How to Capture Hawaii as Japan

[noxmortem]

Naval Invasions are pretty difficult in Hearts of Iron 4. How do I capture Hawaii as Japan, as there is only a single province where I can land next to the port and therefore therefore I am not able to encircle the port.

I tried to land with 4xMarines Division (2x4 Marines each, width of 80) supported by engineers, art, rocket art, logistics support and there was no way to win with the negative supply penalty of -33%. I did barely any damage at all and Hawaii is so far away from any air base that I am unable to get air support there.

[Aedile]

That's what carriers are for...

[noxmortem]

And how do I use them? What kind of attack command would I use for the planes stationed on a carrier in range? What type of planes to use? What kind of bombing command?

Wow: I just realized he has 14 divisions there and I already wasted 40 divisions on Hawai :(

[Aedile]

You put your carrier on hold, (just standing somewhere), then it works just the same as a regular airbase, except of course you need carrier planes. CAS is the most useful one (for ground support)of course.

And you should be able to build a port and airbase at the beachead, though honestly I never tried if you can in unsupplied region. Likely they'll just counterattack.

Also battleships (and other capships), will do support shore bombard when on hold.

Hawaii can barely support more than two divisions without them being supplied by the port so... get your subs on convoy intercept. .Alternatively if you got the tier 3 strat bombers they can reach hawai from Marshal islands and level that port. It helps...
But yes hawaii is quite difficult, almost impossible unless you cut them off and soften them first.

I don't know if there is better way.

[Mol]

You could do it the cheaty way and just build a port on the province that you land on :)

[deadsanta]

Originally posted by noxmortem:

And how do I use them? What kind of attack command would I use for the planes stationed on a carrier in range? What type of planes to use? What kind of bombing command?

Wow: I just realized he has 14 divisions there and I already wasted 40 divisions on Hawai :(

Yeah, just leave that there and do the Japanese version of Island-hopping: MacArthur realized that taking every Japanese island would make the war last forever and consume countless lives, so he just cut off the islands with pickets/patrols so they couldn't resupply and left them.

Go take Alaska, Canada, Mexico or some other country and use it to stage attacks on the US mainland, leaving those 14 divisions effectively useless to him.

[noxmortem]

Thank everyone for the ideas, this is wonderful!

The positive thing about hawaii is it showed me how much it can be worth in HoI4 to land with a single division directly on a port, just to see how many divisions the enemy has there. I would really not have expected so many man on that tiny island in the middle of nowhere :)