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misterbean

Fumbling My Way through History
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Oct 18, 2009
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Welcome to my first AAR ever. I decided on a tutorial on how to win the war in Europe (and maybe beyond).
Why Germany? It's the most popular and it's the nation I know best.
Why Semper Fi? I'm just more at ease with SF than FtM.
But first....

A little disclaimer: I am not, nor shall I ever claim to be, the best player on the forum. Some can tell you the exact math needed to gain maximum effect. some are just better strategists than me. But if you are in need of a tutorial, chances are you just want to have fun with it. I hope to provide the basics upon which to build your own campaigns.
 

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Lesson 1: Game Start.

once you reach the starting screen, just click on single player. this will take you to a map of Europe. The top left of the screen will take you to the various starting dates. The default starting date is set at 1st of Januari, 1936 as seen at the top. this is the one we'll play so we have over 3 years to prepare.
On your right are various settings to adjust the game to your preference, mostly to do with handing over parts of the game to the AI. We will be doing everything ourselves so you don't have to touch anything
.
we will play at normal difficulty.
game mode. there are two and both have to do with handling supplies. on "normal", your supplies travel from your capital to various supply depots and your troops in the field. it is vital to protect your supply chain here. (think of it as trains and trucks delivering ammo and food wherever they are needed.) Switching to "Arcade" means everything you need is teleported to where it's needed. It is easier, but that also goes for the AI-run nations. you don't want to play the SU like that unless you want a real challenge.
Since this is a tutorial, we will leave it on normal.
Victory Conditions. you can change these to have an alternate history of sorts or to provide more or less of a challenge. I never bother with them. the only victory condition I need is the one I set for myself. In this case, obviously, it will be winning World War II. Go ahead and look at it. just don't change anything.
Selecting which nation to play can be done in 2 ways: by clicking on the flag of the major nation at the bottom or by travelling the world by holding your mouse at the edges of the screen and clicking on the nation you want. In our case, Germany is right there, in the middle of the screen
. Click it. you will now see a picture of Hitler at the top. click play and we're underway...
 
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Great to see you starting an AAR :D. Germany has always been the nation that I have felt I should be better at than I am, so I will be paying attention!
 
glad to have you along for the ride.
 
Lesson 2: Mapmodes.

Part of leading a nation to world dominance is having all the info right at your fingers. that's where mapmodes come in. see the world map at the bottom? those tabs at the top of it each give you a different view of the land on screen. From left to right they are...
hoi31.png

this is what you see when the actual game starts. It is the terrain map. while it's kind of okay to look at, it doesn't tell us all that much.click on the tab left of the terrain map.
hoi32.png

this is the simplified terrain map. each colour on the screen represents a different terrain type. each provides bonuses and penalties to your troops. they are:

white: plains. just flat terrain. great for mobile forces on the offense. lousy for defense.
light green and dark green: woods and forests. movement is slowed, offense takes a penalty. if you look at the south of Belgium, you'll see the forests of the Ardennes, which gives you an indication why the French never thought Germany could attack through there like they did. there is one even deeper shade of green, which represents jungles. along with marshes, these are among Earth's least hospitable ecosystems. fighting to survive in one of those becomes enough of a challenge all by itself.


sickly blue: Represent marshes and swamps. if you look at the far right of the screenshot, you'll see some of the Pripyat Marshes. if at all possible, stay out, because fighting and moving becomes all but impossible in there. unless you're a marine, who has special bonuses in swamps, jungles and amphibious operations.
brown: hills. rolling foothills that impede movement and combat. often they lead to
grey: mountains. what we think of when we picture the Alps. only mountaineers like fighting in hills and mountains.
purple: urban. a pest to conquer, easy to defend. remember where they are if you need someplace to fall back to for defense.

hoi33d.png

the next mapmode is the political mapmode. the one you'll be staring at most of the time; each nation represented by a different colour.
hoi313.png

the next one is the weather map mode. bad weather will ground your plains and turn your priceless carriers into large bathtubs. extreme weather, such as the Russian mud season, saved the Soviet Union as much as any of Hitler's stupidities. I'm not going to list the modifiers here. the HOI3 Wiki and the nice folks at the forum will help you out better than I could. what matters is that when your planes don't take off, this may help clue you in.

