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in all this mess nobody bothered to ask OP which version he was playing. As we all know, this, by itself, makes a HUGE difference.
I've played UK, US, SU, France, Japan, Italy. Off-hand games as Cuba, Portugal and mexico.
Common denominators concerning Germany:
getting bogged down in Holland. Needing until oktober 1940 to reach Paris. But I've also seen them go like a bat out of hell.
DoW Norway and not invade. DoW Norway and getting all their transports sunk. most of the time, however, it takes the AI a while to assemble the forces it needs. The main problem seems to be that the GER AI declares on Norway because of a routine in its script and only then seems to realise it is at war with yet another nation in Europe.
I have NEVER (I repeat NEVER) seen Norway or France delay Barbarossa. MP trouble usually means the invasion fails, but that's another story.
I understand OP's rage. Who hasn't rage-quit a game at one point or another? But respect works both ways. There's no need attacking all the forumites because most of us like to focus on the things that DO work.
This is probably not how you meant it, but to me it feels a bit like trolling (sorry if I'm wrong) and in THIS forum such things are heavily frowned upon.
 
^ What that guy said.

Granted, I only have 200+ hours over two games (ITA and GER, specifically). I've tried the FRA games, but never ventured far into it because I'm afraid I'll get frustrated at the fact that FRA is nerfed into the Stone Age.
 
The thing is, almost all of those problems can be easily adressed. RAF going north? Well, that just made the Germans control the air over the channel. Which again means, when coupled with mining, the Royal Navy won't be able to even touch the German naval ships operating in the channel without amazing casualties.

Supply: why would the Germans have troubles supplying the troops after major ports are taken, and the channel secured? It's a few kilometres between the British coast and France. I believe the Germans estimated supply problems only until they captured major ports.

Amphibious experience: The British army in summer-autumn 1940 was nonexistant, only militia was active. I doubt the Germans would have any problems storming the beaches.

and it goes on and on.. To almost every single one of your problem there is a possible solution, as you said. None of them are game-breaking, so to speak. Imo, this pretty much says that the Germans did have a realistic chance at taking Britain, if not probable.

For your reference, the probable source of the other poster's arguments:

Why Operation Sealion Wouldn't Work


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The Second World War has always been a favorite stomping ground of alternate historians, especially the writers of alternate history novels. Probably the most popular single alternate history in the western world is one where the Nazis win the war. In order to accomplish this, the creators of many timelines utilize Operation Sealion, a German plan in 1940 for the invasion of Britain. Unfortunately, what most don't realize is that Sealion was nothing more than a pipe dream - utterly unworkable in any alternate history at all similar to the history we are familiar with. In this essay, I will examine the various reasons why Operation Sealion would not work, and could not be made to work (without _extremely_ large changes) in an alternate timeline. Check out my own Unification timeline for an example of the level of changes necessary for a German invasion of Britain to succeed.

There are both practical and political reasons against the success of Sealion. First, I will deal with the political reasons. Mainly, an invasion of Britain was something that would require a lot of planning well in advance to have a real chance to succeed. Since the main window of opportunity is early in the war, before Britain is too heavily defended, the Germans would have to plan for an invasion of Britain as a serious possibility before they even started the war with Poland in 1939. The problem with this is that Hitler never planned for a long term war with Britain, much less an invasion of it. When he invaded Poland, he seriously did not expect Britain to be willing to engage in a full-scale war over it. He kept hoping for peace throughout the early stages of the war, and after the fall of France, Hitler expected to be able to make a peace treaty with Britain so that he could attack Russia. He actually respected the British Empire, and is not known to have ever seriosly considered conquering it as an end in itself. Even if he changes his mind about this after the war is started, by that time it is too late to make all of the necessary preparations for an invasion. Despite his war with the Western Allies, Hitler's primary goal was always expansion to the East (especially the invasion of Russia), and it would require a serious change to his personality for him to distract himself with long-term war plans focused in the other direction.

