Darkest Hour does a better job of letting you delay it or (partially) speed it a long, but which part of the war matters. The game works with probabilities, and you have a high probability of Japan re-igniting the Sino-Japanese war in early/mid-1937 and Germany annexing Austria and demanding land concessions in 1938 and invading Poland in 1939. As a player you have a lot more leeway of when you might decide to start the war than the AI does (you could, hypothetically, declare war on France in 1936 as Germany, for instance).
In other versions of HOI2 there was like a 2% chance that taking Danzig wouldn't event start the war and everyone would just hang out for the next 10 years. Germany's invasion of the Soviet Union is also a bit more flexible.
Unlike AoD and HOI2, Darkest Hour has decisions (and most of Germany's major actions are now dictated by those (they basically function the same as events for the AI)), but I don't think Danzig or War is a decision now.
Are there any barriers besides tech/army level inequities that would prevent someone controlling lets say France from just invading Germany right off the bat?
Germany is dissuaded by the Maginot line which the AI will keep manned; France is dissuaded by being a democracy. Democracies can only declare war if their target has high enough belligerence (Hitler as a leader specifically lowers Germany's belligerence at peace and increases it at war so more and more democratic countries are likely to help the allies over time), and they can only do so with a dissent hit unless their government has gone full hawk lobby.
At the start of the 1933 and 1936 scenarios most countries are also demobilized and don't have the rolling war machines you'd need for a full scale invasion, so there's that, too.
Ostensibly there's nothing stopping a dictatorship from declaring war other than guarantees that many other countries have (i.e. USSR declares war on Romania, Germany guarantees Romania's independence, Germany declares war on USSR (...along with probably Italy and the UK, etc.). And the problems of war itself (like the difficulty of getting resources shipped in).
I don't think the AI is generally set up to declare war of its own volition (it's generally event based, but even HOI2's AI files are basically glorified events), but it will join wars and the AI will seek out suitable alliances for the wars its in.
Neato and seemingly historically accurate though it does seem that you can mightily game the system with the foreknowledge you have over general world events and AI tendencies to stick to the script as it were.
I dunno if they've changed this (I hope they have) but last time I played Darkest Hour only Nazis and Stalinists could declare war on completely non-belligerent nations.
This is our starting situation. China is fractured. We are the yellow blob in the center. To the sides are the minor Chinese nations. In the south is the Guangxi Clique, to the west is Yunnan, in the northwest is the Xebei San Ma, in the north Shanxi and the small red area is Communist China.
Immediately to the northeast is Japan and their puppet Manchukuo. They will become a problem, soon. To the south is the Indochinese Union, a puppet of France, and Siam. Far to the west is the British Raj and to the north of them is Tibet. Which we have cores on. And theyre not a British puppet!
Further out in the north we have Mongolia and Sinkiang which are also cores. And then the USSR of course.
China is very much a case of good news, bad news situation
The good news: we're China. Infinite manpower when we need it. If we can tech up and fully industrialize then we will be nearly unstoppable. We control many of our neighbours as puppets with only Yunan and the traitor Mao not under our control. We start out with a not horrible base IC of 41
The bad news? We're China. Incredibly backward and in a historically losing situation
This is the political screen. We have sliders! Which we can move every two years, but fortuantely a lot of events change them. We are an authoritarian, right-wing closed, free-market? dictatorship. Our population is demobilized, we favour isolation but are prepared to fight.
Some of that is good.
* Authoritarian states get less dissent from declaring war but suffer increased partisan activity in occupied territory.
* The free market orientation makes upgrates and production cheaper, at the cost of higher tech research costs, which is a good trade off for us. Our current ideology doesn't allow us to go full free market, but that's okay.
* We're about to go into WWII so being a Hawk is a definite good - diplomacy costs more but everything else is better.
* Isolationism is bad. It hurts intelligence, makes declaring war expensive and difficult and increases a bunch of costs. We will make an Interventionism move.
* Demobilized is good and bad, but full mobilization is also pretty bad. This can only be changed through mobilization decisions, which I'll cover later on
We start with 25% dissent which affects both our fighting ability and our industry. We basically cant do anything until we get rid of that. Our armaments minister is also pretty terrible and just makes everything worse, so we replace him with a much better guy. I would like to note for extra hilarity that this is the same guy as the Minister of Security who has the trait of "Crooked Kleptocrat" there. I'm not sure what that's about since he's a "Laissez-Faire Capitalist" in the other post (cue joke about them being the same thing).
Here's the real bad news. 1926 infantry. 1918 logistics and supply tech.
Armor is even worse. Not that we have the fuel to run an armored campaign anyway
Industry is much worse
Hilariously the main aircraft branches are fully researched through 1918 yet we don't have any AA
Navy? What Navy?
We have developed down the Soviet school of military thought. I will throw wave after wave of my own men until the target is captured!
Here's the real problem. See those skill numbers and icons? Yeah
HoI2 research is done using a pretty cool system. Let's look at researching 1931 infantry. Each technology is represented by 5 icons and a number for relative difficulty. When researching, each part is researched in sequence and you're done when they're all done. The time to research each piece depends on if the tech team has a matching icon (which halves? the time) and the difference between the team's skill and the difficulty.
Where it gets cool is that the difficulties can be different so you have to pick the best teams to work on them, so each country can have specializations in technology.
However, our best team has a skill 5 and only one specialization - mathematics (asians are good at math, right?) which is of decidedly minimal use. Our second best is von Falkenhausen... and he's not going to be around later on (well maybe, I plan to beat up Japan before that event would remove him so it might not fire). There's one other skill 4 team, chemical engineers basically. Everyone else sucks.
I've turned on a feature of HoI2 that lets you acquire annexed power's tech teams. It's kinda gamey, but otherwise we will be stuck with shit forever. I will be restricting myself to just myself, other China splinter groups teams and certain Japanese teams. And while it's not very realistic that you get all of a conquered nation's tech teams... neither is it that you get none at all, especially with a common culture. Hopefully I won't have to actually use them, but if my spying doesn't yield me much, I have a backup
For our initial techs, we're researching infantry divisions (which you need to do or the Japanese will kill you), our first Land Doctrine, which will give us lots of morale which lets our troops recover from fighting faster, and the next industrial production tech. We get one extra tech slot for every 20 IC, plus one free. We should get a fourth slot soon. We will be trying to keep up with the majors starting at 4+ with better teams, but we can catch up
Production, nothing to see here yet, we're going to be giving the people bread & circuses to get them to calm down for the first few months. The numbers along the top of the screen are: energy, metal, rare materials, oil, supplies and cash. Factories consume 2 units of energy, 1 of metal and 0.5 of rare each day, producing whatever they're assigned to.
