I just finished my first game of Waking the tiger from start to finish. The game was on normal settings which typically is a push over but I wanted to try things vanilla for my first game. Overall I want to say that this expansion is very well done and adds some very nice improvements.
First a synopsis of what happened in the game
Stage 1- Repel Japan
China(me) fortified its ports with Garrison(which has some bugs in it now where it leaves guys in the wrong places or does not assign them to any particular place. I submitted a bug on this with repro save so hopefully...) and then concentrated all my effort on forts and the north border. The fight was pretty tough and I had to retry once because I didn;t get enough forts up early enough. 2nd try i had 3 forts in each province when they attacked(perhaps i should have done even more instead of prioritizing getting economy up and running). All the warlords joined my faction and sent me oodles of expeditionary forces which were essential in holding back the Japanese. Despite my best efforts they started to sneak through west of the north line(through the warlord provinces) and cut around behind me and headed back to the ocean. Luckily I had gained my strength enough to finally cut off this incursion and after a lot of work managed to get encirclement and kills. This led to enough JP losses that I was able to push forward and soon it was a total route and all of korea was mine. So ends Japan, they sat on their island crying and never came off even once after that. They offered me peace once I took the last of the mainland, and I declared on them again later to get their french occupied rubber and they just sat on their island and watched. Eventually they randomly capitulated to me for no apparent reason. Maybe their manpower was trashed not sure.
Stage 2- Oh oh nazis
The nazis meanwhile had been tearing up everybody and had become the clear threat to my late game. All of Europe was theirs, all of Africa was theirs(them and the Italians) and they were half way to Moscow. I knew if I didn't do something quick it would be bad so using the new 3 way war, I declared on them after taking iraq and iran giving me Africa access as well as the Mediterranean and I was able to join the Russians, despite not being in their faction, and fortify their lines. Yeah new 3 way war system! It worked quite cleanly, the only major issue was my planes were not able to help because they cannot use non allied air bases. During this time i was economy building and by the time I stalled out the German rush on moscow I was a beast with 30 million manpower and more factories then I could fuel the resources for to build stuff.
Stage 3- Mop up
In we go into Italy and then para drop into northern Germany to pincer as well as pushing hard from the russian side. Germany collapsed under massive manpower strain. Near the end of the war the war screen looked crazy with around 20 million Russian casualties, and total casualties in the 30-40 million range. Both russia and germany had gone to scrape the barrel. Germany surrendered and I was able to get parts of italy and northern germany, trying to grab as much steel as I could as I was around 300 in the red on steel as I was not a preferred trading partner and all the steel was taken oddly enough 130 by canada and some other smaller nations were just gobbling up steel in either a bug or some strange strangle japan via resource hoarding. It was pretty effective.
Stage 4- The next big war
After a little bit, the russians declared war on the allies and proceeded to take most of europe. I bided my time and watched the manpower reserves of the allies and the comtern plummet and then at the right moment I attacked russia and it was about a year before they had lost everything and were being pushed back. I stopped at this point because I didnt really feel like the slog that finishing the allies would be. It was clear with my 1000+ factories and 50+ million manpower they would never be able to stop me. I did see the allies start nuking the russians which I had not seen before.
Non plot notes:
The new field marshal system, its getting some criticism and I have to say with having around 300 divisions of size 40, there is absolutely no problem. I used the new marshal pink line management technique some to get him to auto control 5 generals. This works well and is just about identical to having a giant field marshal. You can have seperate tank divisions that don't fall under this auto mode if you so choose and you can still do your spearheads. Most of the time I did it like normal and it was def not a micor management problem at all. Def equal to or better then before.
The new follow army air wing order. I used this only in the final vs-russia battle portion and the game was soooo busy at that point it was really hard to tell if it worked well. In general I saw planes going where they needed to be so its def not completely broken. I do not feel that I can accurately judge the effectiveness + ease of this vs doing it by hand with how complicated the war was. The idea of planes auto following your armies from airport to airport is cool and I plan to use this more in smaller wars to watch it more carefully. I did learn that they won't auto turn on the right missions when doing this and so for a long while half my airforce was just idling.
The new general promotion system. This seems to need some work. This was a HUGE campaign going into the 50s and most generals never got anything beyond what they started with or unlocked shortly after getting them. The generals were just not learning the "from using" type things which are pre-reqs to all the others. And the field marshals got a couple unlocks at the start and then never more again. With how much fighting i did in so many places this doesn't seem right.
Acclimatization, I noticed it counting up and down in cold and hot and I never paid it much attention beyond that so I cannot say how interesting it was.
China focus tree: This tree is very well done. I don't know if its intentional or not but you cannot complete all of it because there is not enough inflation decreases to get all the inflation increases. There is a decision that lowers it and maybe they meant it to be repeatable but its not.
Decisions: These offered some cool ways to change your country(like reforming the army with XP) and ill be interested to see what other countries get.
New production UI: The abilty to do 5x and 10x factory groups means you almost always need only one production group per ground\air group. I don't know why they didnt do this for boats. Its an excellent improvement.