the next one is the diplomatic mapmode. it tells you who your enemies are and who you can trust. since we'll be playing Germany...duh...
hoi34u.png

the following one may be important for a badass conquering nation such as us; I tells you of varying shades of revolt risk. In other words, where do you send your garrisons? this is vital because revolt risk has a detrimental effect on your supply chain and the amount of resources you can loot from conquered enemies...euh...I mean safeguard for civilisation. Green is good, yellow is a rising problem. Red is very bad. I'll tell you how to handle this later on.
hoi35b.png

the next one is in the middle. it is the most difficult one to read and maybe the most important one of all. those green lines all over Germany are your supply chain. All resources, supply and fuel are send from the nation's capital to where they need to go. Green means good. blue means surpluss, other colours are varying shades of bad. mousing over a province will tell you how much supply is at hand locally, how much is needed and how much is send through. A division that is out of supplies cannot attack an anemy province or reinforce to replace casualties. cutting an enemy's supply chain by taking one of the provinces involved is akin to strangling his divisions. sometimes, when faced with powerful, well entrenched forces, knowing where to cut his lifeline makes all the difference.
notice the red and green lines going between East Prussia and Germany mainland? those are your convoys. Red convoys send supplies and fuel to your troops abroad, green ones send faraway resources back to the homeland. when you have the time, just load as the UK. you'll see why the nazi's placed such emphasis on the subs.
hoi36.png

next up is equally important. it is the infrastructure mapmode. it tells you the state of your transportation network. thanks to the autobahnen-program, Germany in 1936 is probably the most advanced nation on Earth in this regard. again, green is good, yellow and red are bad to worse, while black means noone or nothing can pass through there. great way to block an enemy advance. just look at North Africa or Norway. you can only improve this by researching the right tech (which Germany allready has) and then spending some of your industry on it for a couple of months.

when we return, we'll look at the last mapmodes in lesson 3.
 
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Lesson 3: more mapmodes.

hoi37z.png

first up is the one around which the entire war-portion of the game is based. without going into too much details right now, each nation has a percentage of National Unity. Each country has victory points, which are the most important provinces they own or control. you win a war by taking more Victory Points (VP) away from your enemy than he has National Unity (NU). more details will follow in later lessons.

hoi38s.png

This one is the theater mapmode. Germany has 2 theaters: by default they are called the Bitburg theater which handles defense of Western Germany and the Berlin theater, which handles the Eastfront. every nation has at least one of these. think of it as such: Macarthur and Nimitz were in charge of the US pacific theater, while Eisenhower was in charge of the European theater of operation. again, more details in the lesson about Orders of Battle. Why is this important? when you let the AI control your armies (which we won't be since you can't learn anything that way), you have to know whether Magdeburg is part of the western or the eastern armies for stationing freshly build troops.

hoi39.png

Here we have the aerial mapmode. It shows you where your airbases are situated. the ones that are white have at least 1 plane stationed there. important to know where there may be a gap in your aerial defenses, for instance. It also makes it easier to select planes when you also have ground forces in the same, small province.

hoi310.png

like the aerial mapmode, the naval mapmode shows you your naval bases and convoy routes to ease of reference. the blue ones have at least 1 ship based there.

hoi311.png

For completeness' sake, here we have the strength mapmode. not all that big, except when you're positioning your forces prior to invasion and want to make sure you present an unbroken (green) front. as you can see, Germany's armies are scattered all over the place right now. In the lessons about Order of Battle (OOB), I'll teach you have to change this.

hoi312.png

last but not least is the resource map mode, showing you which provinces produce resources, telling you which one to protect from enemy bombing campaigns and which ones to take for yourself to reduce the enemy's capacity for warfare.

That's it for the mapmodes. If all this seems overwhelming at first, don't worry about it. We all felt that way at first. With a little help, you'll feel right at home in no time. And if you have any questions, don't be afraid to ask them. there are no stupid questions. only stupid answers.
See you next time!
 
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Now if someone could point out to me how to create one of those handy dandy indexes and renaming the links involved, I'd be much obliged.
 
Strangely ironic that the would-be teacher is himself in need of a lesson :D

I find that there is something strangely gripping about reading tutorials for games I already know. A good, engaging start!
 
Now if someone could point out to me how to create one of those handy dandy indexes and renaming the links involved, I'd be much obliged.

If you want a set of bullet points, then it's

Code:
[list]

[*][post={your post number}]{Chapter Title 1, 2, 3, etc.}[`/`post]

[*][url={webpage}]{Chapter Title 1, 2, 3, etc.}[`/`url]
[`/`list]

The asterisk tag goes at the front of every entry in the list. I use the post tag rather than the url tag since it takes up less space overall, but I don't know based on how tags are processed if one is better than another. Note that I had to stick marks around the forward slashes in the closer of the tags, otherwise you wouldn't be able to see them.
 