After the break are manpower (in thousands), nukes, dissent our transport capacity (which I will get into later) and industrial capacity or IC.
Now, on to the war. For some odd reason I can't actually attack Communist China, no idea why... maybe the infrastructure is too low? Which is a topic for another time! They don't attack us either, so this is a very boring war!
Our allies are nice and often give us techs for free. These don't actually give us the tech, but they do give blueprints that halves? the research time, on top of other bonuses. A few of these occur, fortunately they will help a lot in catching up in the naval department.
In March this event fires (wiki) apparently wildly early. The three options are: peace with Mao and lose some dissent, get a bunch of dissent and keep fighting or get a ton of dissent, peace with Mao and alliances with the rest of China... who are already our puppets anyway and we lose out on an awesome event later on. Apparently screenshots dont work when big decision windows are up! We hedged our bets, playing our cards close to our vest as China is wont to do
Italy annexes Abyssinia which is Ethiopia in other games. They start at war with them, which can be handy to get war bonuses and early experience. It is particularly helpful in 3, but were not playing that!
The Spanish Civil War fires. Go Nationalism!
Infantry completes... and we start the next one. This one will bring us to current tech fortunately, though by the time it finishes we will probably be ready to start the next one
At some point I received about half of the Guangxi Clique... its some extra industry. I have no idea why though. I pretty much just ignore the "We have concluded a deal with X" windows and it was probably one of those - those are usually AI trade deals. The AI maintains imports & exports to run the industry. Ive also told it to stockpile cash, which we need for spying.
Finally, we get our initial 25% dissent down and start producing some troops
Then I realize that a far more pressing issue is our total lack of an airforce so I start producing some fighters. With any luck we should have 3 squadrons ready for the attack with another 2 coming online soon. Upgrades of our land army are well underway. Our 50 divisions can probably hold the line without too much trouble, but giving Japan total air control would be bad.
This is actually a more favourable situation than in most of the other HoIs. We start out with more territory and dont have to directly war with people. Im not entirely sure why they would shift the borders so much between games, but meh.
Matching tech components double research speed; blueprints also double research speed (so effectively halving time...unless you're researching ahead of the historical date).
I should point out that there are events in DH that can increase (...and decrease) tech team skill. There may also be a decision where you can use some of your money to do so (I know there's one you can get a +2.5% research speed bonus similar to what some of the industry techs provide). But the general decisions depend a lot on your government type, and I don't know if Paternal Autocrat gets the IC boosting one or others. Since you're buying down all the dissent you can probably stockpile a bunch of money to see what decisions you get.
Guangxi Clique has an event where they may cede Guangdong to the Nationalists in order to avoid/stop war. It's kind of weird that there's no corollary event for China to acknowledge this (like many other events), but ...free land! As far as I know this just cuts out the middle man of AoD and HOI2's events where Nationalist China offers the peace deal first.
DH modified the map a bit but also (I believe) removed a bunch of mysterious mountains that HOI2 had (southern China...not especially mountainous unless you consider 3000 feet a mountain).
At least in AoD the tech team events are incredibly rare. The increases seem to fire for used teams and the decreases for unused teams in my experience
That is a little late for us yeah. The war starts for us sometime in the next year, well before it does in Europe. This one will contain actual fighting! I dont know if that event is even implemented though. Fortunately once we get our obsolete army up to snuff and get some of these tech backlogs cleared up we should get some options. Assuming Japan doesnt steamroll me because Ive only test played to the start of that war, but not the war itself
I should probably point out that - while I know a bunch of nuances about mechanics and events - I am pretty terrible at playing HOI2. So I can provide exciting information like "DH adds a frontage mechanic that gives you greater diminishing returns on a doomstacks than original HOI2" but I can't necessarily help you defeat Japan other than basic stuff you likely already know (like garrisoning the coast of the Yellow Sea and preparing for their inevitable barrage of aircraft.
Which is why I look forward to seeing the emergence/downfall of China against Japan and ...whoever you decide to side with.
That's basically me in EU3. I know all about combat width and flanking and combined arms bonuses and shock and fire modifiers and which land techs are the most important.
My actual strategy is still always "doomstack, wipe their army, carpet seige"
My friend is working on a roguelike game you can play if you want to. (It has free demo)
That pretty much is the EU3 strategy. Doomstack it up and try to encircle or chase their stacks. There is a bunch of maneuvering tricks though to let you beat superior armies
Anyway, this won't come up for a while yet, but should we go for a carrier fleet, battleship fleet or no capitals and research other stuff more? Note that the carrier fleet is by far the most research intensive. No capitals would have heavy crusiers as our heavy ships, but we could build more of them
I would say, much like China today, that we do not need any bothersome aircraft carrier doctrine. If the enemy dares approach by boat we can send them to the bottom of the Yellow Sea by dropping millions of people pounds of bombs on them to sink their expensive toy boats.
(We probably won't really have to worry about a navy until after WW2 is mostly over anyway; we've got plenty of enemies on land we can worry about without having to waste our precious, terrible research teams working on ships. Unless of course you planned on physically invading Japan. Then it's either going to be 'sink everything with planes and use paradrops' or 'build token fleet to try to take out the Japanese navy'.)
Unless Darkest Hour changed the events a lot they should give you Manchuria (and I think Korea as a puppet) in return for peace if you push them back far enough.
Our land doctrine completes and we switch to catching up on destroyers. We can't actually be given tech blueprints for techs that are not currently researchable and there are a few other techs we can still get blueprints for before... things happen
A month later we start switching out our terrible leaders for... slightly better ones
Consumer goods needed isn't really good, it makes reducing dissent harder, but we still get the same amount of cash and getting rid of these -IC penalties gets us a bit better industry... another minister comes up later so I should have waited on this switch, but oh well
Production tech completes and we start researching fighters, we do need to catch up a bit because we're still badly behind
Our first fighters complete. We have a distinct lack of airports, but we can still cover a large part of the coast.