AI: its hard to say playing a totally new thing how the AI did because I missed most of the important europe conquest time. However if I had to guess I would say it was playing well as I never saw anything horrible happen and i did have a lot of battles.
Stability and war support: This is a cooler way to handle world tension and national unity. It makes more sense and I liked the ways you can manipulate it. Changing your economy type different econ modes now requires war readiness instead of world tension. Having your empire wrecked now ruins your economy instead of just a capitulation stat that doesn't matter until it flips.
Oil and rubber production: This is now a much harder investment. You only get 2/2 at first and eventually you can get 8/8 by researching it. That's a lot of techs to spend where as before you could just get the first point and be done with it. Balance wise makes sense. Feels like a big hit to the germans except for the fact that they could get a lore more rubber per building slot.
Capturing equipment: I never noticed this happening. I only checked one battle specifically for this and it said I captured nothing.
Mission system: I think this is just a decision with a time limit? I had one of these happen and the wording on it was pretty bad but basically you had to capture Vietnam area within a certain time if you wanted to fail the mission which actually meant passing the mission. If you failed it you got some nice bonuses and if time ran out you passed it and got penalties. Technically was fine just cosmetically confusing. If there is more to missions then this thing I missed it.
Command power: I didn't use this too much other then buying promotions and playing with it in a few battles. Perhaps its a huge deal that I failed to exploit. I couldn't decide if the large equipment losses was worth the bonus so I just didn't use it.
Special forces: This was a big deal when I started using paratroopers who I don't use normally but not because they are bad. They were super awesome. I don't know if they got improved but they made it really easy to backdoor grab ports etc. The cap makes it much harder to abuse these systems. I could only have about 16 divisions of size 20 with my massive armies.
Minimap: I didn't see it... forgot about looking for that until I read it on the list I am using to recap.
Planes to supply units: I tried this for my paratroopers. It worked but you must need a LOT of planes. In the order of hundreds and those things are heavy production cost.
I probably forgot a lot of things. Hopefully some people find this large wall of text interesting to read if they are on the fence about pulling the trigger on this excellent expansion.
Edit: Bugs
Only real bug was the garisson thing mentioned above. I had some paratroopers refuse to go and after some googling and trying things, I did a save load and then they went. Otherwise the only other thing that happened that was really sucky is 100 divisions got cut off from the world and attritioned a ton because capitulation happened suddenlty and they got trapped by the peace deal. I tried strategic redeploy but they could not get out. For clarity they were in my land but surrounded and nobody would give me access rites to get them out. I console ported them out as a final solution.
Great job on the stability etc of this. I don't know about MP but single player is solid. Performance was acceptable too.
First a synopsis of what happened in the game
Stage 1- Repel Japan
China(me) fortified its ports with Garrison(which has some bugs in it now where it leaves guys in the wrong places or does not assign them to any particular place. I submitted a bug on this with repro save so hopefully...) and then concentrated all my effort on forts and the north border. The fight was pretty tough and I had to retry once because I didn;t get enough forts up early enough. 2nd try i had 3 forts in each province when they attacked(perhaps i should have done even more instead of prioritizing getting economy up and running). All the warlords joined my faction and sent me oodles of expeditionary forces which were essential in holding back the Japanese. Despite my best efforts they started to sneak through west of the north line(through the warlord provinces) and cut around behind me and headed back to the ocean. Luckily I had gained my strength enough to finally cut off this incursion and after a lot of work managed to get encirclement and kills. This led to enough JP losses that I was able to push forward and soon it was a total route and all of korea was mine. So ends Japan, they sat on their island crying and never came off even once after that. They offered me peace once I took the last of the mainland, and I declared on them again later to get their french occupied rubber and they just sat on their island and watched. Eventually they randomly capitulated to me for no apparent reason. Maybe their manpower was trashed not sure.
Stage 2- Oh oh nazis
The nazis meanwhile had been tearing up everybody and had become the clear threat to my late game. All of Europe was theirs, all of Africa was theirs(them and the Italians) and they were half way to Moscow. I knew if I didn't do something quick it would be bad so using the new 3 way war, I declared on them after taking iraq and iran giving me Africa access as well as the Mediterranean and I was able to join the Russians, despite not being in their faction, and fortify their lines. Yeah new 3 way war system! It worked quite cleanly, the only major issue was my planes were not able to help because they cannot use non allied air bases. During this time i was economy building and by the time I stalled out the German rush on moscow I was a beast with 30 million manpower and more factories then I could fuel the resources for to build stuff.
Stage 3- Mop up
In we go into Italy and then para drop into northern Germany to pincer as well as pushing hard from the russian side. Germany collapsed under massive manpower strain. Near the end of the war the war screen looked crazy with around 20 million Russian casualties, and total casualties in the 30-40 million range. Both russia and germany had gone to scrape the barrel. Germany surrendered and I was able to get parts of italy and northern germany, trying to grab as much steel as I could as I was around 300 in the red on steel as I was not a preferred trading partner and all the steel was taken oddly enough 130 by canada and some other smaller nations were just gobbling up steel in either a bug or some strange strangle japan via resource hoarding. It was pretty effective.
