• What is Taranto, & I saw mention of Sita as well–-what are they???

  • TripleA

    the battle of taranto
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Taranto

    gamers refer to a uk1 attack on sz97 at taranto


  • @rmcbride:

    What is Taranto, & I saw mention of Sita as well–-what are they???

    Taranto is where this happened:
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Taranto
    The British crushed the Italian fleet at anchor.

    This is widely done in the game by hitting SZ 97 with the kitchen sink.  Even bringing in a fighter/bomber from the UK.  Air can land on Malta.

    Not sure what Sita is…


  • How do people approach this on the Iti side?  Scramble the fighters? Or wait and return force on Iti’s turn with fighters, bomber and seazone 95 fleet?


  • Sita is S. Italy. Taranto is hitting SZ97 and SZ96 w/the Brits. It is a standard move by the Brits in Global or Europe 1940 to neuter the Italian navy. Just did it w/the Allies. See the moves in the Play Board games section of the Forum. The game is titled White Boys vs. The Asians.


  • 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.

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