contested waters

[EUBanana]

In all my games theres a huge ruckus in the eastern med usually when my Entente navies sally forth to purge the Ottoman coast of Austrians.

It's usually exceedingly bloody too, and chews up the entire French and Italian navies, along with a fair chunk of the British.  Not much gets actually sunk but there are always masses of cripples in Naples, Alexandria and Toulon harbours afterwards...

How on earth they managed to get Gallipoli going in 1915 with Austrian firepower like that in the area I will never know...

[SMK-at-work]

Because the AH fleet had already sortied and was out of naval points and AH didn't want to waste precious resources restocking them!

Actually the French and British presence in the Western Med constituted an effective blockade of the mouth of the Adriatic and the AH fleet would ahve taken a pounding trying to get to the Dardanelles.