A Brief Exposition on Combined Arms Militia
The Official Motto of the Red Army’s Elite Combined Arms Militia:
“Be right there!”
Given the savings in leadership for using MIL, and given that any division can enjoy the CA bonus if it has the right composition, I decided to test the value of using MIL as a meat shield in divisions that are combined arms. MIL would be the cheapest meatshield for expensive support brigades in terms of leadership, IC, and even manpower. But would it really work?
I. What units to use?
MIL benefits from technologies that reduce width. It also benefits from a technology that reduces the stacking penalty a bit. With 2xMIL, a division would have a width of 1. You could stack up to 10 divisions in a province for an attack or defense (one province attack direction), although even with the reduction in stacking penalties, they are still pretty severe at that point. Thus, you could hypothetically build a 1xMIL division with 3 support brigades, but it would be pointless because you cannot take full advantage of a division with only 0.5 width because the stacking penalties for getting enough divisions in the province to meet the maximum width are ridiculous.
You could avoid the research for reduced MIL width, but there are advantages to stacking more than 5 divisions in an attack, even if you don't put in enough to get to the width limit. And since you are researching a bunch of other MIL techs anyway, the cost is negligible.
2xMIL appears to be the optimum if you are looking for support brigades. But which ones? To get the CA bonus, you need either 2xTD or 2xSHARM.
TD is available to the Soviets in 36, but SHARM is a long ways away. In preparation for war, I chose to utilize 2xMIL/2xTD as a combined arms formation (64% softness).
There might be other ways to get the CA bonus, but TDs and SHARM will add some HA to the formation. Remember that MIL has terrible HA, even when upgraded properly. There’s no point in using MIL as a meatshield if tanks will simply push them aside because of their inability to inflict any damage on armored units.
II. Build up to war
Ran my standard set up for 36 and 37. Build IC until late 37, trade for supplies, raise threat on Finland, Romania, and Poland, and make sure to research required techs. No leadership is spent on officers or influence. No IC spent upgrades or reinforcement. Once I get new divisions built, I will just delete the old INF; I need to keep them until I conquer Finland, Romania, and Poland.
In January of 37, enact the Great Purge.
In 38, I start a construction program consisting only of 2xMIL, 2xTD. By 38, TDs and MIL have decent techs by now, so I don’t have to worry quite as much about improving their tech. MIL uses militia practical, and TDs utilize artillery practical. This means that the techs TDs use from armored tech line are harder to research than the firepower upgrades, but that’s ok. We’ll get armor practical later in life.
In April 38, puppet Finland.
In late 38, puppet Romania. Then annex Poland.
In 39, Germany will still offer the MR pact despite Poland being annexed. :wacko: Poland will reappear in Ostrava. I accept the MR pact.
By 1940, we have deleted all of the INF and replaced the divisions with the new divisions. We are past the Great Army point.
By August of 1940, it is time to upgrade units. The upgrade cost of these new divisions is very expensive in terms of IC, mainly because the TDs need a lot of upgrades. Production winds down as upgrades take priority.
By August of 1940, we have the ability to build HARM. All CAV and LARM begin to be upgraded to HARM. We have several divisions with HARM in them for use in situations that require heavy firepower.
The Germans declare war in November of 1941. By the time they do it, every single province facing Germany has a minimum of 3 divisions. There are 7 stacks of 5 divisions stationed as strategic reserves in various places. Bear in mind, the Germans own Konigsberg and I own Danzig, so the front is very long, and it includes Slovakia and Hungary.
IV. The War.
Within two months, we have already eliminated the Konigsberg pocket.
By February, we have taken Berlin.
Within a few months, we have taken most of German’s IC and have puppeted Hungary. There is no real way for Germany to recover at this point and I end the game.
Bear in mind that because I screwed up my production in 1940, the Soviet airforce barely exists. The Germans have total air supremacy even as I slowly push them. With that in mind, combined arms militia seems to have strategic value. We won the war, so it’s not like there is a serious flaw in the unit.