The second political concern is that Hitler underestimated Britain and Russia. He knew that focusing his entire war effort on Britain would seriously delay his invasion of Russia, because he could not overwhelm both enemies at once. Russia was both his primary goal, and his most powerful enemy. Britain in 1940, and in 1941 when Hitler invaded Russia, was incapable of significant action against Germany. It had been pushed out of Europe, lost much of its army, its air force was capable of only limited bombing raids against Germany, and it was fighting to retain its possessions in North Africa. The US had not yet joined the war, there was little reason to expect it would do so soon, and Britain alone would not be a threat to Germany's conquests for many years. Hitler fully expected to launch his invasion of Russia, fight there for a couple of years at most, and complete the conquest of his last major land enemy before Britain could do anything against him. Thus even if Hitler had been capable of an invasion of Britain, there is a significant chance that he would choose to attack Russia instead, expecting to win there and deal with the British later. Hitler cannot predict that the US will join the war, and without significant change to his knowledge and thought processes, believes that Russia will be defeated within a couple of years.

The political reasons explain why Hitler did not really want to invade Britain. The practical reasons, however, are even more important - they are why he could not hope to successfully invade Britain even if he wanted to. There are four factors which are either absolutely necessary, or extremely important, to an amphibious invasion, none of which Germany possessed. They are the ability to transport a sufficient invasion force to the landing zone, the ability to supply that force once it has landed, air superiority, and the ability to protect the invasion force and its supply lines from enemy naval attack. Of course you must also possess an army to send across, but Germany had no shortage of armies.

First, the ability to transport an invasion force across the English Channel requires landing craft, and lots of them. Germany had very few, and they were of very poor quality. Plans for Sealion involved using Rhine river barges for transport across the Channel. The problem with these was that they were not designed for use in the ocean, and would swamp if exposed to anything but the very mildest weather (or if a large ship passed close to them at high speed). Even if this were not a problem, there simply were not very many of them. The Germans estimated that they had sufficient craft to ship across an invasion force of at most ten divisions. Ten infantry divisions, because without proper landing craft, heavy weapons such as artillery and tanks could only be transported with extreme difficulty. The "best" scheme the Germans could come up with was shipping across tanks on barges, one to a barge, and having them shoot off the front end of the barge so that they could exit it at the landing zone - a method virtually guaranteed to lead to a high rate of failures of tanks attempting to land.

Without a major addition to their landing craft fleet, which would take a great deal of time to build and would be very obvious to the rest of the world, the Germans could not hope to send across more than ten infantry divisions with almost no heavy weapons in support. A force of this size would be slaughtered by Britain's defenders, which included many divisions of soldiers evacuated from France and equipped as infantry, enough armored forces to outnumber anything the Germans could bring across, tens of thousands of Home Guard militia, and several fully equipped divisions of reinforcements from Canada. In event of an invasion, the British government was fully prepared to use all means at its disposal to stop it, such as poison gas attacks and flooding the English Channel with burning oil. Poison gas could be used by the Germans as well, but they would need time to prepare countermeasures and to use their own gas. The British would gain a short-term advantage by being the ones to introduce gas, and a short-term advantage is all they would need to crush a fledgling invasion attempt.

Various schemes proposed to get around the outnumbered nature of potential German attackers have been proposed, but none would have been workable. Using paratroopers wouldn't work - even if the Germans had not lost most of their paratroopers in the invasion of Crete, and even if their slow, extremely vulnerable transports somehow got past the RAF, Britain was far too large and well-defended for Germany's paratrooper force to make any real difference. They excelled in attacks on pinpoint and isolated targets, such as Eban Emael and Crete, but jumping into a large area with many divisions of infantry and tens of thousands of militiamen, they would be slaughtered before they got a chance to do much of anything. For the Germans to use gas first would not work, because within a short period of time the military forces of both sides would use countermeasures. The main harm of countermeasures is that they slow an army down - of little harm to the British defenders, who can stay in their fortifications, but much more harmful to an invasion force attempting to seize beacheads and take territory. Having the Germans succeed at capturing more, or all, of the British forces evacuated from Dunkirk would also be insufficient. A little-known fact is that after being evacuated from Dunkirk (minus their equipment), most British soldiers were sent right back to France where they fought on until the final pullout. The British lost their heavy equipment at Dunkirk anyway, a fact which can hardly be made worse, and even without the evacuated men the British had more than enough infantrymen to fight off a German invasion. The Germans were physically incapable of shipping across an invasion force even half the size of the one they would need to have any chance of beginning a successful invasion.

