Building Reserve Units or not (as Major, e.g. Germany) (TFH)

[Zacha]

I took out the game after some years again and currently in a game as Germany, I notice that in late 1939 Russia has already a big army in numbers, however they are not fully mobilized and therefore just half as strong as they could be. And building for half the price new units. So far, so good. Now, they mobilize and within two weeks, they have completely filled up their army.

So it seems the building of reserve units, especially with low Draft-Policy, will allow to build roughly double the army when building them as "Reserves" than building them as Non-Reserves (aka Regulars), saving years of production time, and then by just spending a very few weeks the this doubled army gets to full strength. So in a nutshell, using low Policies and Reserve Units makes the army building almost twice as effificent.

Correct me if I am wrong so far. If I am right, this is a tremendous advantage (actually quite an imbalance, an exploit, and quite illogical).

So if I am right so far, is there then any disadvantage to this? I read that Reserve Units would get some penalty on their experience gaining since TFH, but there is nothing to be found on that in the Developer Diary or manual, so I think this might be just a rumor, and in any case this would not leverage this massive efficiency topic.

 

[Zacha]

Ok I found some quite old information which supports this, and made some tests on my own to ensure it is still correct.
Well, going to the extreme (Volunteer Army with minimal training to build up and then switch later to 3y/SbR and specialist) is probably quite gamey. But I will take it into consideration in potential future games wether I quickly go for the 3y draft (after all has a manpower increase, though for an early barbarossa in 1940 it is hard to really use it), or keep the 2y draft. The specialists of course will remain. It is the Wehrmacht, after all.

 

[Kovax]

You are correct that building units as reserves allows you to construct an army for a substantially lower IC cost, since the bonus for your initial mobilization lets you fill up the ranks for half price. There is another cost, however. The lower mobilization laws put serious restrictions on officer recruitment, meaning that you'll need to spend a lot more Leadership points on it to keep your officer ratio from dropping with all of those new divisions being created and requiring officers.

Basically, the choice is between a smaller high-quality army and a large "meat wave" army of poorly led troops (like the Soviet army in the game), or else pumping Leadership points into Officers and reducing the investment into techs and doctrines. The initial officer pool allows for a modest army expansion without adding officers, but any serious buildup will see a sudden drop in the ratio once you exceed the point where you have 140% of the recommended officers. Note that there is no advantage for having MORE than 140% (and any surplus above it is not shown), but anything over 100% provides a significant bonus, up to that 140% cap.

My personal preference is to pump a lot more Leadership points into Officer Ratio in 1937, with high mobilization laws, since Germany has less things of importance to keep current in 1937 than it has Leadership points to throw at it. Meanwhile, I build mostly IC, Infrastructure, a few airfields and aircraft, a few ships, and only modest amounts of infantry and armor (which would otherwise eat supply for the next few years) to bring up their "Practical" values. In 1938, I lower the mobilization laws to build a gazillion infantry divisions at the cheaper rate (but still high training levels), since I've already built up enough officers for them. The downside to that is that most of the demobilized manpower is gone for good, so you have to worry about running out of manpower later in the war.

The real strength of HOI3 is that there's no "optimal way" to play. Every strategy has its good and bad points, so there's more than one viable solution to a problem, and problems with every "easy answer". The fun part to me is seeing what kind of whacky ideas you can come up with and make work. Go all-in on strategic bombing, build a massive paratroop force to cut off the enemy's entire front line, go armor-heavy, send meat-waves of Militia, or whatever else you want to test out.