Axis combined Multiplayer AAR

[unmerged(12303)]

As mentioned in the previous posts usa had enough threat to enter "any" moment. There is no point for USA to wait. If it can fortify its forward positions and make it hard for japan to jump the islands why should it delay its 450 ic boost? Also last mp game usa joined in January 1940. So im approx speeding them up 1.5 months. France was falling, so usa wouldnt be able to land there. Plus my attack on them would force them to deploy more troops vs me than potentially land in Spain and help out the Brits. So in my eyes im drawing them away from Germany, forceing them to deploy assets against me and hopefully supriseing them.

OFC if i was sure that usa woulndt move its assets id wait. Giveing them 450 ic is generally is bad for me.

 

[Traks]

Also, in MP Soviets usually remove all forces from border.
Low infra on both sides make invasion not too successful idea, except taking Vladivostok and ports for "Supremacy in East" strategic effect. There is nothing useful in Siberia, provinces with any value start near Urals.

Yes, USA could join any minute and probably they were just month away from that. American commanders in private talk admitted that so time was chosen perfectly.

 

[Forgiven]

Production and order of battle.

The Italian View - Chapter I


Time to make a little timehop back to 1938, and review the thinking that lead to this massive army...

First, Italian leadership acknowledged that they certainly did not have the resources to diversify the army into various fields, which after consideration lead to focusing on just infantry and artillery. Now, since tank destroyers are nicely considered artillery as well, that's just what we'll need to boost our motorised divisions...

On infantry side, various simulated builds were done, but most turned out to be overtly ambitious, among them building the army around 2inf + 2art division style, but these gererally lead to awfully low number of divisions. Which, while easier to manage, also ended up considered as insufficient to cover all fronts of the battle plan.

In the end, a build around binary infantry with a single support regiment was chosen, with general plan of building army around 1 specialized corp, 3 standart infantry+artillery corps and one infantry+antitank corp. With consideration that we could eventually expect at least corp or two worth of german panzer reinforcements, the specialized corp number was not a worry, just concentrating on infantry was good goal.

The last months of 1938 were largely spent on naval and airforce assets while war in yugoslavia was interfering with army side of industrial planning, reinforcements and all that, so after gaining experience from the yugoslavian war, there were lot of experienced NCO's and officers to train up a new 'volunteer' army. Indeed, the naval and air units that had been on queue were pushed back and all of the nation's industrial capasity was concentrated on the army..

The following 'OOB' is what was planned, and mostly came to be, for september of 1939, 4a Armada lacks it's artillery components, delivery of which is uncertain at this time, but hopefully can be squeezed into building schedule later on, after upgrades for rest of the army are done. And some of the engineer regiments were not finished until november..

So, in total, 2 armygroups, 5 armies, 25 corps, 125 divisions, 340 brigades made up the Italian Army initially, minor additions would follow, but this would remain the 'core'.

​

 

[Forgiven]

Sorry about the font, I wanted it pretty over readable =)

 

[Lord Ederon]

Nice. I might put up something for SU side too, though I can't speak too much to keep secrets secret yet. I'll probably cover just what happened - conquests, early strategic decisions already obvious to the other side. And some worldwide events I recorded during long time of relative peace SU is in (i.e. no player vs. player war).

 

[juv95hrn]

Sweet! I'm in of course

Nice screenie there. Did Italy attack from the Black Sea? How did they pull that off with that damn bugg closing the straight into the Black Sea when Allies are holding Suez? As you perhaps remembered from my AAR that bugg doomed the rest of my UK Med fleet. And without saying to much - I just had to edit a fleet out of the Black Sea in our present game as it was unlogically caught there due to events in Suez.

I'll comment a bit about the Axis game before the current one mentioned in the beginning of the thread.

I played Italy and got 3, not 5 german panzer divs, to use in Egypt. This was enough to take Suez against heavy opposition.

Italy at the end had a Great Navy with +100 ships. All their BB (17 incl. the ones in the build queue, one old BB was lost while sinking 3 british ones) and DD techs were up to 1942 standard. It is possible to build a nice Italian navy if you mostly ignore air assets.

In addition to the 3 german panzers in Africa and 5 in Romania I had plenty of motorized and armored divisions of license build German armor. Its expensive in the beginning but soon your practicals make them affordable. This meant that I had modern land forces in Spain, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Persia, Southern Russia and also of course around the Rostov beach head established at Novorrossijsk.

In the current game described here Italy can't really buy licenses since we increased to cost substantially. 100 diplo points is it?

The only "mistake" I did was puppetting Romania. I thought they would provide more oil and MP this way but they didn't. The conclusion is that allied minors are worthless in MP.

This was a true monster Italy game and even if Russia pushed the Italian Army in Romania back I warned them of overextending because that might end the campaign prematurely, which is what happened a few months later. It was a fun game but I had hoped it would have lasted longer.

