Japan 45

[Green]

I have no experience with either the HtH or Solo campaigns in this game and no knowledge regarding Operation Olympic so I am not pretending to be in a position to make any useful comments on this.

But the question of balance in campaigns is an interesting one. It has never been clear to me exactly how playtesting is done given the immense time that would be involved.

The way that I use to get a rough feel for balance is to look at the Strength values of each side and in particular the total VP values of the two forces. I am not sure how these VP values are arrived at but my assumption is that they represent a overall estimation of a units worth and take into account relevant attributes such as quality, firepower, mobility, etc. If this is correct, then it is allows a better comparison than just looking at numbers of men, guns, etc.

For the Operation Olympic Solo campaign (Historical Plan) the comparison is 24,000 VP for the Allies vs 22,000 VP for the Japanese. This is intended to be played as the Allies. For the HtH campaign (Historical Plan) the comparison is 23,000 VP Allies versus 33,000 VP Japanese.

These seem the wrong way around to me as you would expect a Human Japanese opponent to be tougher than the AI. But of course the victory conditions are quite different between the two so this is not a fair comparison. But at first glance it does look like the HtH version would be tough fight for the Allies as they seem to be attacking with a weaker force!

Similar VP comparisons with some other campaign games are as follows;

                    Allied      Axis
Sealion        17,000    17,000
Sicily           15,000    10,000
Salerno          9,000     6,000
Anzio           13,000    11,000
Normandy    85,000    28,000

None of this proves anything but it does provide some superficial support at least for your view that the Allies are up against it in the Japan '45 HtH campaign.