Germany -> Soviet Union + Combat log

[TheMoe]

I attacked the Soviet Union early in Sept of 1940, and it's the first time I've felt ready for the attack. Mostly re-learning the game, and going further in my understanding of HOI4 in 2024. No mods, and all but latest DLC. Single player only against AI.

I need to start a new game where I use what I learned about light tanks and rush mediums.

Questions and thoughts:

1. Good grief am I going through planes and supplies like crazy. I've already killed a million of them or more and I had something like 60k extra infantry equipment going into the war. Now I'm in the red. Never dreamed I'd see this.



2. I can't figure out what's really going on and where I'm losing equipment. Take this screenshot of artillery losses. Attrition: 5068 Combat: 3668, then if I hover over Attrition, I get different numbers. Now: Lost in combat 2609, Lost for other reasons 2459. So which is it? Did I lose 2609 in combat or 3668? Guess there's nothing I can do besides always update the MIO and chose buffs that increase reliability?



3. I've trying to figure out how I'm actually doing against the Soviet Union. I'm taking land like crazy, though their airforce is cutting mine down, and I'm running out of equipment.

Here's some screen shots indicating where I am and how much progress I've made in almost six months.

58% towards capitulation



I have max collaboration



Win ratio 80%



I know I'd be doing better if I had medium tanks. Other than that, I've killed all their fleet in the seas north of Germany, and I've sunk any transports going through that area. Looks like I'm also about to take any ports that have access to those seas.

I've never made it this far into a war with the Soviet Union, and of course I have England sending their fighters and bombers over. Some of my airforce is over there. Just as a side note, I'm trying to purposefully play this somewhat historically. I've already set up a collaboration government in the Soviet Union (see screenshot), and I'm working on England. My next goal after the Soviet Union would be England, and I don't want to take the easy route and Sea Lion England first.

Infantry template



Motorized template



Building Mountaineers instead of Marines



Trying to keep all the templates down to 24 width to decrease supply issues and to give me more divisions for things like "attacking from multiple directions."

Medium Tank Template



This is the light tank template that I'll get rid of in the next playthrough.




Keeping up with infantry and anti-air/artillery, and just started upgrading air







Outside of the medium tanks, is my experience attacking the Soviet Union going well? I'm sure it would be better if I had the medium tanks, but outside of that? Those are the best templates I know the build (outside of flame tanks, but I'm just not there yet). Any suggestions? Thanks.

Edit: Here's the save if someone wants to take a closer look.

GER_1941_02_26_02 soviet save.hoi4

drive.google.com

Edit 2: Looks like a player can only use CAS and Tactical Bombers in regions with air superiority. That's another mistake I've made, trying to spread them out across the front line. They've just been chewed up.

 

[marcelo r. r.]

I did take a look on your save...

- Don't use motorized divisions on eastern front, if make motorized let them as stand by to repel western invasions....
MOT have tons of attrition and eat your equipment dont worth the headache of microing it on eastern front.

- The winter is on and your divisions are starting losing strength, isnt good make all front atack on winter, its apply big penalties on tank divisions.

- You declared war on the begin of winter(September). If declared on historical month(june) you have 4 months before winter bite your divisions. If wanna have even more spare months atack when winter ends(not sure if is middle march or april), you can check provinces to see if winter is gone.

- For 20 width divisions you have too few, is possible make ~240 divisions, but i will discuss that later, i will be back soon,

 

[marcelo r. r.]

- playing GER with mobile warfare don't use field hospitals.
- dont use motorized support divisions on infantry template, its have worse terrain penalties, also infantry speed is caped, then its 12km/h speed is wasted.

- replace field hospital with support artillery,
- replace motorized recon with cavalry recon

 

[marcelo r. r.]

- Ins't a good idea annex your balcans friends... theyre giving big attrition, and not contributing to manpower.
- if spared them, you could have asked their expeditionary forces, BUL/ROM/HUN divisions are good as port-defenders.

 

[marcelo r. r.]

why spared denmark/norway?

 

[marcelo r. r.]

that trait is very useless, dont pick it for your panzer generals

 

[TheMoe]

I did take a look on your save...