1936 infantry completes and we start upgrading everything. I start juggling production to make sure we are reinforced and upgraded as much as possible by 1938.
Early 1938, our first research efficiency tech also completes. Not a good choice in the short term, but essential long term. Fighters complete a day later.
Slightly behind schedule, the Anschluss of Austria occurs
Sadly, the Nationlists are not doing so well in the Spanish Civil War
In late May (really, really late) Japan attacks us. This triggers an event to forge the United Front, if it didn't already exist and all the minors are still allies/puppets and not allies/puppets of Japan. Sadly, I can't actually show you because it won't take screenshots (and it doesn't actually run in Steam either so I can't use that), giving options to either inherit our puppets or do nothing. Try to guess which one I picked
This is why it was important to get the blueprints from my puppets - I'm pretty sure you don't inherit technology too
Okay, well that was easy. Compared to AoD, you can get your territory much faster, but that's very, very good because it's rather hard to actually directly attack anyone in DH.
Now, that looks like a lot of troops and territory, and it is. However the troops are about 100% cavalry, militia and garrisons. And they are all very backwards. The very northern stack you can see is immediately attacked and is losing horribly, so it told to retreat.
Some good news is that DH lets you take direct control of allied units, so we have control of the relatively advanced Communist China troops (for now anyway). At the very least they won't mess up my plans.
So what are my plans anyway? Why are my troops where they are, with gaps on the coast and such?
I can't beat Japan in the air, or at sea, I need them to land troops. The three coastal gaps were chosen to give the AI a nice beachhead in case they want to do a naval invasion. It's hard to see from the overview, but each has a surplus of units ready to counterattack any landing. HoI games work on the same ruleset as other Paradox games - if an army has nowhere to retreat it is destroyed, so I'm hoping they will land troops, I can destroy them, rinse and repeat. I'm not sure if they can retreat into transports, that would be unfortunate but I've never tried it myself so who knows.
In this super advanced plan, the red circles are areas where I'm not putting any troops to encourage Japan to invade and the red arrows are expected Japanese advances. The blue line is my defensive line, generally following the rivers - rivers make excellent defensive positions. If all goes as expected, I launch a counterattack in green and cut off a hopefully significant force in low infrastructre, no supply, northern China, starving them out and encircling them.
One particular quirk of the plan: Communist China is in the Japanese zone of advancement. This is quite deliberate. Declaring war in DH is based on something called belligerence. You can only declare war on countries whose belligerence is above a certain threshold, defined by your interventionism - isolationism scale and they are currently at 0. This increases pretty much only by doing belligerent things or espionage, so if I can save all that trouble by having Japan annex them and then taking them back I'll go for it.
Additionally, we get another research slot for getting past 60 IC and start researching production efficiency. The US also sends some assistance - supplies, fuel and a tech team from the Pitman Act. Fighters are set to patrol what we can. The relatively large size of our provinces and our low tech is working against us here - those dark green provinces are literally the only ones we can protect with this squad
What does the IC/resource loadout of your trap provinces look like? Nothing that's going to knock you below 60 IC if the Japanese show up (it does take time to rebuild after you throw them off the mainland)?
The DH people also claim to be working towards making the AI less easy to encircle-I bet they will still take the bait.
While checking this, it seems that you can't actually invade anywhere you like anymore! You need beaches present, so only the top one is actually possible for a landing, which means I only need to defend parts of the coast too. that one has 2 IC, and I'll open up a second one with zero. All my other beaches are provinces I can't lose (mainly my airports) or terrible positions (can't be attacked without crossing lots of rivers)
I'm not sure you lose the slot immediately if you go below though, I've seen it happen before where I only had 19 IC and kept a second slot. It was in AoD though
In just about ever HoI game you can usually entice the AI into an encirclement
While checking this, it seems that you can't actually invade anywhere you like anymore! You need beaches present, so only the top one is actually possible for a landing, which means I only need to defend parts of the coast too. that one has 2 IC, and I'll open up a second one with zero. All my other beaches are provinces I can't lose (mainly my airports) or terrible positions (can't be attacked without crossing lots of rivers)
I'm not sure you lose the slot immediately if you go below though, I've seen it happen before where I only had 19 IC and kept a second slot. It was in AoD though
In just about ever HoI game you can usually entice the AI into an encirclement
You lose the slot once that research team finishes, I believe.
Also, pretty sure even HoI2 had the beaches mechanic. It's what basically let you just use Brittany as an air attack staging area instead of somewhere you had to defend. Other than from airborne.
I think DH changes it from the default HOI2/AoD 'sand bar' into something else.
Yeah, I just play 3 more so I forgot about beaches entirely. Usually the only naval assault I bother with is England and as it happens my usual landing spots didn't change
Combat! It's relatively simple, the opposing forces line up and take turns shooting at each other, doing different amounts of damage. I'm not entirely sure about air or sea combat which are black boxes where units go in and damage comes out, but I do know how land combat works.
There are 5 stats that basically matter: softness, hard attack, soft attack, defensiveness and toughness. Hard attacks target armor and soft attacks target people basically. Infantry are 100% softness and heavier tanks can get down to about 10-20% softness. Since we're dealing with infantry vs infantry in various forms that leaves soft attack, defensiveness and toughness as the relevent stats.
Defensiveness and toughness are the number of attacks the unit can absorb in defence and offence, respectively - defensiveness is useless on the attack and toughness is useless on the defense.
Soft attacks are the number of attacks a unit gets; this is modified by the combat efficiency (offensive only?). The game then rolls a die. There is a (I think) base chance of 20% for each shot to hit, if a unit is defenseless than that is doubled. A unit is defenseless if it has been attacked more times than it's defense stat allows.
As a general rule, the efficiency of the defenders is higher than the attackers (and since defensiveness is usually higher than toughness, the defender often has a substantial advantage)
So, let's look at a few units (soft attack, defensiveness toughness)
Infantry: 14 / 29 / 20
Militia: 12 / 18 / 11
Cavalry: 18 / 28 / 20
Mountain: 13 / 24 / 24
So basically, everything has roughly the same offensive power and defensiveness >= toughness, with specialized units having some more, but militia are much worse at staying in the fight. The compensation here is that militia are cheap and use a tiny amount of supplies. And I have like 100 divisions of them (when they get to the front lines!). They are however very very slow (60% of infantry and 50% of cavalry) and I need to walk them across the country.
