The purpose of this AAR is to document a method I’ve found for winning the second world war as Germany, using submarines, paratroopers, and puppets. It will be part comedy, part tutorial, and depending on how my luck goes, another part comedy (this time, of errors!) Make sure you’re sitting comfortably, as we play Darkest Hour – The game of high-explosive diplomacy!
We’re going to pick a Nazi Germany – none of that yucky communism stuff here, please! National Socialism – the Nice Option!
First of all, go to the production tab. In the automated trade section you’ll want to stockpile oil – we’re going to need it! We’re going to set up ten factory runs in eastern provinces, out of the range of allied bombers, and two runs of ten forts in the border provinces against France. Since we’re going to inherit Saarbrucken later, there’s no need to fortify the province nearby. The other things we’re going to do are set up a run of 3 interceptors, 3 transports, and 3 tactical bombers to fill up the squadrons present in Berlin.
Head on over to diplomacy and take Rudolf Diels for the -10% consumer goods need, and any of the Industrial Specialists in the intelligence minister slot for the +1% IC. Come October, we will add in Hjalmar Schacht in the Armaments Minister slot for +5% IC. Move towards Hawk Lobby to reduce production cost and time, and Free Market to reduce upgrade cost, and to get the sweet Free Market events.
The priorities in technology are as follows:
1. Industry – you need to maximise every ounce of IC and supply production efficiency that you can, plus research modifiers. I also like researching nuclear weapons, though if this grand plan works, the war will be over before we can use them.
2. Armour – what’s Germany with Panzerkampfwagens?
3. Aircraft – we want CAS, FTR, TAC and TRA techs, plus the doctrines. Most important is the doctrine that allows us to perform airborne assaults!
4. Submarines – U-boots are going to be the key we use to secure the route to England and victory – more on that later!
5. Infantry – while Infantry are obviously important because they will form the core of our army, their technologies are not actually completely vital. They’re nice to collect if we can, but in the early game I find there’s plenty of time to pick up everything we need.
For this AAR I’m assuming the reader is familiar with how events work – Germany largely plays itself, and if you follow the events you’ll be alright. I’ll include some of them to help orient the reader, but mostly my screenshots will be of important player decisions and maps rather than the stuff that plays out on it’s own.
In January 1934, we get very lucky, and one of the Free Market events triggers, giving us free blueprints. They aren’t hugely useful blueprints, but every little helps! If we can, we will eventually make a small corps of marines for beach landings, but that small increase in research efficiency is more exciting.
One of the things new players may not be familiar with is money devaluation – in the early game, since you’re not allowed to produce much due to manpower rules, you’ll find yourself with a lot of money, and to my mind the best way to use it is to devalue your currency. This gives you a +0.5% IC, which as Germany can be as much as two or three whole effective IC, which is MUCH better than waiting for the Public Works decision – I believe that gives you +5% IC, but it also produces 1 IC in a province somewhere. To my mind, that’s not worth it for the 6000 that it costs. I’d rather take the small increase earlier than a bigger one down the line – but I’m sure if I were to do the maths the Public Works would be better.
Bear in mind that as Germany you also want to spend lots of money buttering up Austria so you can achieve as early an Anschluss as possible.
After we annex the Saarland from the hated Hon-hon-hons, I start a run of 30 submarines. In this latest patch, you can’t fit submarines with torpedos, but they remain the best way for Germany to compete on the sea. Don’t try to win a stand-up fight, but if you intercept an enemy fleet, even if you lose a load of subs you’re bound to sink something much more expensive than a submarine – it’s the easiest way to send the Royal Navy to the bottom!
Another important set of repeatable decisions – the Recruitment Campaign! During peacetime it’s a swap of 1500 money for 40 manpower, and you could probably do it five times in a game before Danzig or War – you’re looking at 200 manpower extra. That’s a big sum, and you can’t afford NOT to take it! This will provide the manpower you’ll need to build the airforce and panzers during peace.
