all 1C should have done is create the Coral Sea map for the famous carrier battles (Midway, Marianas, Leyte Gulf) and one generic (but well done) island map and be done with it. It should have been biased to online and offline single missions. By trying to create scenarios for "campaigns" they fell between two stools - a true Pacific campaign needs lots of BIG maps with long distances so that players can replicate all the dull stuff that happened between the 48-hour Zero-massacres. They should just have just concentrated on the latter.
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03-26-2008, 11:21 PM
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