Now, stacking lots of militia can be helpful because units choose their targets randomly, so if you have 5 militia vs 3 infantry, you need multiple infantry to target a single militia to get the extra attack bonus
However, the real meat is the combat modifiers - defending in a mountain is good, attacking across a river is bad, being out of supply is very bad, fighting at night is just a straight -90 penalty, combat experience and good leaders are good, etc. It's usually pretty obvious.
The real trick to HoI2 though is the command limit. See those numbers, 8/12 and 5/5, those refer to the ability of the commanders to lead their forces, with a Major General having a limit of 1, Lt. Gen has 3, Generals have 9 and Field Marshals have 12. On defense, all commanders' leader values are added, while on offence, for each attacking province the highest ranking leader leads all forces from that province. Any divisions attacking over that limit get a -75 penalty, which basically means you need roughly a 3:1 ratio to be as effective as if your force was properly commanded (not strictly 4:1 because the extra troops you commit makes enemy attacks less directly useful).
This is where headquarters units come in - they double the command limit for adjacent units, and increase supply efficiency. I probably should have built one earlier, but they're not as useful for defense, and only having one isn't that great, but I do put a pair in the queue for later.
However, we have some problems. The Japanese troops are better led and more experienced, my troops are mostly militia whereas theirs are mostly regular or special troops and their special troops (mountain, marines, etc) have the nice properties of reducing or negating related maluses (hill attack penalty, river crossing penalty, etc).
Japan starts bombing our ports and basically takes out our best port in one attack? In response, I move some interceptors to catch the bombers in the future. They have so many planes that we can't even really make a dent, but we can reduce the frequency of attacks.
Commie China sometimes issues orders to their troops, it looks like I just get shared control, not absolute control. An infantry division goes up and lets me see exactly what they have. That's a HQ unit, militia, infantry, marine, infantry with atrillery and cavalry.
Damn Japan already has battleships and light carriers
Mid-June, my force distribution looks like this. I am attempting to blunt Japan's attack, doing some damage before falling back. Japan is probably attacking with something on the order of 40-60 divisions and I have more moving up, but they will take a while to get to the front lines. I have however made a critical mistake that will cost me later.
The AI takes the bait lands a few divisions - that's 50 manpower of his gone
They take the first province
And continue to push into the heartland. They are not going to go north unfortunately, so I have to plan for a south attack instead - it can still work, it's just not as nice. This is a tenuous situation for the AI, if I can retake some of the northern provinces, I can cut off a significant force
Oops, I had forgotten about that beach site. Fortunately, I have a few stacks that can immediately attack and repulse the landing. These retreat to their ships.
And off to the right, you can see my fuckup. There was a beach site on the peninsula that I left open. Unfortunately, when I moved the troops to the front, I didn't close the landing, so the AI landed a bunch there and I additionally lost my 4th research slot. It's not catastrophic and the important research didn't get dropped (1939 infantry, 1932 fighters) but it is annoying. I just diverted a dozen divisions to clean it out. I have about 70 divisions at the front, with another 30 that should be coming in the next month or 2. Japan probably has 50ish
My plan remains essentially the same, give the AI a gap, let them overcommit and punish them for it. With worse troops, worse leaders, no meaningful air support, shitty terrain and half the production this will go on for a while though
What does your fancy intelligence report say about the Japanese force numbers? (...maybe the ledger would be more useful)
I am hoping for some early Japanese successes to make it a true underdog story that we can publish and sell to the masses... I am certainly not a Japanese spy trying to thwart our efforts by sabotaging our new infantry model research.
Also a very basic overview for people completely unfamiliar with paradox games (or that have only played other ones):
Generally units have 3 important stats for the actual unit cohesion: strength, organization and morale.
Strength [the brown bar] is basically the number of men and decreases combat effectiveness the lower it is (a full-strength division will beat an understrength division all things being equal).
Organization [the green bar] is basically the discipline and training of troops coupled with their current capability as a combat force. Unlike what one may expect, combat usually hits organization and not unit strength (combat usually ends with changes from 100 strength to 95 strength and 100 organization to 30 organization - it's usually a rout and not a slaughter).
Morale is basically the unit's ability to regroup and continue fighting. Morale is what increases organization up to its maximum level.
This is where the fundamental tenets of the land doctrine trees come into play. Although they can favor other things like mechanized infantry production bonuses instead of infantry production bonuses, the main difference between the combat trees is their balance of organization to morale. Germany ends up with high organization, modest morale. The Soviet Union (and by extension China) use human wave tactics, meaning they have relatively low organization but high morale (confusingly enough this basically reverses the way Victoria uses morale and organization).
Taking Operation Barbarossa as an example: German troops are good for an initial massive push because their organization lets them outlast the USSR's frontline units in the first combat push (even despite substantial defensive bonuses). But German troops may stall as they are forced to rest and let organization regain somewhat slowly. During these bouts of combat the USSR troops have lost their organization, but their higher morale means they're back and ready for a fight sooner, meaning more attacking.
Of course, if a unit does get whittled down in strength through combat and bombings and attrition, the unit can be automatically disbanded (or you can spend IC and manpower to reinforce troops over time.
Land combat is somewhat straightforward, since all of the modifiers are basically listed for you (other than the stats like softness for the individual units). The same is true for air combat. Naval combat is slightly different because it also has engagement ranges, which you can indirectly affect with leaders and fleet composition. Basically your only real control after combat has been initiated is to add or subtract troops (send in naval bombers during a fleet engagement, move in tanks during a prolonged land battle, scrambled you beat-up fighters if enemy bombers are coming in, ...retreat, etc.).