Making sure you don’t waste dissent reduction is also important – as Germany there’s usually a dissent-reducing event on the horizon, so take every opportunity you can to use that dissent. I use Purge of the Army to improve morale, though it costs us a few good leaders. A few days later, we Create the Wehrmacht, which also reduces dissent.
In 1937, our first Panzers roll off the line – we should have 6 Light Armour Divisions ready for Fall Weiss, and with better optimisation it is probably possible to get 9 out without compromising the rest of this build.
The rest of 1937 is pretty quiet; when we finish the new Sub tech I order another fleet of thirty, and thanks to our 200 relations with Austria, we get the Anschluss pretty much the first week of 1938.
1938 is also pretty dull – the Condor Legion comes home, Fat Bastard Goering works out that you can throw men from a plane into combat. An anonymous member of the Luftwaffe suggests that perhaps we could give the men parachutes, which is exactly the sort of bold radical thinking we’re after! The paratroopers won’t actually be available until early 1940, which may even be late to join in Fall Gelb, but they’ll get their chance to shine…
After the Anschluss, we ‘invite’ the Czechs over for tea and a friendly chat about SURRENDERING TO ZE REICH BEFORR IT IST TOO LATE! Prime Minister Nev helps us by looking the other way at some bits of paper he likes the look of while we diplomatically beat the snot out of the Czech ambassador until he gives us the Sudetenland. (There is a mistake here – because I get a free Hawk Lobby move from this event, I should have moved over to Free Market earlier. Not to worry – it’s not a huge difference in the grand scheme of things, but in a strategy as risky as this I should be paying attention to marginal details like that.)
I love diplomacy.
Speaking of diplomacy, Hjalmar Schacht decides he’d like to go and do some fishing, or whatever it is retired economists do. We diplomatically ask him to stay, and the amount of noise he makes whinging and complaining about not being allowed to go home is so awful that the entire Reich hears it, causing a massive spike in dissent which can only be cured by increased production of toasters and Volkswagens.
At the top of ’39 we get our penultimate free grab – we split Czechoslovakia with Hungary in exchange for an alliance. I instantly assume military control and place their army on the new Polish border.
Just in case something should happen.
Not that anything WOULD happen.
Say, what’s that tasty-looking IC doing in Lithuania? We fire Claim on Memel, and secure a strategic supply of funny cat pictures and reaction gifs. (I’ll get my coat.)
As if to distract from my bad puns, Molotov and von Ribbentrop agree that Poland is making the map look ugly, and it would only be polite to neaten things up a bit. The Polish are less keen on this. We fire up the diplomatic corps – all seventy divisions of them – and let ourselves in to discuss the issue with the Poles.
At the outbreak of war, our order of battle is as follows:
OBERKOMMANDO DES WEST:
Saarbrucken – 3 Cavalry Divisions, 6 Infantry Divisions, 4 Forts.
Mainz – 9 Infantry Divisions, 4 Forts.
Freiburg – 6 Infantry Divisions, plus 3 en route, 4 Forts.
En route: 1 HQ Division
“Fest steht und true die Wacht, we hate the French,
Fest steht und true die Wacht, we hate the French!”
My diplomats are not very creative lyricists.
Their job is quite simple; keep the frogs away. We do this by setting our men on an extremely high diplomatic alert footing. When the three extra infantry divisions, the French break off an attack on Freiburg, giving us a ‘frei’ hand to deal with Poland.
OBERKOMMANDO DES OST:
Koenigsberg – 1 Infantry Division
Allenstein – 3 Light Armour Divisions
Stettin – 3 Light Armour Divisions, 6 Infantry Divisions
Deutsch-Krone – 6 Infantry Divisions
Meitzen (or something. I’ll be honest, I forgot the province name and all I can see in the screenshot is ‘M’.) – 6 Infantry Divisions
Long Province (I forgot this one too.) – 6 Infantry Divisions
Gleiwitz – 18 Infantry Divisions
Os-something – 4 Mountain Divisions
Hungarian Provinces – 15 Infantry Divisions, 2 Cavalry Divisions, 1 HQ Division
The plan is drawn below; attack the south and north, throw infantry to keep the body of the Polish army busy, wrap around to Warsaw and intercept the border troops as they retreat inwards, causing them to be destroyed. Enemy units only need to retreat into a province with one of our divisions in it to be destroyed, so don’t underestimate the effects of running a quick armoured or motorised group in the enemy rear!
