Will be fun reading your AAR-explanation, of what HQ did with your master-plan.
The explanation may just come down to 'utter incompetence'... who knows what interesting twist I can give to that.
A part of me wishes you have more time to prepare and a part whats to see how well your set up stands up to the German AI and its military.
You can always prepare more, but you also play the hand you're dealt. Obviously, if it were up to many of us, we would always want more time to prepare, but then again, we also want to get it over with. I share your sentiment...
So ... cue screeching Nazgul, orcs mustering, and fateful music. The Dark Lord’s forces are in motion again - Yugoslavia now, soon it will be the Rodina!
It is early in the year for the attack on Yugoslavia - if it is over quickly, it could mean an early Barbarossa, which is not good because it is another month or two to wait for the relief of winter.
Let's hope the German AI takes it's sweet time. The worse they time their invasion, the better we fare... Then again, it wouldn't be a lot of fun, nor very suspenseful, if Germany just attacked mid-winter.
Is Romania anywhere close to joining the Axis voluntarily? The Germans will really want them adding to their effort ... so they can fail them at Stalingrad next year!
If not in the Axis, then conquered so they have more room to get at us. Tense times indeed.
They naturally drift towards the Allies, but, the Germans have just started their third influencing campaign and a rough estimate puts them at about 160 days of continuous influencing from joining the Axis, which means they are closer to the Axis than to the Allies, but not by much. (they are really far from the Comintern with an alignment of over 300). With all the wars around, the Romanians are desperate to have strong friends.
(their neutrality is 24%, and we seem to threaten them the most with a threat of 45.6%)
A more worrying problem is Turkey. They can't join anyone now (due to their neutrality), but an enduring influencing campaign by Japan has placed them closely aligned enough to join the Axis. The saving grace here (and why I'm actually not that worried) is game mechanics. As Turkey is technically in Asia, the threat they respond to the most is threat from Asian countries, and as Asia is quiet, the noted difference between their neutrality and the highest 'perceived' threat is equal to their Neutrality, because only Asian threat is counted up to a certain level...and even over that threshold, threat from the same continent counts in full, while threat from other continents is like drops in an ocean. Luckily the Soviet Union counts as Europe and not Asia, because the Turks feel very threatened by us...Turkey joining the Axis should be more manageable though as the Carpathian mountains protect the SU from any big panzer attack from that side while the terrain on the longer Romanian border is wide open and would give the Axis many more opportunities to concentrate on.
Additionally, Turkey doesn't 'want' to be in the Axis, hence their own Alignment towards the Allies, which only has marginally less pull than the Japanese charm offensive, so as soon as the Japs stop influencing them, they will quickly pull back out of the Axis danger zone and towards the Allies... If this doesn't work out for the Axis, it'll have been a huge waste of leadership as both Germany and Japan have been taking turns trying to pull Turkey towards them, with only the latest Japanese effort actually getting them close enough for anything to possibly happen... The sunk cost is enormous... It does make me worry about our Nat China campaign... but there things are different, because doing nothing will likely end with Nat China in the Axis, or close. Turkey, on it's own, wasn't going anywhere.
