Hi guys,
In SP I'm still struggling to find a strategy for the Axis that doesn't involve excess cheese.
That means no Dutch gambit.
Prioritising the Kriegsmarine over the Heer , performing Sealion immediately after the fall of France to defeat the Allied faction in 1940 works as well.
However, if you play a more historical path and prioritise the army, other members of your faction invariably start collapsing before you can even defeat USSR.
A lot of attention is focused on the attrition Italy suffers in the Sahara, which may explain why their division count drops and drops throughout the war until they start crumbling. But, I think there's an even bigger issue, that has nothing to do with low infra provinces.
As we all know, the AI loves to shuffle divisions. The problem is, when you have an African theatre, it will choose to do so across the Med. Against the combined might of the French and British navies, the Regia Marina gets wiped out within a few months.
I've tried going after Yugoslavia and Turkey before Poland, to allow a land route to Suez. I quickly took the canal and established a land link to the Italians in Libya. This reduced, but did not eliminate Italian naval redeployments through the water and most of the divisions they sent that way got sunk.
You can't close off the med until 1941 because Spain is reluctant to join the Axis, and even if you attack the Falangists all this does is prevent the Allies sending new ships. Because of the way Naval combat works - large fleet meeting small fleet means small fleet loses several or all ships, large fleet only gets minor damage to one or two vessels that is easily repaired - the Italian Navy will never recover.
Establishing Naval supremacy means taking all of North Africa, Greece and the Levant, Cyprus, Crete and Malta and putting your own battle group in there. Even then, you never quite get rid of the submarines predating on Axis merchantmen and need a decent ASW unit in each sea zone.
In that game, I conquered Iran, Iraq and the British Raj, establishing a land route to the Far Eastern axis. However, it turns out joining the war with Nationalist China was a mistake, because Italy then tried to send troops to this front. Naturally it thought going through the Red Sea, past Djibouti, Aden, Columbo, Singapore and Hong Kong was much quicker than overland across the rail links i built.
The only way i could stop the carnage was to focus all my efforts on taking out Nationalist China ASAP.
So in conclusion then, given the state of the AI, it seems you really need to build an ahistorically strong Navy to stop the other Axis nations getting slaughtered at sea. This results in a much weaker army, but with micro and human advantage, you should still be able to conquer Europe.
You could probably make a success of things as Italy and Germany. However as Japan, the Axis are inevitably defeated in Europe by 1941, despite my hard slog through China, India, the East Indies and Siberia.
In SP I'm still struggling to find a strategy for the Axis that doesn't involve excess cheese.
That means no Dutch gambit.
Prioritising the Kriegsmarine over the Heer , performing Sealion immediately after the fall of France to defeat the Allied faction in 1940 works as well.
However, if you play a more historical path and prioritise the army, other members of your faction invariably start collapsing before you can even defeat USSR.
A lot of attention is focused on the attrition Italy suffers in the Sahara, which may explain why their division count drops and drops throughout the war until they start crumbling. But, I think there's an even bigger issue, that has nothing to do with low infra provinces.
As we all know, the AI loves to shuffle divisions. The problem is, when you have an African theatre, it will choose to do so across the Med. Against the combined might of the French and British navies, the Regia Marina gets wiped out within a few months.
I've tried going after Yugoslavia and Turkey before Poland, to allow a land route to Suez. I quickly took the canal and established a land link to the Italians in Libya. This reduced, but did not eliminate Italian naval redeployments through the water and most of the divisions they sent that way got sunk.
You can't close off the med until 1941 because Spain is reluctant to join the Axis, and even if you attack the Falangists all this does is prevent the Allies sending new ships. Because of the way Naval combat works - large fleet meeting small fleet means small fleet loses several or all ships, large fleet only gets minor damage to one or two vessels that is easily repaired - the Italian Navy will never recover.
Establishing Naval supremacy means taking all of North Africa, Greece and the Levant, Cyprus, Crete and Malta and putting your own battle group in there. Even then, you never quite get rid of the submarines predating on Axis merchantmen and need a decent ASW unit in each sea zone.
In that game, I conquered Iran, Iraq and the British Raj, establishing a land route to the Far Eastern axis. However, it turns out joining the war with Nationalist China was a mistake, because Italy then tried to send troops to this front. Naturally it thought going through the Red Sea, past Djibouti, Aden, Columbo, Singapore and Hong Kong was much quicker than overland across the rail links i built.
The only way i could stop the carnage was to focus all my efforts on taking out Nationalist China ASAP.
So in conclusion then, given the state of the AI, it seems you really need to build an ahistorically strong Navy to stop the other Axis nations getting slaughtered at sea. This results in a much weaker army, but with micro and human advantage, you should still be able to conquer Europe.
You could probably make a success of things as Italy and Germany. However as Japan, the Axis are inevitably defeated in Europe by 1941, despite my hard slog through China, India, the East Indies and Siberia.