Strangely ironic that the would-be teacher is himself in need of a lesson :D

I find that there is something strangely gripping about reading tutorials for games I already know. A good, engaging start!

what do you mean "would-be"? :D
 
Lesson 4: The Game Screen.

hoi33d.png

click on the political mapmode so that you're looking at the same image I am. (third one from the left, remember from lesson 2?)

the game screen gives you a ton of info all by itself.
at the top of the screen, next to the flag, you have the resources at your disposal.
The first three, energy (coal mostly in those days), metal and rare materials, are the ones that fuel your factories. For every factory, you need 2 points of energy, 1 point of metal and 1/2 of rares.
Crude oil, which is automatically refined into fuel, is next on the list.
the following, with the little factory next to it, is your industrial capacity or IC. The first number, 66, are IC you're not using. the next, 141, is your base amount of IC (the actual factories devoted to military stuff). the final number is your base modified by a number of factors such as minister traits and laws (we'll talk more on this later). this number is used for everything you produce or upgrade. As you can see, with 197 IC, Germany is allready pretty powerful and we'll make her even more powerful once the game starts.
supply is next. this is the amount of supplies currently in Berlin.
Fuel makes the world go round, or at the very least, all the shiny goodies that you will use to conquer as large of a chunk of the world as possible. you get it by refining crude oil, which the game automatically does for you.
money is what you use to pay for all the above. Contrary to HOI2, there is no longer the possibility to exchange, for instance, energy for supplies. In HOI3, you sell the stuff that you have a surpluss of and use the money of those sales to buy stuff you're short of.
next up is Manpower. these are the men who will be filling the uniforms and who will be fighting our wars. Each point represents about 1,000 men. with 826,000 eligible young men ready for duty to the Fatherland, Germany is a long way from ready for war. We'll deal with that shortly.
The little enveloppe stands for diplomacy points. These are used to influence nation in a variety of ways and in making trade deals.
Spies are next. Germany does not really need to send a lot of spies abroad, but doing so will make life a lot easier. more details, as always, will follow.
Dissent. this one is hugely important. it represents the unemployed and disgruntled Germans. As this number rises, people will stop working and our soldiers will worry more about their loved ones back home than about the guy trying to shoot them. keep it at 0 at all times if at all possible.
The last number is our National Unity. Remember when I was talking about VP Provinces earlier? This is the percentage of Victory Points the Allies or Soviets will have to conquer before Germany will surrender.
The rest will be explained later.
Enough dry theory stuff! Time to start this game!
 
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Lesson 5: Production.

Click on the Production tab. This will take you to the production screen. Here you will manage your economy, build stuff and manage any convoys you have.
hoi318.png

The top right of the screen shows you your IC. We have 197 IC. This will be used for our entire economy. Just below the IC are a series of sliders, each with a “need”. To fully use this slider we will have to use this amount of IC.
There are a number of ways to set the sliders. By right-clicking on the “need”, the slider will set itself and lock itself. You can also drag it to where you want it and lock it by right-clicking. Or you can use the “-“ and “+” buttons at either end to fine-tune it.
Upgrades: By researching new things, some of our equipment will become obsolete. Setting this slider will replace our old guns with modern ones. We won’t do that just yet. We’re not going to war for another 3 years and in that time we will get a lot of upgrades. Besides, we need the IC for other, more urgent stuff.
Set this slider to zero and right-click it, locking it in place.
Reinforcements: During war, men will die and will have to be replaced by fresh recruits. That’s what this slider does. Even during peace, some men will retire or leave. Set this slider to 0.75 and lock it by right-clicking the slider. this will take care of most of our needs and we will only have to change it at certain times.
Set supplies to little over 25. We will be selling a lot of these to pay for metals and rares. Buy allowing ourselves a nice surplus to build up, we’re insuring we won’t run out. Lock it in place, just like the other two.
Consumer Goods . this is what we use to keep dissent down and the people happy. Set this at 0.05 over the need to ensure any rounding errors on the computer’s part don’t end costing us dissent. If you’re unsure, look at the screenshot above and follow my lead.
As you probably noticed, the IC we’re not using right now is divided evenly between unlocked sliders. By locking all of the others, all unused IC is going towards production. We’re only building a couple of ships right now, so we now have a nice amount of IC to work with. But we need more. We’re going to build a ton of infantry, tanks, planes and ships, so we really could use more IC than we have right now.