 

[juv95hrn]

It looks good for the Axis so far. However, those 0-ORG French divs only show how favourable the HOI3's combat system really is to the attacker

I played France. I got control at the time when Germany attacked. I think this is a fair point to take over since controlling them from start might make it too hard for Germany to take out France at all.

I managed to stablize the front everywhere including Switzerland and Italian alps for about 3 months but when finally org runs out and your fronts start to crumble there is little to do but watch your forces become overrun. Its not as much blitzkrieg as it is steamroll-to-death we are talking about as mentioned here.

Also Axis were a bit lucky in that they surrounded Paris only hours before my first batch of built land units were deployed on the build queue. This meant that I could deploy them in Paris without org or wait until Paris fell and place them elsewhere when the campaign was all but over. Of course this would only have delayed Germany a couple of days and been of no major importance but felt frustrating at the time.

 

[Traks]

I'll comment a bit about the Axis game before the current one mentioned in the beginning of the thread.

I played Italy and got 3, not 5 german panzer divs, to use in Egypt. This was enough to take Suez against heavy opposition.

In addition to the 3 german panzers in Africa and 5 in Romania I had plenty of motorized and armored divisions of license build German armor. Its expensive in the beginning but soon your practicals make them affordable. This meant that I had modern land forces in Spain, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Persia, Southern Russia and also of course around the Rostov beach head established at Novorrossijsk.

In the current game described here Italy can't really buy licenses since we increased to cost substantially. 100 diplo points is it?

The only "mistake" I did was puppetting Romania. I thought they would provide more oil and MP this way but they didn't. The conclusion is that allied minors are worthless in MP.

This was a true monster Italy game and even if Russia pushed the Italian Army in Romania back I warned them of overextending because that might end the campaign prematurely, which is what happened a few months later. It was a fun game but I had hoped it would have lasted longer.

75 points I think. Still, huge investment and 0 licenses have been bought so far.

Infrastructure could not hold more. In fact we also gave Transport plane which was supplying troops in Egypt 24/7.
It was still stalemate, broken only by dropping paratroopers and adding marines attack.
So overall it was substantial resource hog, but worth it. That's why I say, you do Africa seriously or don't do at all.
Yes, Italy provided great assets against SU even if front there was on verge of collapse after Soviet starting attack, we could straighten the front and strike back. Stressful and enjoyable.

 

[Forgiven]

Athens

The Italian View - Chapter ... err.. VIII ?

Now, let us return to the eternal battle of Athens. Some of you may remember, this battle began in January 1940, on ground, it was a dull grind, replacements to divisions that got themselves demoralized by continously charging (futilely) over no mans ground into the opponents ditches, a proper World War I style battle. Air battle varied bit more, while Italian fighters largely managed to keep away any threath of british bombers, the allies still managed to maintain enough air presence to have Italian bombers taken care of. Also, our close air support planes lacked airfield near enough to reach Athens, so the bombing duties were left to the bit elderly tactical bombers, which couldn't handle extented campaigns and had to spend over half the time down on ground for repairs, resupply and reinforcements. Initially we focused on plain direct support for the ground units by preforming attacks against the troops in Athens, but as this clearly wasn't sufficient to change things, we changed target to the British reserve that stayed in the neaby province of Nafplio, destroying supply depots and roads over the Corinth Canal and elsewhere between Peloponnese and Athens. (Shot of the combat from 19th of May 1940, roughly 5 months into the battle)

Now, certainly, the british could still reinforce athens if they wished to commit their navy into the operation, ship fresh troops from -for example- Egypt, but making their life that much harder was apparently enough. This combined with the air bombing losees and pressure created by Japan against British India was enough to have the Brits withdraw their forces, largely uncontested excluding few light naval bombing attempts by Italian Naval Aviators. Thus, finally, on 4th of June, Italian troops arrived into Athens and the Greek surrendered, leaving few brit divisions late in evacuating still on mainland, but they had soon manage a retreat to their ships, afterall, the Italian airforce has succesfully destroyed the roads to them earlier, making the attack against said forces harder. In total, almost 800 000 men participated in battle of Athens, losses on ground favored the Brits and Greek, but almost certainly the Italian bombing operations evened this out. (5th of June)

Meanwhile, few British divisions had occupied eastern Turkey (I'm not really sure why, but we thanked them for the 'protection' against possible soviet invasion of Turkey) and Italian forces in Turkey had fallen behind a suitable riverlines. (5th of June)

The question was... what now, practically all threaths to Italy in Europe had been eliminated, excluding soviets, and we couldn't possibly go against them alone...​

 

[CptEasy]

Hehe.... You guys don't really like neutrals... do you?

