@SuperbattleshipYamato re: Taranto
My general ethos is that I’d rather the British keep their fleet intact, and back them up behind the canal. Even if the Italians take it by land, you can keep them from expanding into the Indian Ocean by sea.
The other side of it is like… I think air power is great, while navies are sort of “the cost of doing business” – so trading my planes to take out your navy is a bad exchange. I’m fine with taking the cheap/easy win of sniping the fleet at Malta, because in the grand scheme of things, I think the transport will cause more damage to me than the battleships and cruisers and whatnot.
I’ve seen some weird things, like 2 subs being sent against the British cruiser at Gibraltar and both subs being sunk. Generally I assume there will be a sub there, and a sub up near Canada; I tend to send the SZ109 fleet to Canada, along with a couple of fighters, and place a new carrier there on rd1. If there’s a damaged battleship (and sub/s) in SZ111, I’m usually inclined to attack it with the fighter from Scotland and/or the UK bomber.
Do German players usually prioritize the UK transports? The Ai always seems to leave those 2 sea zones alone; granted we’re talking subs attacking destroyers, and their planes are out of range (except the strat. bombers, but landing in Belgium would be pretty undesirable…)
To me, it also seems like it stands to reason that the Germans should prioritize hunting destroyers, just because I tend to assume that the great strength of the western allies is their air power; if you have no transports, your battleships and cruisers can’t influence land combat, and if you have no destroyers, your planes can’t target subs – it paints a picture that as “guy who has subs,” the German player should be targeting things a certain way, to play into that. Honestly though, it seems kind of moot, given how relatively short the battle of the Atlantic ends up being.
I’ve run a handful of test games recently where I’m using battleships as my main surface unit, with the US. I think it’s a strat that pays off later/in the long run, when you’re stacking landings over multiple rounds (usually in the Mediterranean.) If your floating bridge consists of 4 transport loads and you can pile on 4+ shore bombardments, it starts to add up. But honestly, on the Atlantic side, I’ve seen a British strategy of just stacking bombers and fighters and strafing down the French coast – the number of casualties inflicted is staggering compared to what the battleships are able to do. Not an unexpected result, but I think to me this just cements the utility of destroyers, in that convoy-escort role.
I’ve found that when I’m too aggressive with pushing the allied fleets east too early, the Germans still tend to kamikaze their planes into my ships – but this actually only serves to speed up their own demise. As long as I’m not losing a huge amount of transports all in one go…? I can afford to lose a loaded carrier and 2-3 surface ships, as long as I take enough of their planes down with me. In these instances (for the cost) I’d rather be defending with the extra shots I’d be getting from buying destroyers, as opposed to the higher attack rating of a battleship.
But I think it’s generally best to be cagey with your allied fleets, and build them up to a point where the Axis can’t afford to attack them. This feeds into why I generally don’t like the idea behind the Taranto raid; I know I can outspend the Italians, so it’s actually in my interest to keep my fleets strong while I do that, rather than do a move that at best amounts to “mutually assured destruction” in my estimation.