Under the IC sliders, we have our trade routes. Right now, Germany has no trades going with other nations. We will be doing a lot of trades tomorrow and here is where you can keep a close watch on them.
Under that we have our convoys. We have two, right now. One transporting supplies and fuel from Stettin to Koningsberg, the other bringing resources from Koningsberg to Stettin, which will then be transported to Berlin over land.
The big one on the left is where we will build everything we need to (hopefully) win the war. It is divided between army, airforce and navy, with some miscellaneous stuff underneath.

See the little rocket in the middle of that line? Click it.

hoi319.png

This will build a rocket test center, which will be used by our research teams to eventually invent rockets and jet engines. It will cost us 28 IC and take 252 days to finish. We only need one of these, so we can simply click “start production”. As you can see, a rocket test center has been added to our build queu, scheduled to finish sometime in september.
Click on the”industry” tab on the far left of the same list. This will build more factories for us. Each factory adds 1 base IC to our total. They take a year to finish, so we will have to start early on these. See the “serial” and “parallell”? serial means you will build one after the other so that you only have to pay the IC for one at a time. This will take too long. Parallell build means you will build them all at the same time, each of them costing us some IC.
Leave serial at 1 and start a 12 parallell build of factories. Click on “start production”.
We are now building factories and a rocket test center and we still have IC left over.
Leave the production screen by clicking on the “production” tab again or by clicking the large grey “X” in the top right corner.

hoi320.png


hoi321.png


We’re back on the game screen. Zoom in using the Mouse Wheel or the small “+” in the bottom right corner next to the World map and find the province of “Villingen” on the French border. It is the only one on that border that has a division in it. click the province.

hoi322j.png

This is our province card. It shows you all there is to know about the province you selected, including night- or daytime, temperature (it is slightly freezing in Villingen), wind, any and all resources to be had there, terrain type, connections to other provinces and so on. Go ahead and mouse over all of them. Take your time. When you’re ready, look at the lower half of the card. Here we have all the provincial stuff we can build in the production screen. Some are greyed out because we haven’t researched that tech yet (such as radar), or because it is impossible to build there, such as naval bases. Mouse over all of them. When you’re ready, find the Land Fort. Click on it once. You now have a grey bar next to it, meaning we are building a land fort in Villingen.
Close the province card (grey “x” at the top of the card). Do the same for all the provinces south of Villingen that border France.
Go to the production screen. You should now have 5 land forts queued up.
Go back to the game screen and find Wilhelmshaven.

hoi323.png

Click the province to get the province card, just like before. However, this time we will not be building any land forts. Wilhelmshaven is at the North Sea. If we leave it unprotected during war, the Uk will invade Germany in 1939. So we will build a coastal fort instead. We will later man this fort with a garrison once we have build some.
Do the same for Kiel (the province with a naval base just on the far side of Denmark)
Check in the production screen. You should see 2 coastal forts at the bottom of your build queu. If you do, unlock the supplies slider on the right, right-click the production need to set it and lock it, thereby transferring the leftover IC to supplies.
Leave the prduction screen.
Next lesson: leadership, research and spies.
 
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good to see another explanatory AAR.

One idea that may help is that in addition to showing the main screens you start to relate the information to your own plans - I often find at the start with a new game that its understanding cause and effect that really trips me up
 
good point. Thanks for the suggestion. and welcome.
 
Lesson 6: The Masterplan
This can be the hardest thing to do when starting a new game and it is by far the most important. Now that I have my nation, what do I want to do with it?
I plan to lead Germany along a more or less historic path up to and including the invasion of the Soviet Union. Right from the start, you must always keep in mind the end goal: our mortal enemy is the Soviet Union. Everything we do must be for that one final purpose: eliminating the Soviet Union.

What do we need for this?

Firstly, we need IC. Truckloads of it, so that we can build an army capable of smashing anything in its path with lots of armoured and motorised infantry. We will need aerial superiority throughout the campaign.
IC can be build, and we will gain more by speeding up the Austrian Anschluss, and by taking over Chechoslovakia.
At any rate, whatever nation you play, you must always prepare for the unexpected. What if you’re playing the UK and Ireland joins the Axis while half your army is in India and Africa?

So we look beyond our own borders. What do we see?

