Supply for naval units without access to ports

[mdsmall]

From my reading of the rules, there seems to be no impact on naval units if they lose all access to a friendly port. This can happen to the Soviet fleet in both the Baltic and the Black Sea, if Axis ground forces capture all the ports that each of these fleets rely on. The only way that fleets seem to lose supply is if they raid a convoy or are attacked - otherwise, they can float around in their respective enclosed seas indefinitely. Is this reasonable? I would have thought that naval units in this situation should find themselves in a few turns at zero supply and should then suffer attrition, similar to land units.

Michael

[Platoonist]

Well technically cruising would burn up supply as well, but you're not too likely to have to do that in the confines of the Black Sea.

It's not realistic, but that is how it works right now. Naval units can bob about the ocean indefinitely provided they have supply and stay out of trouble. I recall one player talking about a German raider that he had camped out on one of the the Cape Town raiding location hexes in SC2 World at War. The AI never responded to it, and since that type of activity doesn't burn any naval supply, it spent almost the whole game there doing its thing turn after turn.

[mdsmall]

I am grateful that most of the time you don't have to worry about sources of supply for naval units (the exception being subs sent out to raid convoys). But it would be a reasonable revision to the rules to require that a naval unit be able to trace a supply line of any length back to a friendly controlled port. If the can't, they should start to lose one supply level per turn until their side recaptures a port or they hit zero supply, at which point the existing attrition rules should come into effect.