Fighters responding adjacently to amphibious assault invasion fleets

[Yoper]

Last night the German player had an instance where the UK player was amphibiously assaulting Belgium.  Instead of responding to the actual land battle in Belgium with his fighter, he would have like to have gone after the transports that was a part of the invasion fleet.  (He had one fighter and one infantry in Belgium versus six incoming UK infantry with naval support shots.)

The thinking being that he would have rather killed the infantry while they were still on the boats instead of dealing with them after they have unloaded into the land territory.

He was unable to go after the fleet because there was no naval battle in the sea zone.  He was not defensively responding to a battle in that sea zone.

While I understand the reasoning of the prior point from the present rules standpoint, I also agree with his assessment of the situation and agree with his wanting to attempt to disrupt the invasion through the use of his air against the naval units.

You might want to review this situation and think about allowing air units to do this kind of defensive response.

Craig

[Mark]

This is a difficult one.  We have had the occasion happen when the Axis had a sub or a transport in the sea zone and the Allies invaded the coast without attacking the transport and the sub - so the Axis could not fly defensive air support into the sea zone either - bacause there was no battle, even though they had naval units there.

One of the problems is that the attacker moves his air units first, and then the defender reacts.  If we allowed sea zones to get nailed, the attacker would have to split his air forces up to cover both his navy and the land battle - allowing the defender to choose afterwards what to defend.

We could invent a rule that says in this instance the attacking planes support both battles - but what happens when there is a 'real' naval engagement going on before the amphib? It could open a can of worms more difficult than what we have now.

I think the way the rules are now deals with this situation in a consistent pattern with the rest of the air rules - but if you can think of a good way to address it - I would be happy to add it into the optional rules - because it has been brought up time to time by others.

[qxxx]

that is what happend in the war - the fighters covered the navy or assisted in the amphib.  the defender only gets to choose one defensive action and the navy is in his adjacent sea zone, he decides whether to attack the navy or wait to attack the first round of ground units. One way to help this --
Normally air units can not be destroyed by ground troops and will be used to possibly destroy as many units as possible, knowing they can't be destroyed; however I have toyed with the idea of - if you attack with it or defend with it, it has the possibilitiy of being destroyed. Example - the attacker has 3 inf and 3 aircraft, the defender has 2 inf and 2 aircraft - the air to air both whif and move to the battle board - the attacker or defender rolls more hits than the number of infantry, the excess hits are applied to the air -makes players think about using the air              ken