Intelligence reports that Japan has a lot of nice shit - 70 infantry divisions and 10 bomber squads and about 10 times our fleet. This is probably wildly inaccurate, but it shouldn't be too off. I'm not sure if it includes their puppet's stuff though - we're definitely fighting Japan + Manchukoku, I'm guessing they're the source of all the un-upgraded troops I'm seeing. Not that I'm complaining about that
Nothing significant happens in July and August, but in September my troops have finally walked across the country and I launch the first of my major assaults
Japan makes more progress on their beachhead, but my reinforcements have also arrived here and you can see my counterattacks being launched
An overview of the current battles with the bar showing who is currently winning - for the first time ever, we're winning everwhere
A few days later Japan retreats
And lands a few more divisions at Sacrifice Point. They get attacked as soon as I notice them
I've made inroads in removing the Japanese beachhead and pushing their troops back. I'm now trying to keep the frontline forces busy while my nothern troops cut off their supplies, but we definitely have more troops on the front than Japan, a good sign
As November starts, my mistake is finally corrected. I should get back up to 60 IC and another tech slot soon. I leave a couple militia to defend the beach and send the rest north
Some more techs complete - I start researching supply and 1938 fighters - we might be able to get to modernize soon! Infantry is being researched ahead of time a bit so it's really slow, but that should cut off a good few months off the completion time from starting it in 1939 and getting a tech edge will be big
Sadly, Japan got a cavalry division past my attacks which pinned my northern forces and they were forced to retreat into my territory again. Sigh, I'm not used to playing in areas where the travel time between provinces is a month or more
Progress! My manpower has taken a fairly large hit... though a lot of that might just be reinforcing my inherited troops, but we may have to start mobilization soonish. I'm not too worried though. Full mobilization gives about 45000 manpower, enough for a good 3500 infantry divisions
Okay, this is super-cool--as a Taiwanese national, and pretty familiar with that historical background, playing nationalist China is definitely going to be interesting. Normally, I hate historical revisionism bullshit that a lot of my countrymen parrot out ("Oh, if only the Japanese hadn't interfered, the civil war wouldn't have been lost.") as a universal fact but is actually played on very much ethnic lines (claiming racism doesn't exist isn't just an American thing), but Iron Hearts is the perfect place for it. Bring it on, and hope that you can keep those foreign dollars flowing (that's one thing IH doesn't seem to express that well in gameplay).
EDIT: OP's comic is great--very great--but it needs more Indian Empire/Britain tearing the absolute shit out of each other.
In the mid 1940s, Britain actually used aerial bombing campaigns in India, the insurrection against British rule had gotten so bad.
I would think that pwning japanese should be pretty doable for human player. Still, it is interesting to see where you are going to expand after this war being over. Take parts of the Union or just India?
Posts
Question: Does WW2 always hit at the same time or can it be accelerated or delayed?
In other versions of HOI2 there was like a 2% chance that taking Danzig wouldn't event start the war and everyone would just hang out for the next 10 years. Germany's invasion of the Soviet Union is also a bit more flexible.
Unlike AoD and HOI2, Darkest Hour has decisions (and most of Germany's major actions are now dictated by those (they basically function the same as events for the AI)), but I don't think Danzig or War is a decision now.
Are there any barriers besides tech/army level inequities that would prevent someone controlling lets say France from just invading Germany right off the bat?
At the start of the 1933 and 1936 scenarios most countries are also demobilized and don't have the rolling war machines you'd need for a full scale invasion, so there's that, too.
Ostensibly there's nothing stopping a dictatorship from declaring war other than guarantees that many other countries have (i.e. USSR declares war on Romania, Germany guarantees Romania's independence, Germany declares war on USSR (...along with probably Italy and the UK, etc.). And the problems of war itself (like the difficulty of getting resources shipped in).
I don't think the AI is generally set up to declare war of its own volition (it's generally event based, but even HOI2's AI files are basically glorified events), but it will join wars and the AI will seek out suitable alliances for the wars its in.
This is our starting situation. China is fractured. We are the yellow blob in the center. To the sides are the minor Chinese nations. In the south is the Guangxi Clique, to the west is Yunnan, in the northwest is the Xebei San Ma, in the north Shanxi and the small red area is Communist China.
Immediately to the northeast is Japan and their puppet Manchukuo. They will become a problem, soon. To the south is the Indochinese Union, a puppet of France, and Siam. Far to the west is the British Raj and to the north of them is Tibet. Which we have cores on. And theyre not a British puppet!
Further out in the north we have Mongolia and Sinkiang which are also cores. And then the USSR of course.
China is very much a case of good news, bad news situation
The good news: we're China. Infinite manpower when we need it. If we can tech up and fully industrialize then we will be nearly unstoppable. We control many of our neighbours as puppets with only Yunan and the traitor Mao not under our control. We start out with a not horrible base IC of 41
The bad news? We're China. Incredibly backward and in a historically losing situation
This is the political screen. We have sliders! Which we can move every two years, but fortuantely a lot of events change them. We are an authoritarian, right-wing closed, free-market? dictatorship. Our population is demobilized, we favour isolation but are prepared to fight.
Some of that is good.
* Authoritarian states get less dissent from declaring war but suffer increased partisan activity in occupied territory.
* The free market orientation makes upgrates and production cheaper, at the cost of higher tech research costs, which is a good trade off for us. Our current ideology doesn't allow us to go full free market, but that's okay.
* We're about to go into WWII so being a Hawk is a definite good - diplomacy costs more but everything else is better.
* Isolationism is bad. It hurts intelligence, makes declaring war expensive and difficult and increases a bunch of costs. We will make an Interventionism move.
* Demobilized is good and bad, but full mobilization is also pretty bad. This can only be changed through mobilization decisions, which I'll cover later on
We start with 25% dissent which affects both our fighting ability and our industry. We basically cant do anything until we get rid of that. Our armaments minister is also pretty terrible and just makes everything worse, so we replace him with a much better guy. I would like to note for extra hilarity that this is the same guy as the Minister of Security who has the trait of "Crooked Kleptocrat" there. I'm not sure what that's about since he's a "Laissez-Faire Capitalist" in the other post (cue joke about them being the same thing).
Here's the real bad news. 1926 infantry. 1918 logistics and supply tech.
Armor is even worse. Not that we have the fuel to run an armored campaign anyway
Industry is much worse
Hilariously the main aircraft branches are fully researched through 1918 yet we don't have any AA
Navy? What Navy?
We have developed down the Soviet school of military thought. I will throw wave after wave of my own men until the target is captured!
