Thoughts on long form play

Last year we played the entire Asiatic Campaign starting immediately following Pearl Harbor all the way to early June 1942 (San Diego group; 2023 was the first year that group sputtered a little and actually started playing games other than War at Sea on at least some of the nights). The campaign started with the Prince of Wales and Repulse sailing out of Singapore to interfere with the Japanese landings at Malaya. We allowed for the what if of running into the Japanese cruiser group they missed by some 30-40 miles the night before they were sunk (in our history). In this scenario, they did indeed encounter that group and won the fight, then abandoned their effort to intercept the landings, and returned to Singapore out of range of Japanese aircraft. Their survival did tilt the campaign. Singapore fell a few weeks later and as a result, the Java campaign was tripped up and the allies never lost all the islands. There were convoy actions, landing actions, thwarted landings, carrier battles, surface fights, all with some element of real historic battles. We even tried a few land battles though the mechanics needed some help (largely relying on Memoir 44). From there, we played out selected scenarios or generated ones we thought might take place his history started shifting away from what actually happened. We did a lot of research on ship locations and movements, allowing for some shifting of forces (we made the assumption that US and British ships only entered into the theater when they actually did in history - there were still fights in the Mediterranean and Atlantic to contend with. We allowed for repair if ships were damaged (but they did have to sail to ports where they could be repaired, Japan had some advantage in that). It was a bit of a learning curve and we realized some mistakes were made and we could correct those if we ever try to run the campaign again. War at Sea can be pretty brutal though. The Japanese were not doing nearly as well as they did in history, and both sides were using ships up at an accelerated pace (one thought, perhaps when a ship reaches 0 hull points, consider it just out of action, and a -1 required to actually be sunk). The campaign was the focus of our games for about 5 months which leant a certain level of realism to it. The Japanese were really pestered by the Prince of Wales and Repulse which gave the British quite a step-up from what they really had to work with. The USS Enterprise was caught at anchorage on the east coast of Australia by a surprise raid and put out of action for a couple months as one of the last major victories of the Japanese. The main reason I think the Japanese really had trouble is that we had trouble generating the available Japanese air units available when we started. By the end, I had some excellent references for squadron composition and availability but by then we had left the early war behind. The Japanese really did start the war with some impressive air superiority. I thought the Asiatic campaign was an excellent theater to offer the long haul game. We have considered something similar for the Mediterranean. I always thought it would be fun to combine all that we learned into a single PDF campaign guideline and share it with the War at Sea group but alas, I've not managed this yet.