Turkey canal closed to the black sea

@greyleaf3

Don’t confuse yourself by introducing the term “retreat” to the situation you describe.
The decision to retreat occurs during conduct combat phase (Step 6 of the General Combat Sequence).

Your scenario is at the beginning of the Combat Move Phase - and the “Sea Units Starting in Hostile Sea Zones”-rules (rulebook page 12) apply. So this is about combat movement, not about retreating.

And in this phase sea units can move their full range.

The enemy destroyer of course has no effect on the submarine’s movement here - as the submarine is already there - and does not enter or move through a hostile seazone containing an enemy destroyer.

Thanks P@nther it does help. And Krieghund, I totally misread that part of the book…looking at it now it’s plain as day! I feel like that’s not how it worked (for land or sea) way back in Classic, but maybe I’ve just been playing wrong all these years. I guess I just figured if a unit wanted to live in a territory, it had to risk for it. Thanks again!

Thanks for the answers!

One sub point that Argo didn’t mention is that if you commit the transports to the attack, and the naval battle fails, that the whole surviving group retreats together, with the land units stuck on the transports until the next turn.  This makes them very vulnerable to being destroyed, which makes this type of combined sea/amphibious attack high stakes.

This is also why you have to commit to the battles at the same time; not only does it keep the flow of play clean but it also forces you to analyze all the risks you are taking at the same time.  Reshuffling your unit allocations in other planned battles after the first combats are seen is also a no-no, though in a friendly game it is ok to make some revisions.

Still, since you can choose the order you fight battles in, this can be helpful.  You can see the outcome of 1-2 big battles, and then know whether the smaller battles are worth fighting to the bitter end, whether its more important to take the territory vs just clear it.  You do have to fight at least 1 round of combat for every declared battle, my point is that gaining certain information as to the outcome of one important battle can be instructive of the need to fight other battles to their bitter conclusion or withdraw early.

We fight in this order, not sure if its required in all versions by the letter of the rules, but it can make the game have a cleaner flow…

Declare all combats, unit buy is sealed and cannot be changed after we begin to do;

strategic bombings in any order then sea combats without land element in any order sea combats with a landing in any order land combats in any order don’t do any noncoms zero zilch none until now because it keeps the separation of turns and moved units cleaner I realize its tempting…

lots of teams only have 1-2 combats to declare per turn so focusing on doing all your combats first (and ignoring units that will noncom) is also an easy way to keep your mind focused on one task at a time;  things that fight get committed first and everything else can be contemplated at length after combats are resolved.

Thanks.

“…transporters can not offload after retreating…” thanks that clarifies the situation.

Yep, that’s why both destroyers have to be sunk. If the transports in sz 11 survive its ok, the attack on London is still a go, but in sz 10 you really need to kill the destroyer and the transport (so UK can’t bring the Canadian tank to defend the capital.)

It’s a pretty tall order.

The alternative to all this, is what you might call the “Late game” Sea Lion. Where you try to slowly build up a surface fleet without drawing too much attention, and then drop a bunch of transports all at once, to exploit a weakly defended London. But there is no real consistent strategy for how that can be accomplished, since so much will have changed by the time you get into later rounds.

Don’t think of loading/unloading transports as using the units’ movement point, think of it as part of the transport’s special ability to carry units. A transport may load units up to its capacity, so long as those units have not moved yet during the turn, and may unload any amount of cargo (none, one unit, or both) once per turn (so no split unloading). However, units that have been unloaded are not able to move for the rest of the turn, and you may not load or move a transport after unloading.