Correct ARMA patch (1.32 or whatever), CORE 0.41, default settings (which I believe were Normal/Normal but I will check).
Played 3 games.
First as USA just to get a grasp on the nature of the mod, Germany was very sluggish conquering France (war lasted well into Winter 1940) which, I assumed at the time, delayed the triggers for taking Yugoslavia and Greece and therefore delayed the AI trigger switch for invading the USSR. No Barbarossa in 1941 and then Japan declared war on me and the Allies and, since I was at war, I remembered from vanilla (and assumed it was true for this) the German AI would never trigger to declare war on the USSR and, even if it did, it'd be too late to make any progress.
Lacking any real threat of failure and wanting to start over anyways now that I grasped the mod I restarted.
2nd game as Germany, the thing I noticed was it was much harder to build overwhelming force early on. This wasn't an issue for me, as a player, but I suspect this is the problem the AI is facing. I conquered Poland, France was more interesting because of the greater equality of numbers, but Barbarossa was a bit of a joke. The USSR AI kept so many divisions east in Siberia. I understand the historical nature of this and made only historical progress (a stop line running from just outside Lenningrad, just outside Moscow, and around Kharkov) in 1941, but they weren't released west over the winter of 1941-42, the USSR remained hopelessly outnumbered, and 1942 was a breeze. Also bitter-peace didn't trigger, but I think my question about that was answered in the thread below (so I can fix that myself). Conditions for bitter peace were met with 60 divisions still in Siberia despite no war between the USSR and Japan. With that game essentially over I decided to step it up in a 3rd game.
3rd game I was Italy. Germany never even conquered Poland this time. They took all VP sites but would not annex Poland. I knew this would foul up the French campaign so I reloaded as Germany just to annex and then brought the game back up as Italy. Declared war on the Netherlands and Belgium but never pentrated France and failed to conquer all of Belgium. Lasted until winter of 1940 before I gave up, knowing they'd never even launch Barbarossa muchless have any success.
In neither case (1st or 3rd) did Germany annex or even make any progress in Norway either.
The mod seems exceptional. I love virtually all the changes. Some are a little annoying, but are perfectly explicable in the sense of balancing the game.
But the AI is very bad. Actually that may be a bad way of saying that. The AI may be fine, but it seems like Germany in particular, in being "balanced" for humans, is too nerfed for the AI to do much with. I could bump the difficulty up, but difficulty is applicable across the board, meaning no AI country gets a relative advantage against another AI country, so that doesn't solve anything. I'm also concerned about the Soviet AI (and this is specific) since I don't think the Soviets suffer from a lack of unit building capacity per say, like Germany, but that they simply don't release their units West even in the face of total and immediate defeat.
This is all with a small sample size, so I could be wrong. I also understand you guys aren't making any additions. So I guess this is just a question of, if this persists in being a problem, what could I be doing wrong and what could I do myself to solve this issue?
Primarily, I want a strong German AI and a USSR AI at least capable of resisting the German AI within reason. It'd also be nice if the Chinese AI could survive more often, but I understand from DAIM and vanilla that the Japan/China problem is a persistent problem with no easy fix. Typically I just solve that by forcing Japan to choose the "break China up" option, which mitigates the effects of the Chinese collapse and is significantly more historically likely of an outcome anyways.