Here's the real problem. See those skill numbers and icons? Yeah
HoI2 research is done using a pretty cool system. Let's look at researching 1931 infantry. Each technology is represented by 5 icons and a number for relative difficulty. When researching, each part is researched in sequence and you're done when they're all done. The time to research each piece depends on if the tech team has a matching icon (which halves? the time) and the difference between the team's skill and the difficulty.
Where it gets cool is that the difficulties can be different so you have to pick the best teams to work on them, so each country can have specializations in technology.
However, our best team has a skill 5 and only one specialization - mathematics (asians are good at math, right?) which is of decidedly minimal use. Our second best is von Falkenhausen... and he's not going to be around later on (well maybe, I plan to beat up Japan before that event would remove him so it might not fire). There's one other skill 4 team, chemical engineers basically. Everyone else sucks.
I've turned on a feature of HoI2 that lets you acquire annexed power's tech teams. It's kinda gamey, but otherwise we will be stuck with shit forever. I will be restricting myself to just myself, other China splinter groups teams and certain Japanese teams. And while it's not very realistic that you get all of a conquered nation's tech teams... neither is it that you get none at all, especially with a common culture. Hopefully I won't have to actually use them, but if my spying doesn't yield me much, I have a backup
For our initial techs, we're researching infantry divisions (which you need to do or the Japanese will kill you), our first Land Doctrine, which will give us lots of morale which lets our troops recover from fighting faster, and the next industrial production tech. We get one extra tech slot for every 20 IC, plus one free. We should get a fourth slot soon. We will be trying to keep up with the majors starting at 4+ with better teams, but we can catch up
Production, nothing to see here yet, we're going to be giving the people bread & circuses to get them to calm down for the first few months. The numbers along the top of the screen are: energy, metal, rare materials, oil, supplies and cash. Factories consume 2 units of energy, 1 of metal and 0.5 of rare each day, producing whatever they're assigned to.
After the break are manpower (in thousands), nukes, dissent our transport capacity (which I will get into later) and industrial capacity or IC.
Now, on to the war. For some odd reason I can't actually attack Communist China, no idea why... maybe the infrastructure is too low? Which is a topic for another time! They don't attack us either, so this is a very boring war!
Our allies are nice and often give us techs for free. These don't actually give us the tech, but they do give blueprints that halves? the research time, on top of other bonuses. A few of these occur, fortunately they will help a lot in catching up in the naval department.
In March this event fires (wiki) apparently wildly early. The three options are: peace with Mao and lose some dissent, get a bunch of dissent and keep fighting or get a ton of dissent, peace with Mao and alliances with the rest of China... who are already our puppets anyway and we lose out on an awesome event later on.
Apparently screenshots dont work when big decision windows are up! We hedged our bets, playing our cards close to our vest as China is wont to do
Italy annexes Abyssinia which is Ethiopia in other games. They start at war with them, which can be handy to get war bonuses and early experience. It is particularly helpful in 3, but were not playing that!
The Spanish Civil War fires. Go Nationalism!
Infantry completes... and we start the next one. This one will bring us to current tech fortunately, though by the time it finishes we will probably be ready to start the next one
At some point I received about half of the Guangxi Clique... its some extra industry. I have no idea why though. I pretty much just ignore the "We have concluded a deal with X" windows and it was probably one of those - those are usually AI trade deals. The AI maintains imports & exports to run the industry. Ive also told it to stockpile cash, which we need for spying.
Finally, we get our initial 25% dissent down and start producing some troops
Then I realize that a far more pressing issue is our total lack of an airforce so I start producing some fighters. With any luck we should have 3 squadrons ready for the attack with another 2 coming online soon. Upgrades of our land army are well underway. Our 50 divisions can probably hold the line without too much trouble, but giving Japan total air control would be bad.
This is actually a more favourable situation than in most of the other HoIs. We start out with more territory and dont have to directly war with people. Im not entirely sure why they would shift the borders so much between games, but meh.
I should point out that there are events in DH that can increase (...and decrease) tech team skill. There may also be a decision where you can use some of your money to do so (I know there's one you can get a +2.5% research speed bonus similar to what some of the industry techs provide). But the general decisions depend a lot on your government type, and I don't know if Paternal Autocrat gets the IC boosting one or others. Since you're buying down all the dissent you can probably stockpile a bunch of money to see what decisions you get.
Guangxi Clique has an event where they may cede Guangdong to the Nationalists in order to avoid/stop war. It's kind of weird that there's no corollary event for China to acknowledge this (like many other events), but ...free land! As far as I know this just cuts out the middle man of AoD and HOI2's events where Nationalist China offers the peace deal first.
DH modified the map a bit but also (I believe) removed a bunch of mysterious mountains that HOI2 had (southern China...not especially mountainous unless you consider 3000 feet a mountain).
Which is why I look forward to seeing the emergence/downfall of China against Japan and ...whoever you decide to side with.
My actual strategy is still always "doomstack, wipe their army, carpet seige"
Anyway, this won't come up for a while yet, but should we go for a carrier fleet, battleship fleet or no capitals and research other stuff more? Note that the carrier fleet is by far the most research intensive. No capitals would have heavy crusiers as our heavy ships, but we could build more of them
(We probably won't really have to worry about a navy until after WW2 is mostly over anyway; we've got plenty of enemies on land we can worry about without having to waste our precious, terrible research teams working on ships. Unless of course you planned on physically invading Japan. Then it's either going to be 'sink everything with planes and use paradrops' or 'build token fleet to try to take out the Japanese navy'.)
Just nuke them a bit. Worked for the USA. :P
Our land doctrine completes and we switch to catching up on destroyers. We can't actually be given tech blueprints for techs that are not currently researchable and there are a few other techs we can still get blueprints for before... things happen
A month later we start switching out our terrible leaders for... slightly better ones
Consumer goods needed isn't really good, it makes reducing dissent harder, but we still get the same amount of cash and getting rid of these -IC penalties gets us a bit better industry... another minister comes up later so I should have waited on this switch, but oh well
Production tech completes and we start researching fighters, we do need to catch up a bit because we're still badly behind
Our first fighters complete. We have a distinct lack of airports, but we can still cover a large part of the coast.
