Have been playing (now and then...) for maybe a month now and I'm really enjoying it! My best German HOI3-campaign so far (played maybe two or three, finished none since I grew tired once it got to easy)!
Playing on Hard, I've been moving down a quite historical path (not because I want to mimic history, but because decisions like invading France in spring of '40, securing the Balkan front by invading Greece, attacking Soviets in '41 ) made the most sense.
The war in the East have been ferocious. In the first summer I captured Leningrad, the Ukraine and Smolensk before settling down across a front on the big rivers that meet up at Smolensk (don't know the names!). Winter was horrible (just as it should be!) thanks to the strategic effects, etc. and I lost some ground in the southern sector. This southern Soviet bridgehead was eliminated in early spring of '42, after which I set a plan in motion to capture Moscow; two Panzergruppen set out to organize a huge pince with the Soviet capital at it's center!
I managed to capture Moscow... but the Reds did not surrender! The year finished with operations which captured Brjansk, Kursk and other areas south of Moscow and a Southern operation that captured Rostov-na-Don. Still no surrender, which I had hoped for. meant that a huge force of Panzers were "trapped" in a pretty small salient with Moscow at its center when winter arrived. This winter was horrible, with the Wehrmacht being forced to abandon most of the territory captured in the '42-offensives, since supplies couldn't arrive in numbers large enough for the central sector.
It is now spring of '43 and I've just finished the encirclement of an entire Soviet Army Group in Karelia. This victory (nearly 300 000 soviet troops killed and captured) will not be enough to really crush the Soviets, since they still have huge forces in reserve and the supply situation is horrible throughout the entire central part of my front!
Have never experienced such intense fighting on the eastern front in Hoi3 earlier. In my other campaigns, the Soviets were just unable to recover from the losses they suffered in the early stages of Barbarossa. How did you make it so that the red Army could recover like this?:O I must have encircled up to a million of their soldiers in a series of pincers during the summer of '41!
Also, what is actually triggering these huge supply problems I'm having right now? I like it, but would like to know the causes. I'm having high partisan activity in most of the occupied SU and Poland, this contributes, right? Most of the Luftwaffe has been withdrawn from the front and Panzerkorps have been moved away from the most desperate area (area of Army Group Centre, centered somewhat West of Smolensk, and just behind that awful swampy blob in the middle of the Ukraine). What more can be done?
I have some complaints, though. The European theatre have been very intense and interesting (above all the East, but also campaigns leading up to '41), but outside Europe I've spotted some possible balance issues. The British Empire have all but collapsed, thanks to the fact that they've not been able to do anything about the Uboot-threat! I havn't lost a single Uboot (maybe been engaged three or four times since '39!). Something has to be done about this - the subs are just OP.
Not only the UK have been crippled by this. Japan have not been able to do anything about the American subs, halting their potential advance. Don't mind this if there was actually anything you could do about the subs, but it seems like it's pretty much impossible to do anything about them?
Also, wouldn't it be better if these foreign regiments (who add a nice touch to my army, btw!) were "real" German units rather than EFs? I've discovered that EFs for some reason don't get any reinforcements (?) or upgrades, making these units pretty useless.
Nontheless. Thank you very much for giving me the most enjoyable HoI3-campaign I've experienced so far!
