[deanolium]

I've also tried this strategy, and it definitely works even when you only do it broadly.

Last night, I tried a game as Japan (my fourth game) where I first just concentrated on getting my oil supply up, before going for the sea lanes. My first turn involved an attack on Hawaii, Tarawa and Luzon (and I think somewhere else) - which all succeeded. I caught the American carriers at Pearl and caused some major damage. After supporting Tarawa with some ships and planes, I attacked the Oil islands, leaving Singapore to last, whilst keeping a load of ships at Home Islands. Every turn, the Allies hit Home Is with all their major ships (ignoring pretty much every other port I was taking) - with my carriers and planes at Home, I managed to suffer no damage at all, whilst they sunk all of their carriers and battleships. Eventually I took the Oil islands, and did a raid at Ceylon to stop the British from counterattacking for a while (so I could just leave a small force at Java and Singapore). I then went after Fuji, which went down easily. After the American forces were seriously depleted (they were down to their last CVL) and I got some more infantry, I went after Midway and the Aleutians, before raiding the West Coast. By this time, they had about three ships left, leaving me to take over the pacific with ease.

By the end (I accidently left no-one at Fuji for a turn, so the Austrailians took it back with a tiny force - so that extended my game by 7 turns), I had everything but Ceylon, Brisbane, Wake (why bother?), Palmyra, Samoa, Hawaii and the West Coast. As this was only my fourth game (and I only have a little knowledge of the Pacific war, coming from the first two PTO games from Koei - and I'm not an expert wargamer), this does seem like something's wrong (especially when I lost about 4 ships compared to something like 40-60 of theirs by the end).

The AI is too obsessive about attacking the Home Islands - which I can kinda get as the rewards are really high, especially at the start. However, this turns into a meat-grinder, especially when both my air and surface power far exceeds theirs. They also need to be much more aggressive over the key islands. They pretty much ignored Fuji et al, and should also be cautious about Tarawa. But they also ignored the Oil islands. If they became more aggressive about retaking those alone, that would remove this problem (as the only reason you can easily take the Sea Lane islands is because the Oil situation is so easily solved and kept. From a strategy pov, I should be having to constantly be spending resources to hold onto my Oil producers which will limit my aggressive advancing elsewhere.

That all said, it's a great game and I'm really enjoying it. I just hope that Japan can be fixed.