@Cornwallis said in France's role in Global 1940 SE:
The time i would see use in it is when you activily try to hunt the luftwaffe.
I’ve theorized that this needs to be the crux of Allied thinking.
To wit, when playing against the Ai, the builds for the western Allies are sort of focused around having a strong enough escort fleet to either soak or deter a kamikaze-style attack by the Luftwaffe, in order to protect your supply chain of transports.
There’s a few issues, that you have to try and balance with that:
Deterring the attack vs. baiting it out and making actual kills. It seems like the only ways to achieve the latter is with some combination of scrambling and bombing/escorting. Soaking hits with your navy vs. having meaningful attack power on land. An escort fleet heavy on destroyers does the former very well, but for making landfall in Europe, you need a stronger contingent of carriers+aircraft, with maybe some battleships for a mix of soaking hits and adding offense. Spending too much on fleets vs. not enough on ground troops. If every SZ you need to meaningfully defend requires something like 40+ IPCs of escort ships, I can’t see how the British alone (or the US waiting until round 3/4) can meet that demand while still making any meaningful inroads militarily against the Axis.I think these last 2 points in particular are why I’ve always found myself pulling the UK fleet behind the Suez canal, rather than sending those ships on a suicidal Taranto attack. But, to the 1st point, is part of the Taranto move an attempt to bait/kill German planes, too?
What I’ve found in games where the Ai does go after an allied fleet with the Luftwaffe (beyond the 1st round) is that the result is a much shorter game overall (i.e. the Axis lose faster.) So I can only assume the competent Axis players have taken this into account, and just won’t ever make this sort of move. Again, this brings us back to the 1st point, about how do we bait an attack from the Germans.