I never said don't build refineries, I said don't build them first. They're necessary to have in the long term, but in the short term you want as much equipment ready before the war as possible, and getting 50 mils on tanks and planes each before you start building refineries can make a big difference. If you spend six months building refineries that's six months of lost production when you're on a close timetable. If you build your refineries after France falls instead though, you have a year before barb. During that year you can relax and get your rubber situation sorted out while your air force has nothing to do but intercept bombers.
I was negative 110 rubber after I declared war on the netherlands in my recent game, but it was fine because I had 4000 fully upgraded 1940 fighters already and the RAF didn't. I wouldn't have had 4000 fighters if I had built synthetic refineries first, but because I built mils I got to build up my factory efficiency much sooner. You can afford to have a production dip if you already have your needs met. My rubber stayed negative for a long time, several months in fact before I was able to fix it with enough refineries, but it didn't matter because my air force wasn't sustaining losses during that period. And even during the rubber shortage I just diverted all but 50 of my fighter factories onto tanks and the shortage wasn't even that bad, I was still making 4 fighters a day at -60 rubber.
This was my production queue in August 1940, about 2 months after I knocked out France:
Before the war I had 50 on medium tank 2 to start, then once I got fighter 2 I put the tanks down to 30 and threw everything onto fighters until I had 100 on fighters, then threw everything else on tanks from that point on. I only had 2 factories producing infantry-related equipment the whole time, everything else was for my tank divisions or planes.
And this was the production queue the same day I swapped half of the plane factories back onto tanks since they were basically useless without rubber:
In all honesty, I should have just done that way sooner and I have no idea why I didn't, I just wasn't paying attention. But the point is you can produce enough planes before you are cut off from trade to sustain you through the period when you have a rubber shortage. And in a MP game you'll have fighter 2 way earlier and the axis would probably have close to 15k of them as a faction before the war starts, way more than the Allies.
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