I have considered a MOT/AC with no air cover build just for the lulz, but that's more about being silly than anything else. Like the time I decided to beat AI France with just divisions of pure INF. (It was a boring way to win, in case anyone was wondering.)
Yep. It's for reference purposes. It's sure as Hell not a blueprint for your own IC build up.
There's another dimension to why I do tests like this. It's related to meta-cognitive analysis, though, so be prepared to be bored if that's not your thing.
In gaming today, many players want to know "the meta." They want the optimum strategy to win (or be successful). In MMORPGs, we see this in terms of gear, skill trees, and skill rotations. But it's not just MMOs. You go back to the 90s, and you see it in Age of Empires games where you are supposed to build the second X at time stamp 1:50 in location Y to give you the optimum edge. Everyone blames Starcraft for this sort of thing, but I remember being mocked in Age of Empires by an opponent because I didn't do the meta thing before Starcraft even existed. (He lost, by the way. That's what he gets for wasting time typing troll messages in chat instead of moving peasants to a new resource.)
In Paradox GSGs, players are still looking for "the meta." The problem with this in most of these games is that, while there are better and worse strategies, the idea that there is a meta is misleading due to all the moving parts and unequal starts. I know @Fulmen is in this thread, and he will no doubt remind us that in MP, many strats are meta due to being well tested and applicable in the controlled situations in which those MP games happen. But even he has talked about how changing a few things in terms of what minors are human controlled or what neutrals are allowed to be attacked can result in a wildly different ideal approaches.
This means that even if you find "the meta" for Germany, you haven't really gotten the optimum strategy. With all the variables you have to account for when playing (even when stupid AI allies make life difficult), being slavishly devoted to whatever "the meta" is doesn't really help you be a better or more knowledgeable player. To be knowledgeable and better, you need to understand why a particular meta works well.
Taking this test as an example, let's say you are a advocate for two years of CIC as Germany. That's fine. But you really need to know why it's a good idea, and you should know and understand the trade offs you make with this choice. Factory count by itself doesn't tell you as much as you think it does especially considering that in HOI4, MIC needs time to build production efficiency. Even if I complete 25 military factories today, they aren't making me much for a few weeks.
Where this gets a bit into meta-cognition (which is not a video game meta) is that there is a fundamental difference between blindly following a meta, understanding why that meta works, and understanding the limits of that meta. It's the difference between knowing something and knowing why you know something and knowing the limits of your knowledge.
And against challenging opponents, knowing the limits of a meta and trade offs is pretty damn important. Let me give an example.
Before MtG, we had a game where the Italian player decided he was going to put a significantly larger army than normal in Ethiopia. I was Germany, and I didn't really approve of this. But I'm nothing if not flexible, and I figured that doing something weird and definitely not meta always has value in terms of surprise.
The game goes pretty normal until Italy enters the war. I help them contest the Med, of course, but the real star of the show in January of 1940 is the Italian force in Ethiopia. The British were completely unprepared for this, and even though they were interdicting Italian supplies, the Italian player was doing a good job tactically making life miserable for the British and Dominions. In fact, it got so bad that Britain stripped most of India of its divisions and sent them to Africa.
Now, let's stop right there for a second. Smart players will no doubt be nodding their heads thinking that once the Italians are crushed those divisions can go right back to India. With the Italians half out of supply, it should be easy. But what is happening in this MP game is no longer even cousins with a typical game at this point. Whatever you think the meta is and should be, the situation is different now.
We play MP slow, so while the battle continued in Africa, everyone in the Axis-Japanese channel in Discord began noting increased Indian presence in Africa. Then our Japanese player confirmed the lack of Indian divisions at home covering important things like Burma and various ports. At this point, I called a conference with all humans on our side and asked them whether they were willing to throw caution to the wind and have Japan join the war now. Our Japanese player was fine with it, and the Italian player was willing to keep burning command points on last stand to slow down the British as long as possible. And I committed even more of the Luftwaffe to the Med to make the Allies think a major attack was coming there.
The result was that Italian East Africa did end up falling to the British, but the British army never made it back to India before Japan had DOWed and seized the relevant parts of India. And with the Japanese racing across India towards Iran, a lot of British divisions were stuck in transit and out of position, unable to defend India or the Med. So, a joint German and Italian operation made it to the Suez and Gibraltar and closed the Med.
We won that war hands down, but it sure as Hell wasn't due to anything related to any meta. Instead, we could win through improvisation because we all understood the limits and trade offs associated with various strategies. No one could have even planned for that outcome from the start, and no one on our side would have thought for one minute that India would be bereft of defense.
Someone is about to say, "That's just the British player being stupid" but it's more complicated than that. It's closer to the British player being a slave to the meta. The meta says Japan won't be attacking until 1941 and Ethiopia should fall quickly, so in terms of the meta, it's okay to move a ton of Indian divisions to East Africa just because the Italians are being obstinate. The moment you become a slave to the meta, you become trapped and unable to see opportunities both on your side and enemy side.
I could recount several stories like this one that all show the limits of "the meta." There's the time the Soviets lost all their ports, but were able to survive thanks to pre-researching synthetic rubber techs. There's the time the Germans used nukes to try and crack Soviet defensive lines in 1945. There's the time I ordered the Panama Canal destroyed (I'm still the only person in our group who's ever had to do it). There's the time Japan bypassed India and struck directly at the Middle East, and in that same game, the Soviets attacked Japan to block them (how often do you see Soviet and Japanese forces fighting over Baghdad?). Then there's the game where Britain used tech boosts and design companies to create 1944 light fighters with the light fighter design company in1940, and then picked the strategic bomber design company and applied it to the 1944 strategic bomber in 1941. That game still holds the record for highest percentage of German MIC offline consistently over a period of years. (That was 33-35% of German MIC offline, for those counting.)
HOI4 isn't chess. It's far more complicated than chess. However, there is value in being able to see multiple strategies in your mind and extrapolate from them to desired outcomes, not unlike the greatest chess players do when mapping out moves 20-30 moves ahead of time. Tests like this help provide that kind of data for players.
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