I dont know about the rest of you guys, but taking Australia as Japan is somehow very hard. I even abandoned my mainland plans to go for the continent, but still failed. Funny thing is, as America, when I allied with Germany, capturing Australia and New Zealand was fairly easy, accomplished with 14 divisions and one battle group. First of all, my fleet easily demolished the Australian navy, but the Americans would send the occasional battle group. In a large battle in, yes, the Coral Sea, i lost 2 of my CVs, and very essentially, 6 of my transports, all of them carrying marines. Even without marines, the relatively under-supplied and under-equipped Australian force at New Guinea fell within a quarter. The Americans continued to harass me by attempting landings and succeeding in, yes, Guadalcanal. In the counter-landing, I lost another 2 divisions thanks to some American subs. The Americans lost one armored division. My eyes turned across the way to Darwin. After extensive bombing, I successfully landed about 7 divisions there. My first breakout attempt failed. In the resulting counterattack, I lost all seven divisions. Not one to give up, I finished the conquest of New Guinea. I snuck a transport group to New Zealand, taking it within the month. Here I am now, with only 6 CV's, all in this area, and 22 divisions, all infantry. The problem? I only have 5 transport flotillas left.
When i played as Germany and reached the Pacific, I skipped New Guinea and went straight for Perth on the south west of Australia, the landing there was easy and then from there moved most of my troops around the coastal roads to tak the major capitals. Perhaps you should look into that.
I didn't have much of a problem with the Americans at that time. While I entered Australia from the west, they continued to move troops from the north which allowed me to attack into new guniea and finally a second front and into the north of Australia. Just remember Australia is large and it takes a while to move troops from one providence to another. It is better to do what you did in africa, and jump from providence to providence with the transports. Looks like you will need more transports, navy and infantry. What about naval bombers to deal with the Americans, or submarines?
In my Japan game I launched Operation "Grip" (The Last Stronghold of the Allies in the battle for the Pacific Ocean: Australia, so taking her would secure Japans "grip" on the east.). I made a landing on Perth and sent motorized divisions (Cav would probably work better) around both sides of the continent and encircled their industry. The difficulties is that even though you took most of the country; the southeast sector is heavily industrialized so their economy remains largely intact.
ok, I tried the Perth approach. Worked, but I was running low on reserve troops elsewhere in the world. Especially after American subs destroyed half of my transports. My naval bombers had only limited success. There are six Australian divisions in the desert territories that continuously harass my troops. When I attack, the organization drops to rock-bottom because of the long trip. Otherwise, it is successful.
It sounds like you need more of everything, transports, escorts, carriers, and land divsisions. Australia is the size of Europe and a little bit of Russia. So naturally you need many many men to take it. You are just lucky that they have a small army.
