Turn 41:
At last, my recon event fires and my theater recon rises to a useful level! So nice to be able to see more of what’s going on. One of the things I see is that Jeremy is absolutely going to cut off Mexico. Like, all of it. It’ll take a little while still, probably, but he’s sending Italians west to the Pacific coast, and with just 1 rail line connecting Mexico, he could cut it with an airdrop at any time. I’m really pondering this now….do I want to pull back and let him just have Mexico? In addition to losing a major industrial city (and a bunch of VPs), I also lose a lot of units that will mobilize down there. The Mexicans are not the best units in the world, but there sure are a lot of them. I need to choose, and soon, if I want to fight to the death down in Mexico and risk losing a pile of units, or if I want to pull out.
This game is weird because on a tactical level I feel like I’m doing just fine, but on a strategic level I really don’t know what I’m doing. I’m just sort of defending everywhere Jeremy is attacking and trying not to lose any significant battles. I really don’t know what to do in Mexico and if it makes sense to hold on down there or try and retreat...I think I’m going to try and hold on, even though it’s hard for me to get reinforcements down there, because I feel like it must be equally hard for Jeremy to get reinforcements there as well (especially at this late stage in the match when he can’t be landing much...besides the giant pile of Japanese infantry divisions which I haven’t seen yet). In any case, I can’t really abandon Mexico just yet, as too many units are reorging...I’ll think on it again next turn, though I’m leaning towards fighting for it. To be clear here I'm pretty sure I'm winning, but what I mean by this is I feel like I don't really have a core strategy other than "don't lose a ton of units anywhere."
Otherwise not much going on - just the normal counterattacks. One thing of note is that my airfield bombardments seem to be lacking in effectiveness compared to our last match, and I’m wondering why that is. It could be that Jeremy is doing a better job of keeping his air units overlapping so I can’t pick off isolated ones. It could be the Japanese air force is a massive help there, as well, as they’re largely made up of longer-range fighters and can extend coverage significantly. It could also be that I have been so aggressive with my air force in this match and that I just don’t have the combat power to really hammer the Luftwaffe right now. I decide to compare to our last match. On turn 41 in this match I have 5,400 late Mustangs, 2000 late Thunderbolts, and 2100 King Cobras, along with of course a pile of earlier war fighters (2600 early Thunderbolts, 1700 total P-40s, 2000 P-39s, etc.). Call it about 9500 late-war fighters and slightly fewer early war fighters. In our previous match, despite having a significcantly lower replacement rate for most of the game, on turn 41 I had 5900 late Mustangs, 2400 late Thunderbolts, though only 1600 King Cobras...but that’s still about 400 more late war fighters despite a lower overall replacement rate for most of the match. Have I been pushing my air force too hard in this one? My turn by turn replacement rate isn’t that meaningful to my air force, unfortunately….it’s only something like 250 to 300 or so total fighters of all types, so between 1-2% of my total fighter strength in replacements each turn (to contrast, a newly-mustered fighter unit has 500 or so planes). So, it’s not as if I can just sit back and rest a bit in order to recover my strength, but I do think that I need to be much more careful about how I’m using my fighters - maybe I cannot simply bludgeon the Luftwaffe into submission (or if I can, it might just take far too long to be meaningful).
Boston, where a counterattack has cut off a couple of Axis units (I want to note, by the way, that Jeremy seems to feel the only good defense is a good offense in this version of TOAW....but I have a lot of fortified units here. I think the only good defense is both a defense AND an offense, with some fortified units to create a hard-to-move line but also a lot of counterattacks as well):

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