Odd Factory Issue

Well, since you brought it up, I'll add my two cents to attack and defense values.

The defend/attack question is always mediated by technological status and type of opponent.

Before machine guns, the attack/defend question can go either way. If you have spammed artillery techs and have lots of artillery brigades, you will benefit from attacking. On the other hand, if you spam the defensive techs (strategic mobility and all that) and are sitting in forts across from your enemy, you can dig-in and stand against them.

But machine guns change everything.

If you are sitting at machine guns, prior to the research of BOTH bolt action rifles and barrels, defense is where its at. Defense values with machine guns are so high that a defensive strategy is almost always in order. (Note that when I say defensive, I mean letting the enemy initiate combat, fighting them defensively, and then overrunning them when they retreat.) The casualties alone will be very painful, even if they barely manage to win a battle here and there. Generals can modify this, of course, but building a 19th century version of the Maginot Line and defending it with machine guns and guards can be worth the time and effort.

However, barrels and bolt action rifles swing the pendulum in the other direction. Even a cursory examination of tank brigades will reveal their absurdly high attack values and lackluster defense values. Coupled with inventions that fire off bolt action rifles (and the tech itself), guards gain some decent attack values again, along with the improvements to artillery. Once you have both techs, you can go on the offensive again and maul enemies, provided you use tank brigades in large quantities, backed up with artillery brigades, in offensives. They are expensive, but well worth it.

One tech that does not swing the defensive/offensive pendulum at all is Gas Attacks. No matter what your situation, gas is so useful that I usually research Military Directionism ASAP in 1900 (make sure you have Organic Chemistry). Gas gives a +3 to die rolls in either attack or defense, making it the single most important tech when fighting countries that do not have it. But you have to assume that GPs will quickly gain immunity to gas, so you cannot factor it in to the discussion in any great way.

There are some exceptions to these rules. When fighting uncivs (except China), you can usually just attack all the time and wipe them out. It is to your advantage to keep pressing an offensive against uncivs because even if you have machine guns, you want to put them to flight and keep them on the run until they are wiped out. If you are fighting China, be prepared to fight at 10:1 odds in some battles. High technology helps, but you really should consider treating China with respect and always playing to your strengths when fighting her just like when you fight GPs. If you are not Japan or the UK, consider annexing something bordering China to act as a staging ground for annexing bits of China rather than conducting amphibious landings. Even machine guns won't necessarily save you from 10:1 odds in battles. (But poison gas will)

Ashantai said:

I have pics! Which should I research next?

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I would recommend: Anti-Rationalism first (easy), as that will increase your research speed. Then get Gas attacks (insanely powerful) and up-to-date with your Military Tactics techs. Then, attack someone

safferli said:

I would recommend: Anti-Rationalism first (easy), as that will increase your research speed. Then get Gas attacks (insanely powerful) and up-to-date with your Military Tactics techs. Then, attack someone

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I must disagree with my esteemed colleague. I would SKIP Anti-Rationalism for the moment and research techs all the way up to Military Directionism to get Gas Attacks ASAP. Then I would research Anti-Rationalism. While Anti-Rationalism will increase research speed, you really need Gas Attacks right now. Philosophy Techs, despite their huge pay off, do take awhile to research. And the techs prior to Military Directionism will be cheap to research, making catching up not to difficult.

After that, I would catch up on tactics. Once you are there, research Semi-automation and Assembly Line to boost output from automobile and airplane factories (Fordism invention), in addition to cattle, grain, and fruit RGO output (Refrigeration).

Beyond that, it you might research all of the next Army Techs once you get to 1919. Then you will have carte blanche to walk all over most powers thanks to higher army techs.

Ashantai said:

So am I right in saying that most of those commerce techs are fairly useless?

So, military techs first. Got it.

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I hate to say it, but Commerce techs are still under powered. In the early game, the tax efficiency techs can come in handy so your government can raise revenue, but you would do better to research industrial techs that make both RGOs and factories more efficient increasing the overall economy.

In the late game, there are a few commerce techs that can come in handy. When the world reaches "Peak Rubber, Timber, and Fruit", you should research both the output efficiency techs and the input efficiency techs. The input efficiency techs will lower the total inputs needed by your factories, letting you stretch critical resources futher, while the output efficiency techs will let all your factories do a little better. These techs do not add as much to the efficiency of your empire as techs like Railroads and Mechanical Production, but once you have all the railroads and industrial techs, the only way to improve efficiency is to research commerce techs.

Because bureaucrats promote too easily, the administration efficiency techs are worthless. And the tax efficiency techs are no big deal if you have any other economic policy besides LF, since all other policies let you raise taxes to 100% (100% on paper at least, modified by efficiency to values like 24% or 30%). Over efficient taxes are a curse under State Capitalism and Planned Economy because there are minimum tax values, and the more efficient your taxes are, the harsher those minimum taxes become.

In my most humble opinion, if Paradox wanted to make commerce techs more useful, they would dump the tax efficiency and admin efficiency techs, along with the factory cost reduction techs. Instead, they would turn them into techs that reduce factory build times, techs that increase the size of the national bank (real fractional reserve banking, with a larger multiplier effect on money supply the higher your tech is), and lower interest rates for taking loans (with a higher interest rate at the start than what we have now). I think these changes would make these techs more attractive and useful at certain points.

Hell, shortening factory build times would make it well worth the time to research, even before fixing what I think is a money supply issue in the middle game with fractional reserve banking.

Ashantai said:

It's true. As you can see I am getting 800 a day simply by increasing my factories.

What do the shared prestige inventions do?

Is it worth me going all the way down to aeronautics to get planes? Or spread things out a bit?

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Shared Prestige inventions are a fast way to generate prestige IF you are the first to grab them. Here's how they work. You research Tech X which has shared prestige invention Y. The first country to fire Invention Y gets 50 prestige (a made up value for the moment). The second country gets 25. And so on, until you get only 1 prestige for firing the invention.

So, if you are a minor power, and you want to jump start prestige, researching techs with shared prestige can more you up in the world much faster than industrialization in the early game. The catch is that, as you have noticed, overall score at the end of the game is more or less dictated by IND and a bit of MIL. Prestige is not that important in the final rankings, although minimal prestige is needed to get critical resources off the WM. Take my advice and leave them alone, unless you need Romanticism as the USA for Manifest Destiny.

As for Aeronautics, since it opens before the other tier 6 army techs, you might as well grab it. Airplane brigades have insanely high recon values, making the occupation of those border provinces with level 5 forts much easier. Some later inventions make airplanes have decent firepower, and airplanes are fast. The catch is that they are automatically destroyed if they are by themselves. If you want to do what I do, add maybe 5 airplane brigades to a stack of 20 tank brigades. Tanks have lousy recon values, but guards and artillery slow down the higher speed of tank brigades (they get faster once some inventions fire). So, you pair them up with airplanes (airplanes have support values not unlike artillery) and you have an early Rommel-esque blitzkrieg force that can run faster than anyone else on the map and still stop and occupy terrain if they really have to.

I also build Occupation Armies with a few guards and a stack of airplanes. I leave these behind to occupy those damn provinces with high level forts, while my main armies press ahead.

Airplane brigades are not too expensive to maintain, and they can soak up some excess airplane production, if you need them to.

Aliasing said:

Both I think it was once profitable but now it just loses money when I subsidies it and when I don't it goes bankrupt.


Same with the factories I gained when I got provinces from France in my Great War

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We really need a lot more information. What factories are in the state, which factories are not profitable, what is going on in terms of trade, what the situation is with inputs, and so on.

There are many reasons why this could be happening.