ORIGINAL: balto
BWheatley,
The German air can do nothing about the Soviet Navy if you have a combat vessels with the Transports. And you first need to spot the navy which require enormous amounts of recon. That is part of the problem is that the Germans cannot defend this tactic due to the mighty Soviet fleet.
You state that the German defense is to defend all ports.., well, that requires lots of units. So starting now after Krupp's Salty Dog, all Germans will man their ports, of course that is less units on the front lines where the Germans are already hopelessly overmatched.
I also see this operation as zero gamble because the Russians have tons of units to spare. Only Olivier has been successful as the Germans because he has a freakish grasp of the entire combat engine. I think you will find out real soon in your AAR that you are in deep poop being the Germans. Every penetration you make better have TONS of supporting because the Russian armor is within striking distance at all times.
I sure wish air recon extended farther over the sea hex's.
The air can defiantly hurt the soviet navy if you use the correct planes, and knock their readiness down, it might take several attacks to do this, but after the readiness is lower the aa fire will not hurt your planes much, the level bombers are good for opening attack to weaken their readiness and stukas are then safer to go in for the kills.
I do think transports have way too much hit points though, those guys are hard to sink, they are better for defense than combat vessels..
Like vic pointed out though those 2 cities on the neck of the crimea aren't ports. Without holding ports krupps going to find his units out of supply pretty quickly. You really only need a few minor units to protect against it from the start.
Some of the units on the east side still get a little supply, not much but some, on the west I knew supply would be a major issue and I could not last long, I also knew after seeing no units there he could not attack me, so i landed the minimum units to cut the rail the first turn, and landed the rest later, so that they wouldn't be out of supply as long. On the east side I just dumped everyone because i needed those transports back to port for the next landing asap. The men defending the straight only need to hold those straights for three to four turns, and the first one or two they are not even in reach of the attackers being railed in. Once attacked they will loose readiness but should have enough to hold for a small amount of time.
Now my supply lines from the south are opening up, and maybe next turn they will be receiving supply again. If my opponent decided to bomb my port.. not sure if this would spoil my plans, because its already at 100% damage and only 200 going on 400 repaired... But i did manage to wreck an entire wing of bombers. Not sure how many more he has down there. Also not sure but any planes down there ill bet are out of supply as well and cant fly. But regardless the next wave is ready to go ashore i might capture another port anyway, i made a mistake of not bringing an aa gun to the port when i captured it.. just dont have enough aa units as soviets, there is never enough aa, but germans have aa in every unit lol. Combined with my airforce really makes life tough; but I do have the entire soviet airforce flying cap over the harbor. So hopefully that helps. I do think if he had his units right it could be stopped, but its something you would have to expect, probably something a new player wouldnt understand the mechanics of easily, unless you are like me and crazy about these detailed mechanics lol. But it would need units on the neck of the peninsula in disproportionate amounts as compared to elsewhere, i think the west side is the best because it takes my transports alot longer to get there meaning it could be protected from repeat raids.
Turn 6
OK so we connected our supply lines up, need that bridge though i just ran out of ap to get it. next turn supply should be flowing to our forces, stavka assigned me to hold the town on the west side out of nowhere just as i was getting ready to leave too.. Guess those guys are going to either hold it or die.
In the central front, a dangerous panzer spearhead breaks though and we panic and draw back out lines, we launch counter attack on the spearhead but i think my opponent is wising up he is playing defense cards on them now and i got two bloody noses, reserve army had to be committed there; now I may not have enough troops to conduct a fifth naval landing; but i still think i can destroy those German corps at sevestapol no problem. My troops linking up the supply to the north overrun and destroy an entire Romanian division after a battleship barrage, his units in the Crimea are glass cannons now. My only worry is dismissal, rostov and all other objectives will be held to the DEATH, this may endanger some of my units, or even cause the front to break but its necessary.
And here is the most worrying of all. Our casualties. Despite nearly stopping the panzers to a crawl we are paying a heavy price. Our numbers are dropping fast, and the reinforcements are not stemming the bloodloss. meanwhile he is remaining the same. the only area I am even able to make a dent is his tank and halftrack numbers, where I think we are close to getting 800 axis tanks destroyed, and more than 600 halftracks but even so they only lost about 300 tanks from their original numbers and 500 half-tracks putting them at 2700 out of 3200. Everything else is about the same at the start. i would probably be in real trouble except, I know there must be something close to a a hundred thousand men trapped in the Crimea. Once I mop these guys up, I hope to see the casualties skyrocket.