Second, the supply situation. Once you have sent across an invasion force, it needs to be resupplied and reinforced before it is pushed back into the sea. An invasion force can't carry enough supplies on the landing craft to last more than a day or two, has few heavy weapons, and is almost certainly outnumbered by the forces the enemy can bring to bear given enough time. It needs extensive shipments of supplies , especially in the first few days, or it will run out and be annihlated. It needs heavy weapons and armor, or it will be crushed as soon as the enemy has enough time to bring the full force of his own heavy weapons to bear, or at best be unable to expand far from the initial beachead. It also needs large amounts of reinforcements, so that the main body of the army can be brought across and change the battle from a fight to gain and maintain a foothold, into an actual conquest.

Germany's ability to do this was, quite simply, very poor. Germany was never much of a seagoing merchant power, and as such it did not have very many freighters. Those it did have did not have the equipment or the space to be able to transport German tanks, a serious handicap. Much of the invasion's continued supply would rest on using the Rhine river barges... the same ones used to transport the initial landing, many of which would likely have been destroyed in that same landing, and which were at any rate both slow and vulnerable to attack and poor weather conditions (you can choose to invade on a pleasant day, but it's just tough if four days later, your supply fleet is decimated by high waves). The supply line of Sealion would be ridiculously inadequate, and would need to be many times larger to be physically capable of transporting enough supplies for a credible invasion. For Germany to build a substantial invasion fleet, or supply fleet, would require time (at least a year), would be very obvious to the rest of the world, and would divert resources from other programs. Germany was generally at the limits of what Hitler could realistically finance for the war at the time, so building more barges and freighters would mean less tanks, less airplanes, or less warships, any of which would hurt some other part of the war effort somewhere else.

The third factor is air superiority, easily the most famous of them all due to the Battle of Britain. Much too famous, since many people falsely assume that German victory in the Battle of Britain is all that would be necessary to permit a successful invasion. I hope that the rest of my essay demonstrates that it is not all that is necessary, but indeed, Germany does need to establish air superiority - preferably even total air supremacy - over the Channel and the invasion beaches for the invasion to work. The problem is that winning the Battle of Britain doesn't allow them to do this. Even if Britain was not consistently outproducing Germany in aircraft, and even if Britain did not have numerous advantages such as fighting on home turf (meaning that they could usually recover pilots who were shot down, while the Germans could not), and the use of Radar to give early warning of German attacks, that would not be good enough. Even if the British did not have the Spitfire fighter (which was not so important at that point in the war, when Hurricanes were much more numerous, shot down many more aicraft, and were considerably cheaper to build and maintain), even if the Germans had continued their program of bombing RAF airbases instead of turning to attack London (which would hurt the RAF more, but not be nearly enough to turn the tide), even if the British leadership had been different and decided to follow the much-inferior "Big Wing" policy of air defense, this wouldn't be enough.

The reason none of this would be enough is because of what the RAF planned to do if it lost the Battle of Britain. Quite simply, they would withdraw all surviving fighter groups to the north of Britain, out of range of German fighters, where they would be essentially invulnerable to attack. They would wait there until the Germans launched an invasion attempt, whereupon they would immediately fly south en masse to attack, denying the Germans air superiority. So due to this quirk of geography and German fighter range, there is basically no way for the Germans to get air superiority over the invasion (without, say, multiplying the size of their air force by many times - which would, again, require great advance planning and mean taking resources from some other part of the war effort), because the British would withdraw enough aircraft to safety to cause serious problems for an invasion. Something often overlooked about the Battle of Britain is that the British had multiple fighter groups, several of which were based to the north, out of range of attack. These were used as places where the pilots could rest, aircraft could be repaired, et cetera. They were at fairly high strength during the Battle, and thus even total annihlation of the aircraft actually in the fight would leave the RAF with plenty of aircraft in reserve for Sealion.