LUFTWAFFE:
16 Fighter Divisions in North Germany
8 CAS Divisions in Poland
4 TAC Divisions in Poland
4 TRA Divisions in Poland (doing nothing)
4 INT Divisions in Berlin
The Luftwaffe’s job is simply to shoot down enemy bombers flying over the industrial cities of the Reich. If we left them to it, the Allies can do crippling IC damage, sometimes as much as 20IC lost due to bombs, so it’s best to whack them while we can. The longer the war goes, the better the Allies advantage will become, though, because they can use Canadian, British, ANZAC and South African planes to attack us while we’ve only got the Flying Diplomatic Corps to protect us. ☹
Anyone who’s played a Germany game knows how the Battle of Poland goes – we finish it in just under a month, giving us a chance to turn our hand towards the West. We’re operating on a principle of Strategic Haste – if we slow down at any point the Allies will out-produce us and make conquest impossible. Therefore, the next objectives are, in order:
1. Fall Gelb. Fall right through the Belgians and get the Frogs right in the Gelbs!
2. Fall Seelowe. More details on this top-secret plan later!
3. Unternehmen Weserubung+ - we won’t just invade Denmark and Norway, we’re also going to get Sweden and Finland so we can release UBERSCANDINAVIA and ensure that Paradox Interactive remains our loyal subject!
4. Unternehmen Get-in-there-before-the-italians-bugger-it-up – the invasion of Yugoslavia and Greece. Yugoslavia is useful because we can release Serbia and Croatia, plus the other Balkan states, which provide us with INF divisions which will be valuable in Barbarossa, plus they help eliminate the problem of partisans. They do present an issue with the dissent we get from releasing subjects, but if we’re quick we can wrap up all our wars before the end of 1941 and push down the dissent in time to launch Barbarossa.
Here we are just before the start of July, 1939. We will redeploy some troops, throw everything at the French, and soon we will be hosting diplomacy seminars in the cafés of Paris!
We’re going to pick a Nazi Germany – none of that yucky communism stuff here, please! National Socialism – the Nice Option!
First of all, go to the production tab. In the automated trade section you’ll want to stockpile oil – we’re going to need it! We’re going to set up ten factory runs in eastern provinces, out of the range of allied bombers, and two runs of ten forts in the border provinces against France. Since we’re going to inherit Saarbrucken later, there’s no need to fortify the province nearby. The other things we’re going to do are set up a run of 3 interceptors, 3 transports, and 3 tactical bombers to fill up the squadrons present in Berlin.
Head on over to diplomacy and take Rudolf Diels for the -10% consumer goods need, and any of the Industrial Specialists in the intelligence minister slot for the +1% IC. Come October, we will add in Hjalmar Schacht in the Armaments Minister slot for +5% IC. Move towards Hawk Lobby to reduce production cost and time, and Free Market to reduce upgrade cost, and to get the sweet Free Market events.
The priorities in technology are as follows:
1. Industry – you need to maximise every ounce of IC and supply production efficiency that you can, plus research modifiers. I also like researching nuclear weapons, though if this grand plan works, the war will be over before we can use them.
2. Armour – what’s Germany with Panzerkampfwagens?
3. Aircraft – we want CAS, FTR, TAC and TRA techs, plus the doctrines. Most important is the doctrine that allows us to perform airborne assaults!
4. Submarines – U-boots are going to be the key we use to secure the route to England and victory – more on that later!
5. Infantry – while Infantry are obviously important because they will form the core of our army, their technologies are not actually completely vital. They’re nice to collect if we can, but in the early game I find there’s plenty of time to pick up everything we need.
For this AAR I’m assuming the reader is familiar with how events work – Germany largely plays itself, and if you follow the events you’ll be alright. I’ll include some of them to help orient the reader, but mostly my screenshots will be of important player decisions and maps rather than the stuff that plays out on it’s own.
