Not-So-Limited Overseas Supply

In section 2.4.2, under Overseas Supply Paths, amend the text as follows:

You cannot trace a supply path into a sea area that contains:

  • an enemy CV, SCS or face-up aircraft unit with an air-to-sea factor;
  • unless it also contains a surface naval unit, or face-up aircraft unit with an air-to-sea factor, controlled by any major power or minor country at war with that enemy unit.

In addition, when aircraft voluntarily abort to the sea-box they started from (during naval air combat), turn the aircraft unit face-down.

Rationale

Under RAW, maintaining supply is far too easy if you employ land-based aircraft. Even if the enemy finds your aircraft, you just need to survive one round of air combat and then you can abort back to the sea-box and supply is maintained. The optional rule, Limited-Overseas-Supply, is supposed to remedy this but does it in a very unfortunate way. By making convoys your main source of supply, LOS turns what are strategic units (convoys which carry resources & oil for production) into tactical units (supply carriers). This has a number of negative effects:
- For the Allies, it essentially imposes a convoy "tax" on overseas operations. The CW especially has to maintain a vast network of tiny convoy lines to be able to maintain operations.
- For the Axis, it discourages overseas adventurism in the Med and/or the UK. Because…
- Cutting supply becomes a game of dice. It doesn't matter how much force you defend your supply lines with, if your opponent gets lucky and knocks out a convoy or two (or aborts your Transport), you lose supply. We've seen well-planned invasions of England fail because of a little dice luck that put the Germans out-of-supply despite them building up and deploying a large fleet and a massive air umbrella. Control of the sea-area becomes irrelevant in this game of chance.
- Submarines are suddenly tactical weapons that are effective at cutting supply(!) The convoy-search bonus that submarines get makes them the ideal weapon for this role. When playing the Japanese, I would routinely flood the pacific with submarines to pick at the US supply lines to great effect. Historically, submarines never cut supply to a theater. LOS greatly enhances their effectiveness.

Not-so-limited overseas supply eliminates all these problems and places the emphasis on control of the sea area. If you want to maintain supply using aircraft, you must stay and fight. You can no longer run back to the box to try and maintain supply.

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