To the south, we have Italy, who will become our southern neighbour after the Anschluss. We should get them in the Axis to secure our southern front. The same goes for Hungary and Romania. Typically, Bulgaria plays hard to get, but we’ll get them onboard as well.
We will take out Denmark to secure our Northern flank. In this game, anyone who controls Denmark controls access to the Baltic sea.
The Dutch, Belgians and French will have to be subdued before we can start Barbarossa (the invasion of the SU), thereby securing our western flank. We will not invade the Uk because it is gamey, since it is unrealistically easy.Instead, we will keep them busy and off-guard using submarines and bombing raids.

So that is the first outline:
1939: Poland and Denmark.
1940: the Low Countries, France. Maybe Yugoslavia if we have time left.
1941: the Soviet Union.
After the Sviets have surrendered, we will invade Great Brittain.
Can we do this alone? Maybe. But we don’t have to. We will have Italy on our side. They can keep them busy in Africa until we're ready. Japan can keep the Allies in the pacific busy as well as the Americans should it come to that.
See how we come up with a farreaching plan just by asking ourselves: “okay, what now?”
 
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Lesson7: Theory and Practical.

Before we go on, there is one difficult concept to grasp in HOI3. It is big enough to warrant an update all by itself. So take your time and if you have any questions, ask them.
Open the research tab for a moment. At the bottom, there are a whole bunch of green and blue icons. Mousing over them will tell you that the green ones are “theory” and the blue ones are “practical”.
What does this mean?

First, practical. Basically, this means that the more we build the same stuff, the easier it gets. Whenever infantry practical, for instance, goes up, any future infantry divisions we build will get slightly cheaper in terms of IC and will finish slightly faster. Building stuff will also make it easier to research upgrades. Knowing how to build a tank means our behind-the-scenes tech teams will find it easier to come up with a way to incorporate bigger tank guns in tomorrow’s tank.

Secondly, theory. The more we research the same stuff, the higher our theoretical knowledge gets concerning that stuff.
Sounds simple enough, right?

There is one little caveat, though. Leave something alone long enough, and our theoretical knowledge will start to decay. Same for practical.

What does this mean in practice?

We need to choose what we can research and what not. What to build and what not. Germany, with some effort, can research almost everything. But just because we can, doesn’t mean we should. We will have to keep an effort up in those areas that are of importance to us just to keep enhancing our knowledge of these things.

If you’ve read the lesson of masterplan earlier, you noticed I mentioned we will be doing a lot of submarine warfare.

There are 3 arms in the Wehrmacht. Let’s review our plans with each one. This will allow us to maximize our research and building programs.

The Heer.

The German army needs, first and foremost, infantry. We will need over extra 100 infantry divisions, each of them with their own artillery for maximum combat deadliness. Of the ones we have right now, only one is equipped with artillery. We have 36 infantry division. So we will need 35 artillery brigades (I’ll tell you more on brigades when we actually start building any). We will also need tanks and motorised infantry plus we will need security divisions to handle all the land we will conquer.

The Luftwaffe.

Germany used their airforce as mobile artillery, in support of ground forces. There is no need to change this. So we will need modern medium and light bombers as well as at least 24 interceptors by 1939. Preferably more to ensure that enemy airforces don’t spoil our offenses. We will build transports, both to use in airborne operations and to keep our forces in supply deep inside Russia. What we will not build are strategic planes. For an offense-directed nation such as ours, those big 4-engine planes, in-game, are a waste or resources, time and effort.

The Kriegsmarine.

To keep the UK hopping, we will need lots of submarines. they are lost quickly, but by keeping our submarine practical high, we can make them cheap and fast.

So now you know why I started out building factories. The fortressess I started as well, because they finish before the factories and provide “construction practical”, making our factories cheaper and faster.
 
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http://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum...u-play-this-game-!-quot-A-simple-tutorial-AAR

This is the best tutorial I have found on any paradox game. It helped me a lot. Basically HOI was buried somewhere on my HDD - because I didn't knew how to play. But after following that tutorial step by step and then further playing by myself I have learned a lot.

Now I consider myself a decent HOI2:DD player. But HOI3 is something completely new for me.

And Your tutorial reminds of the one I mentioned above by Ironman5. But he went on explaining things in details leaving nothing. There were very few questions on his lessons because he tried to explain everything - except naval warfare.

The thing I like most about his tutorial was his use of green text and white text. White meant something which the player should do, and green was the explanation and reasoning.


So could you please edit (if possible) you posts and format your text.

