Useless shipping!!!

[Roark]

Whoo hoo!!

[EatYerGreens]

So it wasn't so much enemy blockades causing the problem then, just plain old gaps in the chain?

I have a Byz campaign going myself, currently 'on-hold' while I have a go at the HRE.

It took me a while to notice this but, when my fleet was still small and I wanted to link up Antioch and Egypt with Venice (the only receiving ports available to me then were Venice, one Papal port and Moldavia, in Polish hands), I finally spotted that there is a very subtle join between the Sea of Crete and the area surrounding Cyprus, bypassing Rhodes. In every prior game, I thought a ship in Dodecanese Sea was compulsory.

For a while, as new ships got built (at Crete) I could extend my shipping range one step further into the western Med without wasting a ship at Rhodes, unless I needed to move troops in or out of the island.

The only visible penalty was a hefty dip in population loyalty on Rhodes, every time they lost their connection to the rest of the empire.