- Don't use motorized divisions on eastern front, if make motorized let them as stand by to repel western invasions....
MOT have tons of attrition and eat your equipment dont worth the headache of microing it on eastern front.

View attachment 1127970

- The winter is on and your divisions are starting losing strength, isnt good make all front atack on winter, its apply big penalties on tank divisions.

View attachment 1127971

- You declared war on the begin of winter(September). If declared on historical month(june) you have 4 months before winter bite your divisions. If wanna have even more spare months atack when winter ends(not sure if is middle march or april), you can check provinces to see if winter is gone.

View attachment 1127972

- For 20 width divisions you have too few, is possible make ~240 divisions, but i will discuss that later, i will be back soon,

I know winter is what killed the historical attack, though I didn't think winter mattered that much in this game. Thank you. I get that motorized are not effective in low supply environments. Good to know. I won't build so many next time.

Edit: Where did you go to see the winter penalty. I couldn't locate the same icon with the thermometer.

--Wife just came in and wants to go to bed. Thanks for everything. I'll have to read and learn tomorrow.

 

[TheMoe]

why spared denmark/norway?
View attachment 1127980

Haven't gotten to them yet. Too busy attacking my Balcans friends. I want it all! World domination.

 

[marcelo r. r.]

Edit: Where did you go to see the winter penalty. I couldn't locate the same icon with the thermometer.

on province tab,,

 

[marcelo r. r.]

i'm saving your run, lets see the steps.

1. everything with resistance above 25% resistance goal change to martial law.

2. Edit the Infantry template.

3. pick everything thats not tank division, and switche their template to infantry division.

4. Organize full armies for eastern front, 1 of them will be all your tanks(in red so u can easy distinguish your panzer divisions).

5. Move off your panzer divisions to finish off caucasus front quickly, atack only with tanks.

6. Meanwhile let your divisions sitting on eastern front to rest and reequip.

7. Finish off Uk invasion of France.

8. in caucaus encircle and destroy, use speed at your favor.

9. Create Collaborations governments in France and Poland to save your economy and resistance...

10. Set the location of your new ships on safe place, otherwise they will be born on a randon port and ca ben destroyed on the way.

11. Set the maximum motorization for your divisions get better supplied.

12. Dont convoy raid uk surroundings, their air kill your subs easy.

13. block their seazones to your stuff dont pass there.

14. Utilize Paralel build instead of serial.

 

[marcelo r. r.]

after finish caucasus use your tanks to set small encirclments like this, the soviets will start shuffiling their lines and deorganize. use only to atack/finish pockets. slowly you will reducing their numbers.

 

[TheMoe]

i'm saving your run, lets see the steps.

1. everything with resistance above 25% resistance goal change to martial law.
View attachment 1127986
View attachment 1127987


2. Edit the Infantry template.
View attachment 1127988

3. pick everything thats not tank division, and switche their template to infantry division.
View attachment 1127990
4. Organize full armies for eastern front, 1 of them will be all your tanks(in red so u can easy distinguish your panzer divisions).
View attachment 1127991
5. Move off your panzer divisions to finish off caucasus front quickly, atack only with tanks.
View attachment 1127992
6. Meanwhile let your divisions sitting on eastern front to rest and reequip.
View attachment 1127993
7. Finish off Uk invasion of France.
View attachment 1127994
8. in caucaus encircle and destroy, use speed at your favor.
View attachment 1127995
9. Create Collaborations governments in France and Poland to save your economy and resistance...
View attachment 1127996
10. Set the location of your new ships on safe place, otherwise they will be born on a randon port and ca ben destroyed on the way.
View attachment 1127997
11. Set the maximum motorization for your divisions get better supplied.
View attachment 1127998
12. Dont convoy raid uk surroundings, their air kill your subs easy.
View attachment 1127999
13. block their seazones to your stuff dont pass there.
View attachment 1128000
14. Utilize Paralel build instead of serial.
View attachment 1128004

Thank you! I went back to a previous save before I started justifying on the Soviet Union, and I am preparing my troop as you recommended.

There are some questions if you don't mind, so that I can better understand.

