Hello everyone. New Guy here. First let me say what a great game this is. Very simple but still realistic enough to force the players into the some of the same historical decisions that the leaders of the time did. With that in mind, I have one concern regarding oil.
Has anyone accomplished this feat with the allies in a reasonable amount of time? Unless I am doing something terrible wrong, it just doesn't seem possible. With the +2 monthly addition to the oil stockpile Japan gets once it has captured Singapore, Borneo and Java it quickly builds up a massive stockpile in the 6-12 months before the allies can effectively intervene that launching a full scale assault on the oil fields becomes pointless. This would starve them but not before the Bomb ends the war.
By going after the Philippines instead I can achieve the same result on the Japanese oil supply but then I usually win by strategic bombardment WAY sooner than I would starve them out. I have also tried raiding Singapore and Java early with the RN out of Ceylon and this is having some effect but not enough it seems.
From a historical perspective (I'm a bit of a WWII buff) the allies managed to create a huge shortage on the Japanese oil supply by interdicting the Japanese supply lines using subs without actually recapturing the oil fields themselves. There is also the issue that while the Japanese got some oil from the east indies, their continuing naval operations also used up a lot of oil. This isn't represented in the game unfortunately.
I have even tried modding the game. First by removing the +1 oil from Singapore and then to add an oil interdiction value to Port Darwin to represent subs interdicting supply lines. This seemed to change the behavior of the Japanese AI where for the first time it actually ignored Singapore early on and captured Port Darwin instead. That had never happened in ANY unmodded game before, not even a raid on Darwin. Which was great and totally unexpected but didn't really solve the oil problem as the situation remained Status Que.
This post got a little longer than I expected and I'm sorry about that
But does anyone have any tips, strategy or modding, that would allow me to finally get a realistic oil victory?
I'm gonna try adding an additional interdiction value to Hawaii and increasing the Japanese oil supply to 12 months and see what happens. Cheers.