Withdrawing to the north would indeed leave the south of Britain vulnerable to bombing, but bombing was never decisive in the war even when the Allies launched thousand-bomber raids against poorly defended targets in 1944. In 1940 the Luftwaffe bombers, flying unopposed, would cause a good bit of damage and be very annoying, but they would not seriously impair Britain's ability to carry on the war, or to build up its defenses against German invasion. As such, if the bombing campaign continued unopposed before an invasion, it still would not be sufficient to weaken Britain's defenses (or, actually, prevent them from strengthening) to any great extent. Unopposed bombing would thus be of little to no help in preparing the way for a German invasion.

Last, but definitely not least, is the ability to protect the invasion fleet from naval attack. Something that is often sadly ignored in Sealion scenarios (except the ones that the Germans themselves came up with, one of the main reasons Sealion was never more than a pipe dream to them), is that the invasion fleet and its supplies must cross a body of water known as the English Channel. Water is the domain of the Royal Navy, at the time renowned as the most effective fighting force on the oceans. The forces of the Home Fleet, stationed at or near Britain at all times (usually at Scapa Flow naval base, out of range of German air attack), included at least one aircraft carrier, half a dozen to a dozen or so battleships and battlecruisers, and over a hundred smaller vessels such as destroyers, cruisers, and frigates. Dozens of the lighter vessels were stationed around the southern coast of Britain at any given time. In the event of an invasion, the ships already in the south would cause serious damage to an invasion fleet. Even if the invasion came as a complete surprise, within 24 hours the majority of the home fleet would be sitting in the middle of the English Channel, sinking everything that came within sight. They would certainly take losses, from various forms of attack, but this would not have stopped them. With their country about to be invaded, every last ship would be sacrificed if necessary to stop the invasion. It would not be necessary, however, because the Germans hadn't much to throw back at the battleship task forces in the way of its assault.

Most of the German navy was composed of U-boats. Great for commerce raiding, lousy for attacking well defended convoys, especially in 1940. Even lousier for attacking entire fleets of warships. Not to mention the fact that in the English Channel, in an area packed with destroyers and with very little room to manouver, using U-boats would be nothing short of suicide because they would have nowhere to hide. The German surface navy, at its height, never consisted of more than one battleship, a few battlecruisers and "pocket battleships", and ten to twenty lighter vessels. Thus, the Kreigsmarine at the height of its power was outnumbered between 5 to 1 and 10 to 1 by the Home Fleet. Not good odds if you have to not just fight a force of ships, but prevent them from so much as surviving for a day or two in the middle of the English Channel to sink your barges. At the time at which Sealion would have been likely to actually occur, the odds were even worse. The battleship Bismark was not yet finished, and the Germans had just successfully invaded Norway. This "success" left almost all of their fleet either destroyed, or having serious damage repaired. They had a few cruisers and destroyers to throw against the Royal Navy.

The German fleet may thus be entirely discounted from the question of how the Germans could prevent significant elements of the British fleet from sailing into the channel and sinking their invasion's supply line. The U-boats were useless in such a situation, and even if the surface fleet was not temporarily out of service due to Norway, it was not anywhere near large enough. Again we run into the old problem that if it is to be large enough, the building plan has to be started in advance (for capital ships, at least five years in advance!), and will take away substantial resources from the rest of the war effort. Battleships require a lot of steel to build. It doesn't work to postulate that the U-boats will starve Britain into surrender, either. First, it would be very hard to build more - they required precision manufacturing of many components, skilled workers to build them, and skilled officers to crew them. All of these were in quite short supply. Second, Britain is weakest in the later half of 1940, after that it becomes much stronger quite fast, and within a year is so well defended that there is no chance of a successful invasion. The problem is that this leaves only a year between the start of the war, and the time when Britain is supposed to be starved into being weak enough to allow an invasion. Not nearly enough time for a U-boat force of even twice the size and capability of the one the Germans had in 1940. The U-boat force was most effective later in the war, when it had more U-boats, better U-boats, and bases in France from which to easily reach the Atlantic. It must also be pointed out that building more U-boats detracts from the rest of the war effort, will likely lead to increased antisubmarine countermeasures by the British to compensate, and doesn't really help the problem of those battleships sitting in Scapa Flow deciding to sail down and sink the invasion's supply line.

