@plumsmugler:
@13thguardsriflediv:
Britain buys a few new ships and decides to attack the western Italian fleet with a fighter, tac bomber, destroyer and cruiser. The carrier joins the French units to pick up the surviving planes as the Italian fleet goes down without much of a bang.
This is a REALLY good idea. All these British units involved cannot be attacked (or virtually cannot be) before they make this move and of course the Italians don’t have a turn before this occurs. This practically wipes out the Italian fleet without any effort or risk on UK’s part and when you consolidate the carrier and the planes with the French Med fleet Italy cannot effectively counter-attack this force nor rebuild its lost naval units. Not to mention Italy will more than likely not be getting any bonus income now because they more than likely cannot take Egypt with their Tobruk and Ethiopian forces.
This almost seems like a broken attack of opportunity. By wiping out those Italian naval units without a second thought as to the risk behind the attack it seems to knock Italy out of the game before they even get their first turn. Even if Italy throws everything it has left after that at the remaining British and French units it will more than likely lose everything and leave the UK with a carrier with one or two planes left on it. The end result is Italy with no naval or air units left and the British still having a presence in the Mediterranean. This means Italy has lost the game already! They will have no more than the income they can pick up from southern france and the balkan states and no way of getting to Africa.
If I’m playing as the UK I will do this move first turn every single game and there is no reason to use those units any other way. This seems incredibly broken to me.
Aye, the Taranto raid really is broken for the UK, as there’s absolutely no reason NOT to do it, since the Germans can’t reach SZ 91 on G1 and Italy’s turn goes after the UK. It actually seems the best move since moving the CV, DD, and TAC up to help defend England will just get them killed by the German U-boats and Luftwaffe. Italy doesn’t have enough naval units to respond, which I find is crap, since they had a fairly large navy for just the Med, and also quite a few submarines (where are Italy’s 116 starting submarines? Germany had about 250 throughout the war and starts in AAE40 with FIVE)!