What follows are brief overviews of efforts inside various sectors of New Zealand during our lead-up to WWII.
Economy
Resource stockpiles were improved; having
Walter Nash was a big help. Neither Germany nor the Soviet-Union would trade with us and the UK was little better. We could buy some
Rares from the English but that was to be expected, since that is Britain’s money-maker. However. The UK would not trade with us beyond that, i.e. when we needed to sell supplies and they
needed supplies.
The USA bought 10 Supplies from us and that made the Yanks our chief trading partner. We did trade with other weak nations, like ourselves, but these were small trades typically like the
off and on nature of AI-trading; except that I approved or disapproved all trades.
Espionage
With
Frederick Freeman’s bonus, I hoped we might steal some army/navy-techs from the Italians but the RNG was very stingy and though we quickly cleared out Italy’s counter-agents, our spies stole only
Sea-Lane Defense. Of course, building
Escorts would be insane for a nation possessing a tiny industry. In hindsight, we probably should have went for France but I desired to try something different and now what is done - is finis. (Btw, In past games, I have bad-luck in France as well) I wanted a few early gifts but now that we failed in Italy. I moved operations somewhere else, after a brief prior effort.
Our Armed Forces
Before I get into Production and Technology, I want you to see what New Zealand starts with in terms of techs & units. Be advised, neither area brims with promise.
As you can see NZ starts with very little. We have 6 INF & 3 CAV brigades but no units to guard anything, which is not good, because to protect ourselves we would need to use fighting units; of course we build some GAR for defense and hopefully later, a few MIL for policing actions. Our navy consists of only 5 troop-transports and we have no planes, nor will we have any in the future. Whatever we do, we are very vulnerable.
Of course we needed to build some convoys and targetted about 50; I need to watch that number because we must have only enough to “get-by”. A few GAR x2 divisions, enough ART to fill out our INF-divisions and later some MIL units. I also built two basic Destroyer-groups for a purpose, you will soon see.
Research
With 8 IC we cannot build a lot of stuff and with our Leadership only at 4.92 we cannot research much either. We can improve very little, so whatever we pursue
must provide the maximum benefit.
I decided to keep two INF techs up-to-date as far as possible. I chose what you see in the screen above. Researching all four techs would mean I would do little else, so I opted for work on
Offense only for our units. Generally, with small percentages, I.e.
Terrain-Equipment, the benefits are minuscule for many techs for a tiny nation. After those two infantry techs, I also wanted our ART as modern as possible. In addition I went for
Radios for the Offensive power as well. We will not have many divisions, so they need to be solid fighting units.
Regarding
Industry, I am only committed to
Agriculture and
Supply-Production. I have a question-mark by those two additional supply techs because I “may” work them in the future but I am far from sure I will.
This is the look behind our preparations before deciding to
start WWII.
