Has anyone tried and/or had success with a German naval build in the Med. Sea? Such as an AC etc? The benefits to this would be having a fleet large enough to shelter more than 1 transport and plugging the Med. Sea from Allied ships with intention to harass Rome. It is also in a position harder for the Allies to destroy unlike the Baltic which is in range of London. An AC would also posture fighters in range of africa and ukraine for trading. Add to the fact Japan can link up with little effort and it seems like a viable strategy.
Well I built in the Med with them, it didn’t go to plan, The British Navy overwhelm me and that was like 3 turns of purchases I wasted.
I haven’t done this yet and must put it on my to-try list. The G1 purchase would probably be something like AC, transport, 4 inf, art. This can get the Axis a strong hold on Africa but Europe might not look so good. Germany will fall behind in the count in Europe and might have to concede Ukraine to Russia. As a consequence for keeping 4 units per turn in SE, Germany and EE may be thin on units. Plus, the fighters on the AC won’t be guarding land.
Worse yet, you weaken your position in europe in order to remove forces from europe thus weaking it further. The long term plan obviously is to earn enough income to offset this initial weakness. I believe this is more viable in Spring 42 then revised. It would certainly be worth looking at, perhaps run a ‘simulated’ game, rolls dice but toss out really silly rolls, perhaps give a slight dice advantage to the ‘defender’ of the plan. However, it is important to realize that early in the game with battles between small numbers of high valued units, bad rolls are not unlikely. With Spring 42, failure to secure egypt on R1 with Germany is usually fatal for Germany. The battle is a 5 on 3 for germany, germany has 4 land and 1 air unit typically and England defends with an infantry, tank and fighter. I have played spring 42 about 30 times or so, I have seen this occur twice now where england retained control of Egypt and thus the Seuz and in both times actually had a fighter survive. Luckily, I was the allies in both times. The consequence, the British on their turn transit the Seuz, sink the german fleet and that was all she wrote for the most part for Germany having fun in Africa.
If I was planning on doing a naval build, it would be an aircraft carrier in the baltic; even still it seems very risky for the reasons already given
If you are playing Revised with a bid then one possibility is to add a 2nd G transport to the Med fleet instead of adding units to Libya/Algeria. It doubles the transport capacity and can make the Russian player weary on an amphibious attack on the Caucasus/Ukraine.
Like mentioned above the drawback is that additional units sent to Africa won’t be used on the Eastern front and the 2nd transport will be sunk with the rest of the fleet if the Allies decide to do so.
