Odessa

[OberGeneral]

Post your Odessa attacks here.

I will start.

http://puu.sh/HHs4M/6c33e01879.png

I had it isolated with naval interdiction for 3 turns prior.

[Bamilus]

I get similar results to that in my past few games. Sevastopol also falls quickly if you bring in 11th Army. Rostov is a different story.

[loudscott]

Turn 8 and an all Rumanian affair. [:)][:)]

[Balou]

Congrats. How did you set up your naval interdict and what about the air losses ?

[goranw]

Turn 8. Odessa falls quickly. Ai-Ai.
2 german and 8 attacking rumanian units. (red Kampf ) (flag in attacked hex)
All defending units surrender, rout or retreat. (yellow Kampf)
Nikolajew, Cherson and Skadowsk.
Goran W

[Hardradi]

Forgot to get a screenshot of the battle. Not many defenders home so all it took was one German Division.

[CatSoup]

imo wasting people on Odessa is pointless, i rather just put 3 rom infantry around it then just ignore it. Deal with it in 42

[OberGeneral]

All those look very good. Thanks for all your posts.[&o]

[Bamilus]

ORIGINAL: CatSoup

imo wasting people on Odessa is pointless, i rather just put 3 rom infantry around it then just ignore it. Deal with it in 42

That's a valid strategy but honestly it's pretty trivial to take Odessa (and even Sevastopol) versus AI in one turn if you make sure to move the SU's/naval air units in place ahead of time. I don't find it slows down my advance to send 1 or 2 German units to spend a turn taking Odessa but versus a player I agree it's a tougher decision.

[Hardradi]

Trying for an active defence. Held off the first attack and even counter attacked but this failed.

Naval transport is a consistently high stakes game even where you have almost total domination through Naval Patrol Interdiction. I have been consistently loosing troop transports even though the Axis have little to no control over the seas. I just lost a whole cavalry division in this turn. Based on the WitW formulas, per the original manual, I calculated that I should only be getting interdicted about ~1% of the time per ship. I lost 2 transport ships this turn, lost one last turn and more in the turns before that. Maybe the formula is different in WitE2. It appears that evacuating tired units and reinforcing a besieged port with fresh units through uncontested waters is not a good idea.

In addition to this, in this case it seems its not worth expending the planes to keep the sea lanes open as the AI has chosen not to ship supplies to Odessa (depot 4 vs Kherson depot 3).