V. Performance analysis
Building MIL/TD divisions takes more time than you might expect. The TDs lengthen the time taken to build the division, and TDs themselves are not cheap. However, there are only two practicals at play: militia and artillery. Even without building a single reserve division, I was easily able to build a huge army using this unit. However, since the building times are more lengthy than just regular MIL, you have to plan ahead a bit more than you might otherwise. Plain MIL builds so quickly that you can spam them in a pinch; you can’t expect the same kind of build process when building combined arms militia.
When utilizing the Combined Arms Warfare doctrine, having an army entirely composed of CA units, even when their initial values are not that great, is very powerful. Every division starts at +30% efficiency before we even talk about terrain, leaders, or weather. Combining the CA bonus with MIL divisions that have low widths and low costs resulted in units that never fight alone or even in pairs. Almost all combats involve at least 6 divisions, sometimes more. There are stacking penalties, but the CA bonus makes up for them up to the point where you run out of width. If you really want to stack firepower in a province, the CA bonus lets you get away with it far more than you might otherwise expect. The CA bonus meshes well with militia doctrines, even if you have to research something from Superior Firepower in order to maximize the benefit.
In other words, lowering the width of militia divisions actually works best in a CA environment.
In combat, my divisions were by and large victorious. Since the division contains TDs, it suffers from the same problems any armored unit would have with terrain. In a setting where you would be having a wide variety of units, you have to treat MIL/TD like it is an armored unit. Attacking across rivers is generally pointless. Attacking into mountains is pointless. In open terrain, however, it owns anything the AI has.
While the division does not enjoy as much SA when compared to INF/ARTY, it has plenty of HA, making up for MILs pathetic HA. Armored units cannot push aside this division like they can MIL by itself. As for SA, individually the division lacks enough SA, but you can stack plenty of firepower in a single combat thanks to doctrines in order to overwhelm INF/ARTY divisions. Furthermore, INF/ARTY divisions emphasize soft attacks, which are not quite as useful against a 65% soft unit as they would be against a division of MIL.
Divisions utilizing MIL have less overall ORG, even when the officer ratio is at 140%. Furthermore, MIL has less morale, slowing the regeneration of ORG. In extended combats, rotating divisions is more important with a MIL based army than an INF based army. Since you have more divisions at work, this is just a question of the player managing units. Also, the cost in officers for the amount of ORG each kind of unit has means that MIL is much more efficient in leadership than it may appear. A MIL brigade with 1942 techs has 30 ORG for 10 officers while an INF brigade has 55 ORG for 100 officers.
Utilizing 1942 techs, the MIL division generates over 5 times as much ORG per officer than INF, but individual INF divisions can outlast individual MIL in extended combats.
However, the lower ORG of MIL based divisions is where doctrines and MIL don’t mix as well. The AD doctrine is in the Human Wave category, which might indicate that it should work very well with MIL units; however, MIL/TD divisions burn through their ORG faster than INF, so AD is not as big a deal once you get past a 96 hour reduction in AD.
MIL/TD divisions require rotation to be useful anyway thanks to lower ORG, so there is no point trying to lower AD too far.
But if lower ORG requires a rethinking of AD, there is a fundamental issue that requires even more consideration. MIL/TD divisions are VERY slow. On the plus side, there is no point in researching medium tank engines past whatever point you need for other units. You can also load up on all the armor you want for the TDs, confident that speed reductions are nothing to worry about. Yet, the low speed of these divisions carries with it a host of unpleasant consequences. First, they can’t advance into enemy territory with any real speed. Forget about taking any important terrain quickly. You can defeat enemy divisions and they will be replaced by other divisions before you can enter the province. On defense, MIL/TD divisions have a hard time responding tactically to concerted enemy attacks. Even when a MIL/TD is one province away from a stack that needs assistance, you have to SR to get there in a reasonable amount of time. And if some of your divisions get cut off for whatever reason, you can forget rescuing them if you don’t have something fast.
The slow speed of MIL makes it unsuitable for any kind of mobile campaign; if you want speed, you cannot make significant use of MIL, even to react tactically to counter attacks.