1. With regards to Martial Law, is the goal to get the resistance down below 25% very quickly? Once all provinces in a country are below 25%, may I switch over to Secret Police or should I wait until the resistances are under 15% and choose Local Police Force? What is the benefit of bringing the resistance down so quickly? Are they sabotaging my infrastructure?

2. You asked that I get rid of all my Motorized and Mountaineers and change them to Infantry divisions. I thought that Motorized and Mountaineers had some advantages that players liked. Why switch all to plain infantry?

3. I will follow all your directions and see how things go. I'm exercising my troops now. From what I understand you're asking that I micromanage all my tank divisions and send them through Ukraine, Crimea, and then down south to Georgia as quickly as I can. I'm not quite sure how to do that. You're suggesting I form a line with my infantry that runs N to S along the border with the Soviet Union, then designate all my tanks to one commander and give them the red color. Then line up my tanks on Ukraine's border and try to select a few tanks a time, thrusting with them in encircling maneuvers?

4. If I create a collaboration government in France and Poland, what are the benefits to me. I want their factories and resources. Seems I recall there's a way to create a collaboration government, then give them a bunch of transports or guns or something. The icon I'm looking for resembles a pawn from a chess match. I can see their government screen, but I can't figure out how to give them things and increase support. Where do I go to see that screen? What's the best thing to give them in 2024? Is it still convoys?



I understand the changes you've made to the navy and to keep the submarines from being killed England's air power. It also makes sense to have the new ships spawn in a safe port so they don't have to transit the English Channel.

Thank you, I did discover the motorization settings a couple of days ago, and it makes managing supply much easier.

 

[Kanitatlan]

1. With regards to Martial Law, is the goal to get the resistance down below 25% very quickly? Once all provinces in a country are below 25%, may I switch over to Secret Police or should I wait until the resistances are under 15% and choose Local Police Force? What is the benefit of bringing the resistance down so quickly? Are they sabotaging my infrastructure?

You select the occupation law based on the resistance target, not the current value. Basically you are trying to make sure you can ignore it and not have resistance rise to a value where extra things happen. My strategy has settled on making sure no resistance icons or high resistance warnings occur which is pretty much what has been suggested.

2. You asked that I get rid of all my Motorized and Mountaineers and change them to Infantry divisions. I thought that Motorized and Mountaineers had some advantages that players liked. Why switch all to plain infantry?

Marcelo is making the point that you are suffering significant attrition losses. Mountain divisions are probably fine but can be a bit of a distraction, Motorised divisions are a perfectly fine unit to use but you need to be using them as support for your panzer divisions. Their real point is to be able to do things, like holding the flanks of a penetration, more cheaply than Panzer Divisions and quicker than infantry divisions. Apart from that Marcelo has a point.

3. I will follow all your directions and see how things go. I'm exercising my troops now. From what I understand you're asking that I micromanage all my tank divisions and send them through Ukraine, Crimea, and then down south to Georgia as quickly as I can. I'm not quite sure how to do that. You're suggesting I form a line with my infantry that runs N to S along the border with the Soviet Union, then designate all my tanks to one commander and give them the red color. Then line up my tanks on Ukraine's border and try to select a few tanks a time, thrusting with them in encircling maneuvers?

During the invasion of the Soviet Union your real objective isn't taking territory. You should be targeting destroying Soviet forces instead. To do that you need to either overrun enemy division whilst they are retreating, which is difficult, or cut them off in pockets. The general principle should be to try and make sure that fighting takes place in locations where you have decent supply which can mean avoiding pushing Soviet Forces back and focus completely on cutting off chunks of their forces and destroying them. Once you've decimated their forces advancing becomes a whole lot easier.

4. If I create a collaboration government in France and Poland, what are the benefits to me. I want their factories and resources. Seems I recall there's a way to create a collaboration government, then give them a bunch of transports or guns or something. The icon I'm looking for resembles a pawn from a chess match. I can see their government screen, but I can't figure out how to give them things and increase support. Where do I go to see that screen? What's the best thing to give them in 2024? Is it still convoys?