In January 1934, we get very lucky, and one of the Free Market events triggers, giving us free blueprints. They aren’t hugely useful blueprints, but every little helps! If we can, we will eventually make a small corps of marines for beach landings, but that small increase in research efficiency is more exciting.
One of the things new players may not be familiar with is money devaluation – in the early game, since you’re not allowed to produce much due to manpower rules, you’ll find yourself with a lot of money, and to my mind the best way to use it is to devalue your currency. This gives you a +0.5% IC, which as Germany can be as much as two or three whole effective IC, which is MUCH better than waiting for the Public Works decision – I believe that gives you +5% IC, but it also produces 1 IC in a province somewhere. To my mind, that’s not worth it for the 6000 that it costs. I’d rather take the small increase earlier than a bigger one down the line – but I’m sure if I were to do the maths the Public Works would be better.
Bear in mind that as Germany you also want to spend lots of money buttering up Austria so you can achieve as early an Anschluss as possible.
After we annex the Saarland from the hated Hon-hon-hons, I start a run of 30 submarines. In this latest patch, you can’t fit submarines with torpedos, but they remain the best way for Germany to compete on the sea. Don’t try to win a stand-up fight, but if you intercept an enemy fleet, even if you lose a load of subs you’re bound to sink something much more expensive than a submarine – it’s the easiest way to send the Royal Navy to the bottom!
Another important set of repeatable decisions – the Recruitment Campaign! During peacetime it’s a swap of 1500 money for 40 manpower, and you could probably do it five times in a game before Danzig or War – you’re looking at 200 manpower extra. That’s a big sum, and you can’t afford NOT to take it! This will provide the manpower you’ll need to build the airforce and panzers during peace.
Making sure you don’t waste dissent reduction is also important – as Germany there’s usually a dissent-reducing event on the horizon, so take every opportunity you can to use that dissent. I use Purge of the Army to improve morale, though it costs us a few good leaders. A few days later, we Create the Wehrmacht, which also reduces dissent.
In 1937, our first Panzers roll off the line – we should have 6 Light Armour Divisions ready for Fall Weiss, and with better optimisation it is probably possible to get 9 out without compromising the rest of this build.
The rest of 1937 is pretty quiet; when we finish the new Sub tech I order another fleet of thirty, and thanks to our 200 relations with Austria, we get the Anschluss pretty much the first week of 1938.
1938 is also pretty dull – the Condor Legion comes home, Fat Bastard Goering works out that you can throw men from a plane into combat. An anonymous member of the Luftwaffe suggests that perhaps we could give the men parachutes, which is exactly the sort of bold radical thinking we’re after! The paratroopers won’t actually be available until early 1940, which may even be late to join in Fall Gelb, but they’ll get their chance to shine…
After the Anschluss, we ‘invite’ the Czechs over for tea and a friendly chat about SURRENDERING TO ZE REICH BEFORR IT IST TOO LATE! Prime Minister Nev helps us by looking the other way at some bits of paper he likes the look of while we diplomatically beat the snot out of the Czech ambassador until he gives us the Sudetenland. (There is a mistake here – because I get a free Hawk Lobby move from this event, I should have moved over to Free Market earlier. Not to worry – it’s not a huge difference in the grand scheme of things, but in a strategy as risky as this I should be paying attention to marginal details like that.)
I love diplomacy.
Speaking of diplomacy, Hjalmar Schacht decides he’d like to go and do some fishing, or whatever it is retired economists do. We diplomatically ask him to stay, and the amount of noise he makes whinging and complaining about not being allowed to go home is so awful that the entire Reich hears it, causing a massive spike in dissent which can only be cured by increased production of toasters and Volkswagens.
At the top of ’39 we get our penultimate free grab – we split Czechoslovakia with Hungary in exchange for an alliance. I instantly assume military control and place their army on the new Polish border.
Just in case something should happen.
Not that anything WOULD happen.
Say, what’s that tasty-looking IC doing in Lithuania? We fire Claim on Memel, and secure a strategic supply of funny cat pictures and reaction gifs. (I’ll get my coat.)