Last but not least, aircraft - also not enough to stop the Royal Navy. The main problem is that they don't have the range to reach Scapa Flow, so they can't actually attack the British ships until they are already well on their way to where they will do the most harm. The Germans didn't have much capability to attack ships, anyway. They had no dedicated naval attack aircraft, no torpedo bombers, and their pilots lacked both training and experience in naval attacks. This was demonstrated in the Norway campaign, when they achieved a very low success rate against outnumbered, unarmed ships. In contrast, a battleship task force with a full screen of cruisers and destroyers has a tremendous number of antiaircraft batteries with all-around coverage, and can deal tremendous punishment to enemy aircraft. In the Pacific war, even when both sides had extensive antiship capabilities, air battles between American and Japanese fleets often lasted for many attacks over a period of days, with hundreds of aircraft being able to sink many major vessels in a task force, but virtually always leaving many survivors. Even a Royal Navy force with no air support at all could survive for the required few days in the channel under attack by an air force much better against ships than the Luftwaffe.

In fact, the Luftwaffe would have been quite bad against ships. Virtually all of its bombers were level bombers, which drop bombs from high altitude against stationary targets to good effect. Ships, however, can manouver so as to make themselves harder to hit - and level bombers thus become poor choices to use against ships even in the hands of expert pilots (only the Japanese had any real success with them in the war). Dive bombers and torpedo bombers are generally more effective. As mentioned previously, Germany had no torpedo bombers and its only dive bomber was the Stuka. The Stuka was the terror of the skies in the 30s, but by 1940 it was considered slow, vulnerable, and short ranged. Stukas would have suffered horrendous loss rates against the intense air defense of capital ship groups with concentrated destroyer screens. It's also worthy to note that, due to their range and speed, they could only make an absolute maximum of three attacks on Royal Navy elements sailing from Scapa Flow before they reached the channel. Realistically, only one or two. Thus the British fleet elements sailing south to stop the invasion would not experience significant air attack until they were already within range of the invasion fleet and its supply lines.

All these factors together should demonstrate that the Germans had no capability whatsoever to conduct a successful invasion of Britain. They lacked the ability to get a sufficient invasion force to Britain, to supply and reinforce it once it arrived, to protect its supply lines from the Royal Navy, and to establish protective air superiority over the invasion. For any Germany at all like the one we are familiar with, establishing air superiority during the invasion and protecting the supply lines from the Royal Navy are effectively impossible. The British can withdraw aircraft out of range of attack until the invasion, meaning that a huge increase in the Luftwaffe would need to occur to be able to establish air superiority despite these RAF reserves. Both a substantially increased German surface navy and a substantially increased Luftwaffe and Luftwaffe naval attack capability would be necessary to defend the invasion fleet against the Royal Navy. The problem with trying to remedy all of these is that they will need to be done at the expense of the army, leaving it much weaker for the invasion of France that has to happen before you can even get to Britain. Since Germany's aims lie on the continent - especially the primary war aim of Russia - Hitler cannot afford to focus on a strategy that favors amphibious invasions. And if he does, this must start well before the invasion is to occur, so that years in advance, it is plain to Britain that Hitler is persuing a strategy that can have no realistic use except in invading Britain.

tl;dr: Sealion? No.
 
Well, I'm on the list of people who have never seen Germany get stuck in Norway. I've seen AI Germany lose tons of manpower fighting in Norway and France, causing a loss in Barbarossa, and I've seen the UK launch a 30 division invasion of Norway that got slaughtered, but I can't say that I've seen the Germans send tons of troops to Norway and then fail to take over. And I've been playing the game since before release and I've seen the AI do some nutty things. (What's that AI Japan? I can't hear you over the sound of AI Nat. China storming Tokyo! You'll need to speak up.)

