Matt defends Malta, Larry is Italian and invades

[larryfulkerson]

As far as moving the units, I moved the HQ's away from being adjacent to an enemy unit, and put some of the pieces back together for about 5 of the Italian units and now I'm ready to pull the trigger on the combat phase. I'm hoping for better results than last time.

[mdanz]

So far the plan is to hold of the paratroopers and wait for the Royal Navy to save the garrison. Other than not making it easy I intend to fight as little as possible so the garrison can conserve supply. It looks like I still hold all the important stuff for now but Larry has a lot of counters to use...

[mdanz]

I fortified the hell out of the ports. Without heavy equipment I think its going to be tough but probably not impossible for Larry to break in.
And he's broken through my screen of Patrol Boats right on time...

[larryfulkerson]

New moves from Matt and you can see the ferosity of his attacks. He sank several of my ships and bombarded my planes, I lost a lot of fine planes. I have reason to believe that there's a lot of Italian ships released on turn 5 so there should be some drama this turn.

[larryfulkerson]

I still need to move the ships and conduct some naval combat but meanwhile I've moved the LCU's and this is what the situation looks like now. The British forces have been busy forcing my units backward and destroying several of them. I have scheduled about a dozen attacks on the island making sure that there's some CS to help them out. I have two planes that are red and resting but the rest of them are yellow but they are going to fly missions anyway. I'm down to my last 292 units. I've got 4 swimmer units that need to be loaded on a ship to move to the island but I would lose them all if I tried to approach the island right now. RN ships that I need to deal with would sink the swimmers enroute.

[mdanz]

So Larry came out swinging with Battleships. He shot his way through my screen of L.Cruisers and destroyers, he sank a Heavy Cruiser I think too. So far I think he's down 1 1/2 battleships from primarily air attacks in the early morning turn. His ground attacks haven't broken through and he hasn't cleared the route in to any beaches yet. Though I think he has one more drop available to salvage that..
Then I have to stop the surge of Heavy Naval counters and hopefully Malta still stays free from Fascist tyranny.

[mdanz]

This is what the ground situation looks like.

[larryfulkerson]

New moves. Matt was busy during his turn. There was a couple of movements on land but this turn it was mostly a sea war. This turn may be dominated by sea action as well.

[larryfulkerson]

This is what it looks like on the island now. The Italians have no hope of succeeding on this project even though there's plenty of sea cap and the remaining units in the staging area COULD put to sea but the RN would shoot them out of the water while they sailed past. I'm getting ready to conceed.

[larryfulkerson]

So um....Matt and I have been sending emails back and forth and we have both decided that a different scenario is called for since it's obvious that larry is going to lose this one. We've decided that our next scenario will be: "Operation Lion de Mer 2004" and Matt is the first mover and I'm the second mover whichever side that happens to be. I'm told it's about the sealion situation where Germany is attempting to invade England. This will be the first time through the scenario for me so I'll have to hit the ground running.