As if to distract from my bad puns, Molotov and von Ribbentrop agree that Poland is making the map look ugly, and it would only be polite to neaten things up a bit. The Polish are less keen on this. We fire up the diplomatic corps – all seventy divisions of them – and let ourselves in to discuss the issue with the Poles.
At the outbreak of war, our order of battle is as follows:
OBERKOMMANDO DES WEST:
Saarbrucken – 3 Cavalry Divisions, 6 Infantry Divisions, 4 Forts.
Mainz – 9 Infantry Divisions, 4 Forts.
Freiburg – 6 Infantry Divisions, plus 3 en route, 4 Forts.
En route: 1 HQ Division
“Fest steht und true die Wacht, we hate the French,
Fest steht und true die Wacht, we hate the French!”
My diplomats are not very creative lyricists.
Their job is quite simple; keep the frogs away. We do this by setting our men on an extremely high diplomatic alert footing. When the three extra infantry divisions, the French break off an attack on Freiburg, giving us a ‘frei’ hand to deal with Poland.
OBERKOMMANDO DES OST:
Koenigsberg – 1 Infantry Division
Allenstein – 3 Light Armour Divisions
Stettin – 3 Light Armour Divisions, 6 Infantry Divisions
Deutsch-Krone – 6 Infantry Divisions
Meitzen (or something. I’ll be honest, I forgot the province name and all I can see in the screenshot is ‘M’.) – 6 Infantry Divisions
Long Province (I forgot this one too.) – 6 Infantry Divisions
Gleiwitz – 18 Infantry Divisions
Os-something – 4 Mountain Divisions
Hungarian Provinces – 15 Infantry Divisions, 2 Cavalry Divisions, 1 HQ Division
The plan is drawn below; attack the south and north, throw infantry to keep the body of the Polish army busy, wrap around to Warsaw and intercept the border troops as they retreat inwards, causing them to be destroyed. Enemy units only need to retreat into a province with one of our divisions in it to be destroyed, so don’t underestimate the effects of running a quick armoured or motorised group in the enemy rear!
LUFTWAFFE:
16 Fighter Divisions in North Germany
8 CAS Divisions in Poland
4 TAC Divisions in Poland
4 TRA Divisions in Poland (doing nothing)
4 INT Divisions in Berlin
The Luftwaffe’s job is simply to shoot down enemy bombers flying over the industrial cities of the Reich. If we left them to it, the Allies can do crippling IC damage, sometimes as much as 20IC lost due to bombs, so it’s best to whack them while we can. The longer the war goes, the better the Allies advantage will become, though, because they can use Canadian, British, ANZAC and South African planes to attack us while we’ve only got the Flying Diplomatic Corps to protect us. ☹
Anyone who’s played a Germany game knows how the Battle of Poland goes – we finish it in just under a month, giving us a chance to turn our hand towards the West. We’re operating on a principle of Strategic Haste – if we slow down at any point the Allies will out-produce us and make conquest impossible. Therefore, the next objectives are, in order:
1. Fall Gelb. Fall right through the Belgians and get the Frogs right in the Gelbs!
2. Fall Seelowe. More details on this top-secret plan later!
3. Unternehmen Weserubung+ - we won’t just invade Denmark and Norway, we’re also going to get Sweden and Finland so we can release UBERSCANDINAVIA and ensure that Paradox Interactive remains our loyal subject!
4. Unternehmen Get-in-there-before-the-italians-bugger-it-up – the invasion of Yugoslavia and Greece. Yugoslavia is useful because we can release Serbia and Croatia, plus the other Balkan states, which provide us with INF divisions which will be valuable in Barbarossa, plus they help eliminate the problem of partisans. They do present an issue with the dissent we get from releasing subjects, but if we’re quick we can wrap up all our wars before the end of 1941 and push down the dissent in time to launch Barbarossa.
Here we are just before the start of July, 1939. We will redeploy some troops, throw everything at the French, and soon we will be hosting diplomacy seminars in the cafés of Paris!