As for Sealion, even if the AI wasn't bad about garrisoning the home islands, humans can easily make up for Germany's historical deficiencies. 6 wings of NAVs even with 1940 techs can do wonders to jeopardize the RN. A really dedicated human player can build a single CTF (3 CV) by the time the you can expect to begin Sealion and use those up to date CAGs to seriously maul the rustbuckets of the RN (and boy do they have a ton of outdated ships). If I can suppress the RAF, I can even air bridge supplies into southern England via transport aircraft until we capture enough to be semi-self sustaining. I can build more naval transports. And I can make sure that the second wave of divisions ashore are armored units so I can quickly overrun half the country.

Because of how the game is designed, Germany's deficiencies in conducting Sealion are easier to overcome than France's deficiencies in 39. I can research and produce my way out of the problems Germany has in attacking across the Channel, but I have to game things pretty bad as France to have a chance in beating Germany. This isn't a complaint, but it is a recognition that the nerfs on various major powers have varying degrees of workaround available to them. After all, even if the UK doesn't surrender, if I occupy the home islands, Gibraltar, Malta, and the Suez, I don't have to garrison Western Europe hardly at all and can devote more resources to attacking the Soviets. That's gold right there.
 
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Yeah the invasion is worth it, the question is, how to change things to make Seelowe harder for the player but not impossible. Garrisoning the island better would be one of those, and since the AI UK doesn´t send a BEF, neither sends it´s fighters to France, it´s hard to understand why it fails. There was a mod in Arsenal of Democracy that simply put 3 divisions with artilery in every coastal province, but I think it can be done in HOI 3 without using such extreme measures heh.
 
Start small. When the UK AI is capable of garrisoning its homeland properly, then we talk about bigger changes... However, I don't have any experience with 3.06, so maybe sth has changed in that regard.
 
I know for sure that no amount of UK garrisoning will help AI (and it might actually make the process easier, by offering forces piecemeal if they are deployed in major ports). I simply overpower them with navy, air force and specialized land forces invading and paras landing at multiple points. GER is a juggernaut, limited only by resources (can be traded for in advance) and MP (a real limit). In 3.05 UK was let down by AI doing crazy ninja invasions and wasting away all forces - had those forces been available for UK defence, they might have offered a fight. How AI will do in 3.06 remains to be seen.
 
Yeah an AI that knows who the player is in SP is the logical next step and something we have been talking about

With the current engine, wouldn't that mean that you'd have to script different AI scripts and the AI chooses which it does use, depending on which nation the player chooses?
 
With the current engine, wouldn't that mean that you'd have to script different AI scripts and the AI chooses which it does use, depending on which nation the player chooses?
It can still be the same LUA file. All that is required is some shifting in production and research priorities. For example, there is no reason for the French AI to invest in the navy if the player is playing Germany, because that investment will be wasted and France is already weak enough...
 
I've posted before on a possible game breaking bug, but I wasn't sure how to send my save game over to paradox. I think i tried sending it via their contact us general enquiry email.

Anyways, i'll repost what I think I know.

Playing a US game, I was sending a couple of Marines over to the Philippines to help stem the Japanese invasion. I managed to catch the Japs in an unusual lock. The Japanese were landing their troops North of the Philippines Island, a small level 3 or 4 port I believe.

What happens is that after the initial invasion, of 3 to 4 divisions, if you can hold the AI and force a stalemate, the AI will continually pump units to the invasion area. Essentially flooding the Area with Troops. Since the Port cannot manage that number of troops AND the AI never withdraws it's troops, the AI will keep sending Troops each of them carrying their 30 days.

After the 30 days and whatever trickle Supply they get, whatever divisions there will keep stacking up in low infra Jungle terrain. They'll take both Out of Supply and Attrition losses. Essentially if you can hold the first initial onslaught you can murder the entire Japanese Army. I was up to 20+ divisions or about 60 to 80 Brigades worth of troops and counting before I left the game rather disgusted. ( I had 1 Corps of 5 Marine Divisions and 3 Infantry Divisions holding the Japanese. In fact the more troops you start piling up there, the more threat you generate, forcing the Japanese to keep sending more troops).

In some ways all the descriptions of the problem in Norway fits this. An inordinate amount of troops that keeps piling up and not going anywhere.
 
