Questions from beginner !

Hi Prey. All Air units land in non combat and they have the balance of their  unused movement: a Fighter has 4, so if they moved 3 in Combat, then they only have 1 left. Air units cannot land in a territory that has just been captured. They could land on an empty Carrier.

The answer to both questions is “no”.

@Corbeau:

@timerover51:

Your shore bombardment idea has been picked up in the Anniversary Edition rules, evidently.

Ya, i saw that, that’s great news :)
I can only wish i was the one to propose it to the game designer but it really is a coincidence. That was a house rule we used way back then. Still great to see he thought of it too. :)

I like the also th idea of BB acting as artillery support. Good thinking there too. I would not allow it for planes too, i find them already too flexible as a unit acting both in land and sea. I’d rather have them seperated in 2 classes, Land based fighters and CV based fighters. They already have the different molds for some nations, german stuka and Bf-109 for exemple. anyways, that’s another discussion.

For the BB acting like an AA, that’s exactly what i meant. Would give a reason to have one in a fleet.

You need to remember that roughly 2/3 of a carrier’s aircraft were attack planes, dive bombers and torpedo bombers, that would be used in support of ground troops.  This is the basis for the flexibility in fighters in A&A.  If you had a dedicated attack plane, like the Stuka, you could reduce the fighter’s role by a little bit, but by the end of the war, the US Navy’s Corsair fighter was carrying a bombload heavier than that of the Stuka, and delivering it with comparable accuracy.

As for BB getting an AA roll, that makes a fair amount of sense, and is pretty historically accurate.  Quite simply, BBs normally acted as a magnet for air attacks, even if a carrier was around.  The US South Dakato shot down 26 Japanese aircraft while escorting the carrier US Enterprise at the Battle off Santa Cruz in October of 1942, while Adm. Raymond Spruance deployed his battleline in advance of his carriers at the Battle of the Philippine Sea in June of 1944 to deliberately absorb Japanese carrier plane attacks.  However, the US did have the best naval AA fire control systems of the entire war, so what holds true for the US does not hold true for everyone else.  The Bismarck had major problems with defending against a limited number of British Swordfish, while the Italian BBs had similar problems.  The British were so-so, and the Japanese were close to hopeless until late in the war.  You could make it a National Advantage for the US, but I suspect that would not be acceptable to a majority of Axis players.  Making it universal is a bit of a stretch.  It would be up to you.

Where’s the unguarded territory if he blocked off the Baltic? What if there are no troops or very little troops in W. Europe? You may be infinitley efficient when you can bombard a territory, but when the territory doesn’t have many or any troops to bombard, or you are blocked, you are many turns behind in amassing the necessary troops to attack.

And, since you can pick the route, by all means pick the route with the least amount of hazards!  Sometimes those AA’s seem to have eyes (so to speak) and get a lot more hits than are warrented.

I stand corrected…

LHTR 1.3 under “Step 7:  Press Attack or Retreat”

Air Units:

When you designate that an air unit will retreat, return it to the game board battle site. It will retreat as a noncombat move when all other air units finish their moves in the noncombat move phase. Air units can retreat to any friendly territory within their total movement range. A fighter can retreat to a friendly aircraft carrier or to a friendly sea zone, as long as a carrier moves there this turn.

And leaving that DST alive and the Suez open invites another problem…
A pretty nice UK fleet roaming the Indian Ocean.  By UK2 it can be 2 DST’s, an AC, 2 FIGs, 2 TRNs and a sub.  That puts them on par with Japan’s remaining fleet after Pearl…

Both land and naval units that engage in combat remain in the area of combat and cannot be moved in the non-combat phase.  Retreated units have to stay in the territory/sea zone they were retreated to.  The only units that can move after Combat (and in fact HAVE to move in almost all cases) are aircraft.

If you need a basis in reality for this rule, consider those forces to be being re-supplied, repared, reinforced, replacing casualties, etc. as well as securing the area, reparing damaged infrastructure (bridges, airfields, etc) during the non-combat phase.  For retreated units, consider them to be regrouping, replacing lost equipment, etc.