1936 infantry completes and we start upgrading everything. I start juggling production to make sure we are reinforced and upgraded as much as possible by 1938.
Early 1938, our first research efficiency tech also completes. Not a good choice in the short term, but essential long term. Fighters complete a day later.
Slightly behind schedule, the Anschluss of Austria occurs
Sadly, the Nationlists are not doing so well in the Spanish Civil War
In late May (really, really late) Japan attacks us. This triggers an event to forge the United Front, if it didn't already exist and all the minors are still allies/puppets and not allies/puppets of Japan. Sadly, I can't actually show you because it won't take screenshots (and it doesn't actually run in Steam either so I can't use that), giving options to either inherit our puppets or do nothing. Try to guess which one I picked
This is why it was important to get the blueprints from my puppets - I'm pretty sure you don't inherit technology too
Okay, well that was easy. Compared to AoD, you can get your territory much faster, but that's very, very good because it's rather hard to actually directly attack anyone in DH.
Now, that looks like a lot of troops and territory, and it is. However the troops are about 100% cavalry, militia and garrisons. And they are all very backwards. The very northern stack you can see is immediately attacked and is losing horribly, so it told to retreat.
Some good news is that DH lets you take direct control of allied units, so we have control of the relatively advanced Communist China troops (for now anyway). At the very least they won't mess up my plans.
So what are my plans anyway? Why are my troops where they are, with gaps on the coast and such?
I can't beat Japan in the air, or at sea, I need them to land troops. The three coastal gaps were chosen to give the AI a nice beachhead in case they want to do a naval invasion. It's hard to see from the overview, but each has a surplus of units ready to counterattack any landing. HoI games work on the same ruleset as other Paradox games - if an army has nowhere to retreat it is destroyed, so I'm hoping they will land troops, I can destroy them, rinse and repeat. I'm not sure if they can retreat into transports, that would be unfortunate but I've never tried it myself so who knows.
In this super advanced plan, the red circles are areas where I'm not putting any troops to encourage Japan to invade and the red arrows are expected Japanese advances. The blue line is my defensive line, generally following the rivers - rivers make excellent defensive positions. If all goes as expected, I launch a counterattack in green and cut off a hopefully significant force in low infrastructre, no supply, northern China, starving them out and encircling them.
One particular quirk of the plan: Communist China is in the Japanese zone of advancement. This is quite deliberate. Declaring war in DH is based on something called belligerence. You can only declare war on countries whose belligerence is above a certain threshold, defined by your interventionism - isolationism scale and they are currently at 0. This increases pretty much only by doing belligerent things or espionage, so if I can save all that trouble by having Japan annex them and then taking them back I'll go for it.
Additionally, we get another research slot for getting past 60 IC and start researching production efficiency. The US also sends some assistance - supplies, fuel and a tech team from the Pitman Act. Fighters are set to patrol what we can. The relatively large size of our provinces and our low tech is working against us here - those dark green provinces are literally the only ones we can protect with this squad
Next time: combat!
Like, obviously compared to HoI3 but even vicky 2 has smaller provinces than that.
I approve.
The DH people also claim to be working towards making the AI less easy to encircle-I bet they will still take the bait.
I'm not sure you lose the slot immediately if you go below though, I've seen it happen before where I only had 19 IC and kept a second slot. It was in AoD though
In just about ever HoI game you can usually entice the AI into an encirclement
You lose the slot once that research team finishes, I believe.
Also, pretty sure even HoI2 had the beaches mechanic. It's what basically let you just use Brittany as an air attack staging area instead of somewhere you had to defend. Other than from airborne.
I think DH changes it from the default HOI2/AoD 'sand bar' into something else.
Steam: Elvenshae // PSN: Elvenshae // WotC: Elvenshae
Wilds of Aladrion: [https://forums.penny-arcade.com/discussion/comment/43159014/#Comment_43159014]Ellandryn[/url]
Combat! It's relatively simple, the opposing forces line up and take turns shooting at each other, doing different amounts of damage. I'm not entirely sure about air or sea combat which are black boxes where units go in and damage comes out, but I do know how land combat works.
There are 5 stats that basically matter: softness, hard attack, soft attack, defensiveness and toughness. Hard attacks target armor and soft attacks target people basically. Infantry are 100% softness and heavier tanks can get down to about 10-20% softness. Since we're dealing with infantry vs infantry in various forms that leaves soft attack, defensiveness and toughness as the relevent stats.
Defensiveness and toughness are the number of attacks the unit can absorb in defence and offence, respectively - defensiveness is useless on the attack and toughness is useless on the defense.
Soft attacks are the number of attacks a unit gets; this is modified by the combat efficiency (offensive only?). The game then rolls a die. There is a (I think) base chance of 20% for each shot to hit, if a unit is defenseless than that is doubled. A unit is defenseless if it has been attacked more times than it's defense stat allows.
As a general rule, the efficiency of the defenders is higher than the attackers (and since defensiveness is usually higher than toughness, the defender often has a substantial advantage)
So, let's look at a few units (soft attack, defensiveness toughness)
Infantry: 14 / 29 / 20
Militia: 12 / 18 / 11
Cavalry: 18 / 28 / 20
Mountain: 13 / 24 / 24
So basically, everything has roughly the same offensive power and defensiveness >= toughness, with specialized units having some more, but militia are much worse at staying in the fight. The compensation here is that militia are cheap and use a tiny amount of supplies. And I have like 100 divisions of them (when they get to the front lines!). They are however very very slow (60% of infantry and 50% of cavalry) and I need to walk them across the country.
Now, stacking lots of militia can be helpful because units choose their targets randomly, so if you have 5 militia vs 3 infantry, you need multiple infantry to target a single militia to get the extra attack bonus
However, the real meat is the combat modifiers - defending in a mountain is good, attacking across a river is bad, being out of supply is very bad, fighting at night is just a straight -90 penalty, combat experience and good leaders are good, etc. It's usually pretty obvious.
The real trick to HoI2 though is the command limit. See those numbers, 8/12 and 5/5, those refer to the ability of the commanders to lead their forces, with a Major General having a limit of 1, Lt. Gen has 3, Generals have 9 and Field Marshals have 12. On defense, all commanders' leader values are added, while on offence, for each attacking province the highest ranking leader leads all forces from that province. Any divisions attacking over that limit get a -75 penalty, which basically means you need roughly a 3:1 ratio to be as effective as if your force was properly commanded (not strictly 4:1 because the extra troops you commit makes enemy attacks less directly useful).
