My first opinion of Empire of the Sun was that the game was completely, irreversibly broken. Me and my opponent (Panzeh, a fellow Something Awful goon) played the first turn and to me, as the Japanese, the game seemed hopeless: the invasion of Malaya and the Philippines seemed impossible, the DEI was a distant, impossible dream and the entire game consisted of me sending my Japanese Fleets again and again against the Allied fleets, with both good and bad results. How could the game be so broken?
The answer, of course, was that we had been playing wrong all along. We had missed the rule concerning how delayed reinforcements work and hence the Japanese faced Allied reinforcements in turn 2 that they should only ever have to face in turn 3. It might sound silly now but in retrospect this was a pattern that was to be repeated several times afterwards and each time it occurred, my estimation of the game increased.
Throughout my time playing Empire of the Sun (EotS from now on) there had always been doubts about how historical the game was. One of the major features of the game, for example, is that reinforcements aren't restricted to any one area.
You could potentially send MacArthur to Burma if you wanted and have him march through Thailand, French Indochina and then up the Chinese Coast. Maybe you concentrate the Commonwealth fleet in Australia/Solomons and use it to complement the US fleet. Or maybe you manage to hold on to a corner of the DEI (although this latter one can be negated by a Japanese player that knows what he is doing).
So you would think that leaving such decisions up to the layer would completely prevent the game from developing in an historical way: there are two many permutations, too many variables to consider and it would be impossible for the rules to cover them all.
But you would be wrong: EotS doesn't attempt you to hand-hold you into making historical choices, it doesn't structure the game in such a strict way that any deviation means an instant loss. Instead, it uses subtle mechanisms in order to make the players naturally arrive to the answers of 'why did the Japanese/Allies did this particular operation'.
Another example of something that I originally got wrong was the importance of New Guinea within the game. When playing as a Japanese player, most of the early war objectives are pretty clear: you want the DEI/Philippines/Malaya in order to gain resource hexes and prevent the Allied player from reinforcing them too much. You want to pressure Burma in order to keep the Allies busy there and potentially make Burma surrender (which makes the Allied player lose Political Will, one of the major ways in which the Japanese player can win).
On the other hand, the Solomons and New Guinea seem like targets that you wouldn't necessarily want to take: they stretch your resources, they don't make the Allied player lose Political Will, they can be counter-attacked fairly easily and provide easy Progress of War to the Allied player (more on Progress of War later). So why on earth would you ever want to take them?
It took me a long time to work out the answer to this question, but it was a similar epiphany to the one I explained in the first paragraph of this post. The answer to why New Guinea is important is 'pinning'.
'Pinning' is a mechanism that a first does not seem to much sense in terms of historicity, and there have been quite a few people on the internet that decry it as 'gamey'. Without going too much into the rules of the game, it is possible to use a single unit of Long Range Bombers to prevent the entire Kido Butai to react to another threat. This, as mentioned, seems to be nonsensical since how could a single Air Force with 4 combat factors prevent an entire fleet of 100+ combat factors from operating.
Mark Herman wrote a small article refuting the 'gameyness' of this tactic and how it actually does increase the historicity of the game, but my main interest is on the effect of the game and the effect is this: if the Japanese player stations his fleet too close to an allied airfield, he will get continually bombarded with these 'pinning' units and be unable to react.
This both reflects something that happened in real life (the Japanese pulling their fleet out of ports in range of land based air forces) as well as providing a crucial reason why New Guinea (an island absolutely littered with airfields in range of Truk, the main Japanese fleet anchorage) is important.
Another example is Progress of War, a rule that I previously mentioned. Progress of War basically requires the Allied player to continually re-capture Japanese spaces or lose Political Will: this is largely represented as the American public being angry at the slow process of the war. Although this mechanism influences the decisions of the Allied player (and leads to the island-hopping campaign of fame), my main interest is how it actually influences the strategic thought of the Japanese: it forces them into a 'hold everything you have captured' mindset.
Without it, you could just retreat to a more defensive position once you have reached your maximum extent. With it, you try to hold on to every single island, forcing the Allied player to pay for every single one of his gains, pulling out only when the situation is truly hopeless. This was another rule that at first didn't seem to really help the historicity of the game but that, in second reflection, greatly helps the game to retain its flavour of Pacific Theater operations.
I think this is why I love the game so much: it highly reminds me of Napoleon's Triumph, another game I love because it doesn't attempt to recreate the battle of Austerlitz exactly, but gives you rules that motivate you to act like the generals that actually fought in the battle. And this is truly present in Empire of the Sun. The game doesn't restrict you in order to conform to what the game expects the PTO to be like: it gives you pointers and requires you to work it out. And it is all better for it. I truly hope to find other items concerning EotS that I am wrong about, only just so that my estimation of this wonderful game continues to grow even further.