As a collaboration government they already make a significant contribution of their factories and resources and you shouldn't need to focus on reducing their autonomy. The feature you are looking for is lend-lease, you can send them stuff that will allow you to reduce their autonomy and ultimately to annex them but that's pointless because it puts you back where you started with zero collaboration. The idea of releasing them is that you immediately get a good contribution from them and don't need to provide occupation forces.

Thank you, I did discover the motorization settings a couple of days ago, and it makes managing supply much easier.

It is best to manage the motorisation setting via the ability to set this for the army group but if you do then there are a couple of things to watch out for.

• When you add a new army to an army group it won't necessarily automatically adopt the supply motorisation of the army group and you have to make sure each new army is set fully motorised
• Having it set on armies/army groups causes ALL supply sources in range of affected ground units to go full motorised. If you don't have enough trucks this can be an optimisation problem and often it is worth switching this off for garrison forces as they are usually set up to defend ports and the like
• Also, watch out for supply to airfields. Sometimes you need to manually enable full motorisation on a supply dump so as to maintain supply for airfields that aren't near enough to the front line

 

[TheMoe]

Thank you for the explanations. I've always left the decisions up to the AI once I draw a skirmish line and give them plans, and I've never played with the tanks as a manual tool.

Maybe things have changed in the last four years or so in terms of the collaboration governments -> taking full control. It's been a while, but I do recall watching videos about how to puppet a government with the desired end effect of their territory becoming yours, and all the factories and resources belonging to Germany.

 

[Kanitatlan]

Thank you for the explanations. I've always left the decisions up to the AI once I draw a skirmish line and give them plans, and I've never played with the tanks as a manual tool.

The basic problem with issuing your armies / army groups with general orders is that they will tend to just push the enemy back and not destroy enemy divisions. You can do some stuff with AI managed orders but you will often need to very carefully assign detailed orders to small groups of units instead of just a general order for the army.

The recommended way of managing offensive operations (a tiny bit exploity) is to assign your armies frontlines and army level attack orders but never activate the attack orders. Their planning bonus will build up whenever they are stationary and can be used for manually ordered attacks. Their planning bonus decays whilst moving/attacking but next time they stop it starts building again. This way you can get a planning bonus whilst manually managing operations.

A good illustration of the weakness of the army AI on attack is (from a long time back) when I launched a 24 Soviet tank division invasion of an easily defeated Finland. If you just layout a frontline and offensive arrow for the whole lot to advance to Finland's west coast then by the time they have advanced 2 provinces 75% of the current movement orders of units in the army are to transfer them north or south to a different part of the front and, at best, six divisions still advancing. This can be corrected and still use the AI but you have to do all sorts of explicit orders for smaller groups and ultimately it is easier to just plot explicit movement orders for every division.

Maybe things have changed in the last four years or so in terms of the collaboration governments -> taking full control. It's been a while, but I do recall watching videos about how to puppet a government with the desired end effect of their territory becoming yours, and all the factories and resources belonging to Germany.

This is recognised thing. Get a country as a puppet, send them a load of lend-lease to reduce autonomy, go to the UI for managing puppets and change their autonomy level, repeat until they are annexed. However, a collaboration government will give you just as much industry as fully occupied territory with moderately good collaboration. You can use this technique to reabsorb them later if you want to tidy up the map. The biggest issue is when you annex them collaboration is back to zero so you initially lose a great deal of industrial capability

 

[marcelo r. r.]

1. With regards to Martial Law, is the goal to get the resistance down below 25% very quickly? Once all provinces in a country are below 25%, may I switch over to Secret Police or should I wait until the resistances are under 15% and choose Local Police Force? What is the benefit of bringing the resistance down so quickly? Are they sabotaging my infrastructure?

In your case is because your short on equipment reserves, specially rifles are negative, they are the most hurt by high resistance(the red shield icon means resistance hit even more of equipment/manpower), so we have to prioritize eliminate equipment drains like resistance.

4. If I create a collaboration government in France and Poland, what are the benefits to me. I want their factories and resources. Seems I recall there's a way to create a collaboration government, then give them a bunch of transports or guns or something. The icon I'm looking for resembles a pawn from a chess match. I can see their government screen, but I can't figure out how to give them things and increase support. Where do I go to see that screen? What's the best thing to give them in 2024? Is it still convoys?

