Soviets

[Ostheim]

Is it me or are the odds stacked so high against Soviet Russia they can't possibly achieve a near historical level of success?

Edit: Apparently you have to switch to a country other than Russia before the revolution event in order to play Soviet Russia properly.

Edit 2: After playing a while, I have finally reached the point of bewilderment. There are so many events one after the other that turn my divisions over to partisans and cause revolts etc...I am wondering how you are supposed to survive as the soviets.

 

[Kami888]

The events were designed mostly with AI in mind, and when the AI plays the Soviets and has enough resources to feed the country (so that the IC doesnt drop to zero), they actually survive it every time somehow.
The worst events are those which switch allegiance of your units to the rebels. The problem is that the switch_allegiance command works at the corps level rather than division level, so if you have your army all in one stack, chances are that whole army will become rebel army once the general decides to revolt. The way to avoid this is to split your units up as much as possible and have each general command no more than 1 division. That way if the general turns out to be a traitor, he won't take the entire army with him. Also you can cheat and simply put your entire army into the forcepool through strategic redeployment at the time when these events start firing (the downside is of course that you will have no army on the ground to fight the actual enemies).

The revolts mostly happen in the south and in siberia. You're probably better off not trying to get them out of those areas right away. As soon as they turn into white armies, you gain back cores on all their territory, and you also get several big dissent reductions which will decrease the rate at which rebels spawn and your troops will fight better.

I guess the bottom line is that it depends strongly on how well Russia was doing prior to the revolution. If they were doing historically, then the Soviets stand a good chance at surviving. If on the other hand they were almost completely destroyed by the Germans, then yeah playing the Soviets will be hard since the Soviets inherit what's left of the Russian army and if there's nothing left - they have nothing to fight with.