How to Lose to the Bot in "Empire of the Sun"

Japan at game end. US negotiates peace.

Well, I can officially confirm I've lost to the bot in my latest game of Empire of the Sun. Not extremely badly, mind you, but I did just lose a game against a cardboard foldout.

I was playing as the Allies against the Japanese bot in this game, which basically means there are three ways for me to win: there's the A-bomb victory, which is only possible through card play and never came up. There's the victory by blockade, which only works if you can set up the blockade by the end of turn 10. And then there's the actual conquest of Japan, which involves capturing all city hexes in Honshu by the time the game ends in turn 12.

I think part of why I lost this particular game was that I was ahead of the curve for most of it and got overconfident. With Saipan and Tinian in hand by the end of turn 8, I took a pretty leisurely pace for the next few turns. I figured Japan was on the back foot and I could pretty much make my move on the rising sun at my leisure.

The Pacific at the end of the war. Note the massive dead piles at the bottom right part of the board.

Part of what lulled me into that sense of security is the design of the bot system. As soon as the Allies are in the Marianas, the bot pretty much starts pulling everything it has back to Japan. Which looks an awful lot like winning the game if you're a dumb Allied player who isn't thinking too clearly about the winning conditions.

There comes a point in Empire of the Sun where the most the Japanese player can do is be really annoying. Their fleet is smashed, and they'll waste their ships and planes if they try to attack anywhere. But they can park themselves in Japan and make the actual invasion a slow, painful process.

I thought I'd learned this in my last game, but here's the big lesson: when you're playing as the Allies, you have to go the whole game with the assumption that you're going to have to invade Japan to win. If you can set up a blockade or win by A-bomb, that's wonderful. But you have to plan for the last resort, which is boots on the ground in Tokyo.

US carriers conducting mass raids on Japan in turn 11. Too little too late.

And you really do have to plan for it. By the time in this game when I was ready to attack Japan itself, the bot had built up so many air and ground forces it took more than a turn for me to grind them down enough that I could land a reasonably strong force.

Plus Japan smacked me with interservice rivalry on turn 11, which was pretty devastating. Practically, what it means is that you can only activate either US Navy (including Marines) or US Army units on your turn, but not both in the same turn. And practically speaking, that meant I had to try to take Japan using only the Marines as ground forces. I might have been able to pull it off, even with all my mistakes, if I hadn't had about a half dozen US Army Corps sitting on their thumbs in the Philippines and the Marianas.

Like every Allied loss in Empire of the Sun, this one was MacArthur's fault.