This is where headquarters units come in - they double the command limit for adjacent units, and increase supply efficiency. I probably should have built one earlier, but they're not as useful for defense, and only having one isn't that great, but I do put a pair in the queue for later.
However, we have some problems. The Japanese troops are better led and more experienced, my troops are mostly militia whereas theirs are mostly regular or special troops and their special troops (mountain, marines, etc) have the nice properties of reducing or negating related maluses (hill attack penalty, river crossing penalty, etc).
Japan starts bombing our ports and basically takes out our best port in one attack? In response, I move some interceptors to catch the bombers in the future. They have so many planes that we can't even really make a dent, but we can reduce the frequency of attacks.
Commie China sometimes issues orders to their troops, it looks like I just get shared control, not absolute control. An infantry division goes up and lets me see exactly what they have. That's a HQ unit, militia, infantry, marine, infantry with atrillery and cavalry.
Damn Japan already has battleships and light carriers
Mid-June, my force distribution looks like this. I am attempting to blunt Japan's attack, doing some damage before falling back. Japan is probably attacking with something on the order of 40-60 divisions and I have more moving up, but they will take a while to get to the front lines. I have however made a critical mistake that will cost me later.
The AI takes the bait lands a few divisions - that's 50 manpower of his gone
They take the first province
And continue to push into the heartland. They are not going to go north unfortunately, so I have to plan for a south attack instead - it can still work, it's just not as nice. This is a tenuous situation for the AI, if I can retake some of the northern provinces, I can cut off a significant force
Oops, I had forgotten about that beach site. Fortunately, I have a few stacks that can immediately attack and repulse the landing. These retreat to their ships.
And off to the right, you can see my fuckup. There was a beach site on the peninsula that I left open. Unfortunately, when I moved the troops to the front, I didn't close the landing, so the AI landed a bunch there and I additionally lost my 4th research slot. It's not catastrophic and the important research didn't get dropped (1939 infantry, 1932 fighters) but it is annoying. I just diverted a dozen divisions to clean it out. I have about 70 divisions at the front, with another 30 that should be coming in the next month or 2. Japan probably has 50ish
I am hoping for some early Japanese successes to make it a true underdog story that we can publish and sell to the masses... I am certainly not a Japanese spy trying to thwart our efforts by sabotaging our new infantry model research.
Also a very basic overview for people completely unfamiliar with paradox games (or that have only played other ones):
Generally units have 3 important stats for the actual unit cohesion: strength, organization and morale.
Strength [the brown bar] is basically the number of men and decreases combat effectiveness the lower it is (a full-strength division will beat an understrength division all things being equal).
Organization [the green bar] is basically the discipline and training of troops coupled with their current capability as a combat force. Unlike what one may expect, combat usually hits organization and not unit strength (combat usually ends with changes from 100 strength to 95 strength and 100 organization to 30 organization - it's usually a rout and not a slaughter).
Morale is basically the unit's ability to regroup and continue fighting. Morale is what increases organization up to its maximum level.
This is where the fundamental tenets of the land doctrine trees come into play. Although they can favor other things like mechanized infantry production bonuses instead of infantry production bonuses, the main difference between the combat trees is their balance of organization to morale. Germany ends up with high organization, modest morale. The Soviet Union (and by extension China) use human wave tactics, meaning they have relatively low organization but high morale (confusingly enough this basically reverses the way Victoria uses morale and organization).
Taking Operation Barbarossa as an example: German troops are good for an initial massive push because their organization lets them outlast the USSR's frontline units in the first combat push (even despite substantial defensive bonuses). But German troops may stall as they are forced to rest and let organization regain somewhat slowly. During these bouts of combat the USSR troops have lost their organization, but their higher morale means they're back and ready for a fight sooner, meaning more attacking.
Of course, if a unit does get whittled down in strength through combat and bombings and attrition, the unit can be automatically disbanded (or you can spend IC and manpower to reinforce troops over time.
Land combat is somewhat straightforward, since all of the modifiers are basically listed for you (other than the stats like softness for the individual units). The same is true for air combat. Naval combat is slightly different because it also has engagement ranges, which you can indirectly affect with leaders and fleet composition. Basically your only real control after combat has been initiated is to add or subtract troops (send in naval bombers during a fleet engagement, move in tanks during a prolonged land battle, scrambled you beat-up fighters if enemy bombers are coming in, ...retreat, etc.).
Nothing significant happens in July and August, but in September my troops have finally walked across the country and I launch the first of my major assaults
Japan makes more progress on their beachhead, but my reinforcements have also arrived here and you can see my counterattacks being launched
An overview of the current battles with the bar showing who is currently winning - for the first time ever, we're winning everwhere
A few days later Japan retreats
And lands a few more divisions at Sacrifice Point. They get attacked as soon as I notice them
I've made inroads in removing the Japanese beachhead and pushing their troops back. I'm now trying to keep the frontline forces busy while my nothern troops cut off their supplies, but we definitely have more troops on the front than Japan, a good sign
As November starts, my mistake is finally corrected. I should get back up to 60 IC and another tech slot soon. I leave a couple militia to defend the beach and send the rest north
Some more techs complete - I start researching supply and 1938 fighters - we might be able to get to modernize soon! Infantry is being researched ahead of time a bit so it's really slow, but that should cut off a good few months off the completion time from starting it in 1939 and getting a tech edge will be big
Sadly, Japan got a cavalry division past my attacks which pinned my northern forces and they were forced to retreat into my territory again. Sigh, I'm not used to playing in areas where the travel time between provinces is a month or more
Progress! My manpower has taken a fairly large hit... though a lot of that might just be reinforcing my inherited troops, but we may have to start mobilization soonish. I'm not too worried though. Full mobilization gives about 45000 manpower, enough for a good 3500 infantry divisions
EDIT: OP's comic is great--very great--but it needs more Indian Empire/Britain tearing the absolute shit out of each other.
In the mid 1940s, Britain actually used aerial bombing campaigns in India, the insurrection against British rule had gotten so bad.