Same as above, youre short on equipment and resistance are eating up your rifles. you have also few divisions, Soviets AI are becoming confident to counter atack. So we are reverting a snowball of negative effects: soviets conteratack and resistance making your infantry more weaker and weaker and at some point unable to defend.

2. You asked that I get rid of all my Motorized and Mountaineers and change them to Infantry divisions. I thought that Motorized and Mountaineers had some advantages that players liked. Why switch all to plain infantry?

There just useless, also need micromanagment to be efficient, if we need micro something, lets micro just the tanks. Less things to organize, less failure and less "ops i forget something important".

I have take entire caucasus(mountainous terrain) pockets with your 10 tanks in just less 15 days.

 

[marcelo r. r.]

However, a collaboration government will give you just as much industry as fully occupied territory with moderately good collaboration.

Collaboration also dont will raise their autonomy if reach the score, so dont need worry about lend lease equipment.

 

[marcelo r. r.]

a note:

A full frontal atack against SU like your doing can work, but the numbers needed are 240 infantry(20w), 48 light panzers(20w), also 100K+ rifles reserve, at least 5K(ideal 10K) reserves of Art./support equipment/motorized, also the 10% manpower law(a full frontal atack will eat 500K~1million man). Ins't manpower/equipment saving wise, but can serve roleplay purposes or just to those dont have patiente to micromanage tanks. If anything going wrong like slow down on winter, just let divisions sitting on rest to recharge forces, and atack again once winter is gone, thats close to "historical".

 

[TheMoe]

The basic problem with issuing your armies / army groups with general orders is that they will tend to just push the enemy back and not destroy enemy divisions. You can do some stuff with AI managed orders but you will often need to very carefully assign detailed orders to small groups of units instead of just a general order for the army.

The recommended way of managing offensive operations (a tiny bit exploity) is to assign your armies frontlines and army level attack orders but never activate the attack orders. Their planning bonus will build up whenever they are stationary and can be used for manually ordered attacks. Their planning bonus decays whilst moving/attacking but next time they stop it starts building again. This way you can get a planning bonus whilst manually managing operations.

A good illustration of the weakness of the army AI on attack is (from a long time back) when I launched a 24 Soviet tank division invasion of an easily defeated Finland. If you just layout a frontline and offensive arrow for the whole lot to advance to Finland's west coast then by the time they have advanced 2 provinces 75% of the current movement orders of units in the army are to transfer them north or south to a different part of the front and, at best, six divisions still advancing. This can be corrected and still use the AI but you have to do all sorts of explicit orders for smaller groups and ultimately it is easier to just plot explicit movement orders for every division.

This is recognised thing. Get a country as a puppet, send them a load of lend-lease to reduce autonomy, go to the UI for managing puppets and change their autonomy level, repeat until they are annexed. However, a collaboration government will give you just as much industry as fully occupied territory with moderately good collaboration. You can use this technique to reabsorb them later if you want to tidy up the map. The biggest issue is when you annex them collaboration is back to zero so you initially lose a great deal of industrial capability

Thanks for helping me understand. So, not a good idea to take a collaboration back unless to clean up the map. Maybe that explains why some YouTubers were suggesting doing so. Absolutely not worth it if you lose factories in the process.

Yes, I'm 100% with you regarding how the AI moves armies all over the line. I saw that, and I also see that you can limit that behavior by clicking on a setting for each army (Flexible Cohesion vs Rigid Cohesion). Don't even know if that setting works, it's just something I found recently that might be able to limit the movement you describe.

I understand how some player manually control their divisions now and make the best use of the planning bonus. Thanks again!

 

[marcelo r. r.]

Thanks for helping me understand. So, not a good idea to take a collaboration back unless to clean up the map. Maybe that explains why some YouTubers were suggesting doing so. Absolutely not worth it if you lose factories in the process.

France/Poland also have focus tree debuffs on their occupied territories over time no matter what you do.
Occupied France will hit 50%~70% resistance because of marquis debuff and others.