That would be a great solution to balance issues. Could I also suggest you think about archetyped AI's as well? Instead of having 1 main AI, have various AI's with different themes to them and have them randomly deployed to each new game so that each game you dont always face the same boring AI strategies.
It is almost there, save for ability to upgrade and reorganise.

Many WWII games face this problem. IMO as long as the importance of hinsight remains significant, proper AI-vs-player balance will never be achieved.
AI using hindsight?
 
Same thing as the UK if you take Sicily before Barbarossa, Germany sent nearly 200 brigades to the toe of Italy and just sat there with a few attempts at attacks and didnt start the invasion of Russia.
I withdrew to Africa (to see what they would do) and they send them all to the eastern front to start the invasion.
 
AI using hindsight?

an AI using perfect hindsight would end the war in 1939 when everyone in europe and russia falls on germany like a pack of wolves and obliterate them in the name of future peace. in fact there are quite a bit of AI safeguards in place to stop this as there is no real reason all allied AIs shouldnt do a naval invasion the moment germany fights france to delay them until russia can attack from behind. a russian AI with hindsight also would never agree to the MR pact, or at least not honor it. US also would enter the allies in 39 and ignore the pacific completely until germany is beaten.

you guys really wouldnt like it tbh.
 
Half of these things shouldn't really be possible and the efficiency of other half is open to debate. M-R Pact can be beneficial for the SU, suicide AI invasions can be repelled rather easily, the Commonwealth countries would never leave their homeland undefended (this concerns the British Raj as well) and the USA joining the war for no reason in 1939 is historical nonsense, as the isolationistic sentiment was simply too strong.
 
Half of these things shouldn't really be possible and the efficiency of other half is open to debate. M-R Pact can be beneficial for the SU, suicide AI invasions can be repelled rather easily, the Commonwealth countries would never leave their homeland undefended (this concerns the British Raj as well) and the USA joining the war for no reason in 1939 is historical nonsense, as the isolationistic sentiment was simply too strong.

yes, but we are talking about an AI with perfect hindsight. I'm sure the american population would back a preemptive war when their leader from the future showed them pictures of Perl Harbor and Auschwitz.

ps. I'm just being silly here.

for example, the production AI for several countries is made bad by design. A russian AI that starts early to produce a strong defensive army with the goal of fighting germany would completely repel a barbarossa scenario. So basically, unless germany was played by a player (and even then its dubious) you would never get a historical war if the AI knew about future backstabbing etc.
 
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Solution for all these problems could be creating AI that'd produce units it needs rather than forcing specific builds on it. For example - AI of certain countries should focus on its surrounding areas and create armies depending on the types of terrain in its own and neighboring countries. Island-like countries (United Kingdoms, Japan) would then produce more fleets (with transports), infantry and aircrafts while land based armies (France, U.S.R.R. or Germany) would focus on tanks as Europe is more fitting area for tank units (large patches of open ground). Strategy should come naturally. Another problem is that AI doesn't calculate for invasions: there should be an invasion system (for example: specific places where landings are possible) that would be taken into consideration as "possible enemy border". It'd also help to draw a line for an AI what should be defended, because it likes to stay as close to border as possible while sometimes it's often smarter to give up some low-priority ground and don't risk encirclement.
 
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yes, but we are talking about an AI with perfect hindsight. I'm sure the american population would back a preemptive war when their leader from the future showed them pictures of Perl Harbor and Auschwitz.

ps. I'm just being silly here.

for example, the production AI for several countries is made bad by design. A russian AI that starts early to produce a strong defensive army with the goal of fighting germany would completely repel a barbarossa scenario. So basically, unless germany was played by a player (and even then its dubious) you would never get a historical war if the AI knew about future backstabbing etc.
ORLY?
USSR basically has far less LS, less IC, and Less MP gain than Germany that won in Europe.
Especially, if Germany is smart enough to use it`s double LS advantage to tech-rush, which the AI is perfectly capable of with addition of about 1 line to current LUAs.

Not to mention, AI SU is not programmed to replenish lost troops fast(drop training laws down, build Militia, and other cheap and fast to produce units), and attempt to stabilise the line, so if Germany get`s the ball rolling, SU is dead.