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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.