Stage 4- The next big war
After a little bit, the russians declared war on the allies and proceeded to take most of europe. I bided my time and watched the manpower reserves of the allies and the comtern plummet and then at the right moment I attacked russia and it was about a year before they had lost everything and were being pushed back. I stopped at this point because I didnt really feel like the slog that finishing the allies would be. It was clear with my 1000+ factories and 50+ million manpower they would never be able to stop me. I did see the allies start nuking the russians which I had not seen before.
Non plot notes:
The new field marshal system, its getting some criticism and I have to say with having around 300 divisions of size 40, there is absolutely no problem. I used the new marshal pink line management technique some to get him to auto control 5 generals. This works well and is just about identical to having a giant field marshal. You can have seperate tank divisions that don't fall under this auto mode if you so choose and you can still do your spearheads. Most of the time I did it like normal and it was def not a micor management problem at all. Def equal to or better then before.
The new follow army air wing order. I used this only in the final vs-russia battle portion and the game was soooo busy at that point it was really hard to tell if it worked well. In general I saw planes going where they needed to be so its def not completely broken. I do not feel that I can accurately judge the effectiveness + ease of this vs doing it by hand with how complicated the war was. The idea of planes auto following your armies from airport to airport is cool and I plan to use this more in smaller wars to watch it more carefully. I did learn that they won't auto turn on the right missions when doing this and so for a long while half my airforce was just idling.
The new general promotion system. This seems to need some work. This was a HUGE campaign going into the 50s and most generals never got anything beyond what they started with or unlocked shortly after getting them. The generals were just not learning the "from using" type things which are pre-reqs to all the others. And the field marshals got a couple unlocks at the start and then never more again. With how much fighting i did in so many places this doesn't seem right.
Acclimatization, I noticed it counting up and down in cold and hot and I never paid it much attention beyond that so I cannot say how interesting it was.
China focus tree: This tree is very well done. I don't know if its intentional or not but you cannot complete all of it because there is not enough inflation decreases to get all the inflation increases. There is a decision that lowers it and maybe they meant it to be repeatable but its not.
Decisions: These offered some cool ways to change your country(like reforming the army with XP) and ill be interested to see what other countries get.
New production UI: The abilty to do 5x and 10x factory groups means you almost always need only one production group per ground\air group. I don't know why they didnt do this for boats. Its an excellent improvement.
AI: its hard to say playing a totally new thing how the AI did because I missed most of the important europe conquest time. However if I had to guess I would say it was playing well as I never saw anything horrible happen and i did have a lot of battles.
Stability and war support: This is a cooler way to handle world tension and national unity. It makes more sense and I liked the ways you can manipulate it. Changing your economy type different econ modes now requires war readiness instead of world tension. Having your empire wrecked now ruins your economy instead of just a capitulation stat that doesn't matter until it flips.
Oil and rubber production: This is now a much harder investment. You only get 2/2 at first and eventually you can get 8/8 by researching it. That's a lot of techs to spend where as before you could just get the first point and be done with it. Balance wise makes sense. Feels like a big hit to the germans except for the fact that they could get a lore more rubber per building slot.
Capturing equipment: I never noticed this happening. I only checked one battle specifically for this and it said I captured nothing.
Mission system: I think this is just a decision with a time limit? I had one of these happen and the wording on it was pretty bad but basically you had to capture Vietnam area within a certain time if you wanted to fail the mission which actually meant passing the mission. If you failed it you got some nice bonuses and if time ran out you passed it and got penalties. Technically was fine just cosmetically confusing. If there is more to missions then this thing I missed it.
Command power: I didn't use this too much other then buying promotions and playing with it in a few battles. Perhaps its a huge deal that I failed to exploit. I couldn't decide if the large equipment losses was worth the bonus so I just didn't use it.
Special forces: This was a big deal when I started using paratroopers who I don't use normally but not because they are bad. They were super awesome. I don't know if they got improved but they made it really easy to backdoor grab ports etc. The cap makes it much harder to abuse these systems. I could only have about 16 divisions of size 20 with my massive armies.
Minimap: I didn't see it... forgot about looking for that until I read it on the list I am using to recap.
Planes to supply units: I tried this for my paratroopers. It worked but you must need a LOT of planes. In the order of hundreds and those things are heavy production cost.
I probably forgot a lot of things. Hopefully some people find this large wall of text interesting to read if they are on the fence about pulling the trigger on this excellent expansion.
Edit: Bugs
Only real bug was the garisson thing mentioned above. I had some paratroopers refuse to go and after some googling and trying things, I did a save load and then they went. Otherwise the only other thing that happened that was really sucky is 100 divisions got cut off from the world and attritioned a ton because capitulation happened suddenlty and they got trapped by the peace deal. I tried strategic redeploy but they could not get out. For clarity they were in my land but surrounded and nobody would give me access rites to get them out. I console ported them out as a final solution.
Great job on the stability etc of this. I don't know about MP but single player is solid. Performance was acceptable too.
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