Why is Taranto raid so popular?

@flyingbadger

Absolutely badger.

While we may see the fight in the Mediterranean from different perspectives, what we inevitably all agree on is that it’s one of the more significant fronts that can easily sway the game for one side or the other all down to the results of a simple raid on Italy.

For me I stick by my philosophy that every Axis piece on the board should be doing something, or playing some sort of role. Which is why I’m a firm believer that scrambling the fighters into the Taranto Raid as the Axis should be done every single time because fact of the matter is, a lot of people tend to say that it’s better to save those fighters for something new but in the end nobody really knows what they’re saving them for, and that’s what causes Axis players to lose. I mean granted Squire had previously said earlier to save those fighters against the French ships or the remaining British ships in the Med but for me the Taranto Raid is the only time I’ll really be able to take of British Planes if I scramble these fighters and when they’re throwing this many planes at me then that’s my objective. Obviously you won’t be able to have absolutely every unit doing something and playing some sort of genuine authentic role but you can get very close to having every single unit active on the board, which is what wins you games.

It sounds like you only have the fighters engaging in combat. My understanding is that all air units (incl. the bombers get to roll):

The attacking bombers and fighter escorts and the defending fighter interceptors will be the only units participating in this special combat. The combat lasts for only one round. All of the air units have attack and defense values of 1

I hope this helps.

If you don’t want UK to scramble during your amphibious assault, you need some Italian Bombers to raid the Airfield, and now UK have no change to repair it before Germany attack.

The rules are made this gamey way because the designer love the idea of teamwork.

One thing worth mentioning here is that Africa is essentially a trap for the Axis.   Whether the Italian fleet survives or not, it is very hard to make much of an income difference or gain any NOs before America enters the war and takes it back, or without compromising some other more critical front. Â

Italy only risks 2 IPCs by losing Africa.   In our Game 92 on Saturday, I had the entire Italian navy survive because my opponent did exactly what you suggested, and attacked Tobruk rather than Taranto.   The counter is quite favorable to the Italians, to send in their entire fleet on the attack and clear the med for your NO.   Even with the gigantic navy, I was still boxed in as I couldn’t control either Gibraltar or Egypt in the long term though I took both of them once.   Â

Buying more ships is a trap, and you can’t really hold Gibraltar.   I spent all my $$ on strategic bombers and mechs to help Germany on the eastern front and using Italy to protect the Atlantic Wall or help leapfrog Germany in the East is stronger than trying to take the Maghreb or the Levant.  If you keep any transports, the most effective thing to do with those is threaten/cover/block/rush out of Gibraltar but its going to be hard…

One of my buddies said that far from wanting to reinforce the Italian stack on Tobruk, he wanted to evacuate it from Africa.  Its ineffective and trapped on a good day and easy to annihilate on a bad one.

True, I did not mean to say that one bad-luck battle increases your odds of a future good-luck battle. What I meant is that Global 1940 is a much bigger game than, say, Revised. Global has more units involved and more battles that matter. The effect of having more units and more battles is to soften the effect of any one unit missing or of any one battle going poorly. In other words, as you broaden your sample size, you get closer to achieving average results in the aggregate.

The strength of the Taranto attack as Britain is that you have to basically bring as many planes to the fight as Italy has eligible to scramble in order to ensure “mutual destruction” odds.

Assuming you always destroy the Italian transport off of Malta, you will leave Italy with only a handful of boats and one lone transport. With only one transport it is very unlikely that Italy can effectively take Greece and Gibraltar on the first turn, meaning that you can deny them a valuable objective early on. Sending one transport either way means it will take at least another two turns to get to the other side. (The solution to this for the Axis is Germany taking Gibraltar for Italy).

With only one transport, Italy cannot effectively threaten Egypt, which gives Britain much-needed time to fortify it with troops from either India or S. Africa.

Even though the UK’s navy in the med faces almost assured destruction (if the Italian counterattack doesn’t finish it off somehow, German planes will), you are banking on the fact that you make almost triple Italy’s economy. Italy’s paltry 10 IPCs mean that rebuilding transports will take a huge portion of their income. Until Italy achieves it’s NO’s, building anything larger than destroyers and submarines will be impossible without saving up IPCs for 1-2 turns.

The other advantage of this strategy is that by destroying most of Italy’s navy early the US does not have to build as large a navy in the Atlantic, which is a massive benefit given the task of facing Japan in the Pacific.

The other popular UK opener is to pull your navy back into SZ81 and possibly join with the India navy (that might be running away from Japan) and build up a force too great for even Italy’s combined navy to defend against. Then the US and UK both hit the med on turn 4 in a 1-2 punch.

@Cow:

The egypt minor is for convoying sz 97 in the long run and taking italy out of the game.

That can change when Germany (if) takes Moscow and turns towards Egypt.  In my most recent game, Germany ended up taking Moscow and redirected the prior round’s purchase of Armor towards Egypt along with a Ukr Arm purchase Germany had something like 9 tanks sitting in Ukraine ready to blitz ahead of whatever survived Moscow.

UK went on the defensive at this point, but Italy was already convoyed to death with minimal effort.  It really goes to show how important sinking the Italian fleet is if Germany is going to Moscow first when Italy is stuck from round 6-7 on being able to only put 1 or 2 Inf out a round at best.

I think there is a general dogfight and then surviving bombers and tac split up to attack their intended targets. Thus, it would be 2 ftrs, 4 tac, 2 bmrs vs 3 ftrs for 1 round.