None of these issues are too surprising. There was, however, one recurring issue that surprised me. MIL is cheap in terms of IC, manpower, and leadership. It is so cheap that if you look at the screenshots, you will see that I have more manpower than I could ever possibly use. TDs themselves use less manpower than INF, so I will never run out of manpower utilizing MIL in this way. However, for the entire length of the war, I was spending at least 30 IC, and never less than 20 IC a day on reinforcements. Normally, reinforcement costs go up and down during a war. When a major offensive ends, costs shoot up until I get everything repaired, and then they go back down. But with MIL/TD divisions, the cost just kept creeping up. I was mystified as to how cheap MIL could cost so much to repair. But the truth was revealed when I examined the stats of the division. Look at them again.
The toughness of the division is really low. While toughness rates vary by tech, INF has about 5 times as much toughness at 1942 tech levels compared to MIL. But toughness is dealt with at the division level, not brigade level. The TDs add some toughness, but the overall division has substantial deficits in this area. This would not be a big deal if the division was solely composed of MIL; MIL is cheap. But the TDs, even with 50% artillery practical, are very expensive. The division’s lower toughness means that every time this division attacks, it takes much more damage. The manpower cost is negligible; the Germans will never bleed me white because both MIL and TDs utilize very little manpower. But the IC cost gets expensive because I am paying to repair the TDs.
Because losses apply to the entire division, and because the entire division shares toughness, MIL is poor meatshield for the TDs when the division attacks. The MIL itself takes little effort to repair, but the TDs equally share in all damage, raising the cost of repairs substantially.
This deficiency in terms of toughness is not a deal breaker, but it raises some serious questions for long-term warfare. I overran the Germans without too much effort, so the war did not last too long. But if the war dragged on for years, we might ask ourselves whether sustained offensive operations become IC inefficient due to reinforcement costs. MIL by themselves are not really that great at offense, but they don’t cover their support brigades on offense very well either. In a situation where IC might be harder to come by, stacking MIL with expensive units might be a losing strategy in terms of repairing the support brigades, unless you primarily put such divisions on defensive duties.
VI. Final Thoughts
The leadership savings of MIL versus INF are substantial. While MIL has lower firepower in all regards compared to INF, the leadership savings means you can have more MIL than INF. In most ways, you can make up for MIL’s deficiencies by just making more. However, there two areas where more MIL do not make up these deficiencies: toughness and speed. The lack of toughness means that support brigades are going to get hurt a lot more on offense, resulting in more IC spent in reinforcements. In terms of speed, there is no way to make up for this deficiency at all. It might not seem like much, but a 25% slower speed is a big deal in many circumstances. Even utilizing other fast units, the slowness of an army based largely on MIL means that your enemies can outmaneuver you without much effort. The AI is easy to deal with, but against a human player who is serious about maneuvering, you would face some difficulties doing anything other than slogging forward.
MIL’s lack of HA is irrelevant on most cases. If you think you need MIL to fight against armor of any kind, just attach AT/TD. Researching anti-tank weapons for MIL is pointless; I researched it just for completeness in my game, but considering unit composition and the pathetic HA from that tech, it was a waste of research (we might ask why their HA is so low, since you are equipping troops with weapons similar to INF, but the combat performance is so radically different).
MIL does not consume that much manpower. I had a number of battles where I suffered 50,000 or more casualties, but the manpower cost was never significant. Players should never think of MIL as a manpower-intensive unit. MIL divisions with support brigades use even less manpower. If you spam MIL based divisions with support brigades, manpower won’t be an issue (but reinforcement costs might be).
In conclusion, CA MIL divisions have some real advantages. The CA bonus helps mitigate the stacking penalty even more than doctrines will, resulting in more firepower you can apply per battle due to reduced widths. The cost in terms of manpower is negligible, the cost in terms of IC is meh once artillery practicals are in play for the TDs, and the cost in terms of leadership is attractive. However, the offensive potential for this type of unit requires a trade off in terms of speed and reinforcement cost, coupled with the poor terrain bonuses inherent in any divisions utilizing TDs. Instead of using such units on large scale offensive operations, they might best be used to plug gaps and defend critical points. When the Germans attacked Danzig in the opening hours of the war, they got completely owned by the MIL/TD divisions sitting in defense in the city. It wasn’t even close.