Italy looks impressively big... but so does USSR. I'm really looking forwards for that clash. Now, how's US doing in all this? They are still neutral, right? Or...? After all these clashes they gotto be close to war.

 

[unmerged(12303)]

you seem to have missed page 5

 

[Forgiven]

Hehe.... You guys don't really like neutrals... do you?

Italy looks impressively big... but so does USSR. I'm really looking forwards for that clash. Now, how's US doing in all this? They are still neutral, right? Or...? After all these clashes they gotto be close to war.

Yea, indeed, Japan attacked them in late '39 as seen on previous page =)

I'm quite sure some american fighters or CAG's participated in battles over Athens aswell....

 

[Traks]

Yes, it was German INTs against American as I recall.
We did provide limited Int support there. Why limited? In time, you will know

Hehe.... You guys don't really like neutrals... do you?

Neutrals are free xp providing more manpower and resources for their master, and as we have seen more than once, puppets are worse than useless in MP games, so annexation it is.
I would have invited Nat. Spain properly, but they don't join unless Gibraltar is taken and even then chance is low.

 

[Forgiven]

And actually, yea, while Italy has become geocraphically large, the resource gains are a lot less than one might imagine, most of those territories ended up annexed instead of occupied (curses), so the ic/mp/leadership gained from them is rather small...
Indeed, at this point, the list would be IC 129/216 (ok, so it's grown by 47 base from start), 23mp/month (max laws naturally), 18,28 leadership (about 4 more than I began with)...
But I still prefer even that meager growth to puppets messing around, puppets are fine if you can have a human play them, otherwise...
...and yea, I did even consider puppeting Romania and giving them part of Italian army as support after that + have my Co-op play as Romania instead, but this would mean we both need to be present for every session and that's not good, reduces flexibility (Tharkun has been playing for Japan in few sessions lately, as Italy has been peaceful), so this is fine...

 

[CptEasy]

the resource gains are a lot less than one might imagine, most of those territories ended up annexed instead of occupied (curses)

So how does that really work? You would logically think that an annexed country would give more than an occupied, no? So, how much less to you get from an annexed country, roughly?

Edit:

you seem to have missed page 5

Hmm... I interpreted it more as plan than an actuall attack. Looking forwards to some pictures here. We have never really gotten to the point of real long lasting clashes between US and Japan. In "Wildfires" I, as Japan, had some battles with US but it was just in the endgame and I knew it ment little for the outcome of the game.

 

[Forgiven]

So how does that really work? You would logically think that an annexed country would give more than an occupied, no? So, how much less to you get from an annexed country, roughly?

Umm, let's see, the 'non core' penalty that annexed areas get is
non_core = {
local_manpower_modifier = -0.75
local_leadership_modifier = -0.80
local_ic = -0.50
local_resources = -0.5

Closest to this is the occupation law of full occupation.
local_manpower_modifier = -0.75
local_leadership_modifier = -0.80
local_ic = -0.50
local_resources = -0.2

Immediately, it's bonus of 30% resources.
However, since it's bit hard to make out the difference between the other things than resources (as you can't get mouseover view out of them) I'll dabble this with 'collaboration goverment' example, that has the same -50% to resources as annexation (and is most used anyways for manpower gains and low revolt risk).
So, let's see, I found two provinces with 15 energy, annexed one gets non core -50%, revolt risk -11,4%, +5% from tech for end result of 6,1 energy per day. Occupied one, -50% from occupation policy 0% from revolt risk (aye, there's a garrison of infantry here, enough to drop it that low over time...) +5% from tech, 7,9 energy per day...
So 6,1 vs 7,9 (the annexed revolt risk can't be dropped), so 29% more resources gained due to the lack of revolt risk, and I'm pretty sure revolt risk reduces IC, manpower (and leadership?) as well, so essentially you could write the annexation numbers as (with the initial 6% lowest possible revolt risk);
local_manpower_modifier = -0.87
local_leadership_modifier = -0.92
local_ic = -0.62
local_resources = -0.62
Which is really crappy, sure, occupation policies give some revolt risk, and most of the time I don't get around to supressing it, but with the usual collaboration goverment it's still only 1%...
...and you get to change them depending on your IC need against the others...

Wish I had a large scale example, but I don't know if I have any 'pre annexation save' that would have chance of exile or annexation.

 

[CptEasy]

Thanks a lot, Forgiven. That do clear up a few things. Very interesting... but slightly annoying too.

 

[Lord Ederon]

Yes, it's pretty annoying, but moddable. Still, usable vanilla would be gift from heavens for MP community.

 

[Forgiven]

But we haven't modded it right? at least I don't remember us doing it despite myself on some occasion remembering to be annoyed by it?

 

[unmerged(12303)]

i actually like that its a little different - adds a bit of variation depending if the nation surrender or not (not talking about values themselves).

Ill try to add my sneak attack on usa tomorrow.