Other very important thing was that he went with his "walkthrough" in a very historical way.

-He invaded Poland in 1939. After that historically waited then Denmark, then Norway (historically again), then in the spring of 1940 Benelux, France, "bombing of brittain" which was very costly in my game and his. Then Yugoslavia and Greece etc...

He used Submarine fleets - and they did a lot of damage but in HOI2:DD they were cheap and could be produced in large numbers - so replacements were not an issue.

I really like to see a tutorial of such a caliber done by somebody- it will introduce the game to many new players and attract potential customers. The main reason most players are not trying out Hearts of Iron III is because of it's complexity and lack of tutorials and guides.


I will be following your tutorial, but please try to go the historical way, for the sakes of the tutorial purpose- If it was your personal AAR, then it would be okay to invade England, or USA, alternate history etc.. but new players especially me want to see how to conduct the basics. And concepts are best described if there is some parallel given to the historical events that occured. So you building NAVY which is unrealistic with Germany is kinda exploiting the game mechanics.

Nevertheless, whatever path you choose to go I will be following. And will be playing the same as you in hope that I can learn HOI3.

I had already spent 2 hours practicing OOB for smaller countries like Yugoslavia and Romania.

I really want to learn this game cause it has much more depth than hoi-dd and I am looking forward to this tutorial.


good to see another explanatory AAR.

One idea that may help is that in addition to showing the main screens you start to relate the information to your own plans - I often find at the start with a new game that its understanding cause and effect that really trips me up

What other tutorial "explanatory" aars you know of Loki? Please post links or send PM or just say the names.
 
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Now for the questions part:

1. Why did you build only 1 level of forts/coastal defences? And what difference does it make if you build 4

I clicked on the "build coastal defense" button 5 times in Kiel and then went to Production screen and saw the same date of completition and IC requirement as the one in Wilhelmshaven with the addition of +4.

2. Why would we be building artillery brigades on all our infantry? Doesn't that slow them down?

Especially when piercing attacks are made by the tanks - the infantry needs to be fast to close the gaps before the enemy cuts of the tanks.


3. Why when trading - for example with Soviet Union you can buy up to 32 supplies (very likely) but above that it's impossible and with England you can go up to 38?
And why is the same price for different countries on the same amount of supplies (16 supplies for 6 money)?


Thank you for your work and please keep going.
 
There's another good tutorial you can find here: http://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/showthread.php?508595-TutAARial-or-How-I-learned-to-Stop-Fearing-Hearts-of-Iron-3-%28Semper-Fi%29&highlight=tutaarial. The author plays as France instead of Germany, but shows some examples of strategic maneuvers as Germany against the USSR.

In regards to building IC, there are many views on whether to do so or not for Germany. Some players, like misterbean here, build some IC right away and a little each year after the first batch is done so they can build more units at once. Other players, like myself, prefer to build units right away and use the improved practicals to build more later. Both strategies have their benefits and costs. I did the math earlier, and you'd need to build a total of around 170 IC before your input cost (IC invested into making more IC) equals your return (how much IC you get from spending IC to build more). That's because, if you look at the screenshot, with 0 practical in construction 1 unit of new IC costs 4.5 IC, so your initial return is 0.22 IC for every 1 IC spent. After about 170 IC spent you get more IC out of your investment that you paid, which takes about 3 years in-game to do, making this strategy only really useful for the US and USSR IMO since they have longer to prepare. To top that off, look at how long it takes to build 1 unit of new IC with 0 practical. It's almost a year. To compare, infantry costs roughly 3 IC and finish in about 3 to 4 months, so you could either spend 1 year building 3 or 4 new infantry brigades at a total cost of 3 IC (3 per unit) or you could spend 1 year to build 1 new IC at a cost of 4.5, which you can then use the new 1 IC for something else.

So, what it really comes down to is personal preference. Do you want to invest in your economy for about a year so you can build more units than you could have made without the investment, or do you want to instead build more units from the start, with their costs going down after each round of building? The first option lets you do more at once and might be better in the long run, while the second option results in more units earlier. Another thing to consider is the fact that IC costs resources, and Germany gets free annexations later down the road.
 
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tekst has been edited. I know the AAR you speak of. I have it as a Word document on my laptop. You're right. by far the best and most comprehensive tutorial ever. love it.


SLIGHT CHANGE IN PLANS, PEOPLE! BY POPULAR DEMAND THE SUBS ARE BACK IN.
 
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