The third test is over. It is a
qualified success. I think jju_57 will agree with me that it technically counts as success, but that dark secrets lurk underneath the OOB, making it clear that the Soviet Union is nerfed quietly in such a way that you really need to fire Great Patriotic War and associated events/decisions in order to call upon the full power of the Soviet Union in historical terms. Whether this is good or bad is up to debate, but let's go over the numbers.
First, the screenshots:
Not shown: I built a few province AA to generate practicals. They weren't on the list, and they wouldn't show up in these screenshots.
The good news:
The last item I needed to build was the final STR, and it completed basically two weeks before the final date. It was close, but I got there.
All divisions are more or less at their best staffing under the current draft laws (Two Year Draft in 1941). I've built no supply the entire time, as I've been buying up supply. I feel this is historical and okay in the context of the game, although the deficit you see on the supply stockpile represents a problem that cannot be fixed via trade too much longer. Since the war is about start, I don't consider that a problem either.
Officer ratio is where it needs to be; that being said, I want to emphasize that the inefficiency of this particular build scheme in HOI3 terms really hurts the Soviets in leadership. That's a lot of INF brigades chewing up officers and not IC, whereas if I had built something closer to what I normally build, there would be fewer overall brigades (fewer officers), but they would be more IC intensive.
Manpower was a close shave, but I have enough manpower to cover mobilization, plus 170 extra. This isn't exactly the best set up, but you can't say that the divisions I built are phantom formations. They can get up to full strength upon starting the war.
The Winter War lasted from November 1st to March 3rd. I went to HI during the conflict, and that did help a bunch. I almost spent too much time on the Winter War, but that's because a blizzard slowed my units down to a crawl in February, making it almost impossible to win in time.
I did clean up the Soviet OOB. It's easy to forget that HQs count as active duty brigades, costing officers AND eating up consumer goods demand. I disbanded about two dozen useless HQs in 1936, netting me 3 fewer IC on the consumer demand slider. Not much, but every little bit helps. It also cut supply costs down a tad.
In order to achieve the highest rate of optimization, I did something I normally don't do during a build: I only built brigades, not whole divisions. I queued up brigades in batches that I felt would be both easy to manage (in terms of tracking numbers built) and that would maximize practicals. I concentrated on armor first under Volunteer Army, alongside CAV and AC for mobile practicals. The infantry came later in large batches. Aircraft were cooked on practicals early, but only after the switch to Two Year Draft did I start building significant aircraft. I completed the ships already in the queue to generate practicals, but other ships were only begun in earnest in 1939.
I only built around 40 base IC.
I stole several techs from the Allies, but nothing interesting for this particular build (too bad I wasn't asked to build CVs, because I stole both CAG and CV from the French).
Industrial techs stayed at the top of queue until I hit 1940 industrial techs (which put me ahead of time anyway). The Soviets are so far behind in these two categories that getting them up to speed is an absolute must. The construction practicals from the IC I built made it possible to make Soviet industry much more efficient overall.
A key consideration on the level of success is when Germany enacts certain decisions. The sooner Germany does Anschluss and Danzig or War, the sooner Soviet IC increases efficiency. Anschluss puts the Soviets at low enough neutrality to run War Economy, and Danzig or War takes neutrality to zero, killing most consumer good demand.
I maintained CGO the entire time, except during the Winter War.
Why I failed the first two times:
There are a few complicated reasons that caused initial failure. First, the GAR/MP brigades are active duty, and this increase consumer good demand. The first time around, I built them early, causing me to lose overall IC for literally no reason. Second, the most expensive army units need to be produced under the lowest law allowed. In earlier tests, I built all kinds of things under Volunteer Army that took away build slots from ARM and LARM. Getting them done earlier cut their cost substantially. Third, I failed in using HI. It was a mistake to implement it in the ways I did in the first two attempts. The increase in consumer good demand wasn't justified by the reduced build costs.
Another thing that cropped up in both failures was the problem of excessive IC. Trying to put 60 base IC into action was too much. I still had a couple of stray IC in the build queue in 1939, which is completely unacceptable for trying to get a 1941 build in place. Not only does it not pay itself off in time, it literally takes production away from units that need to be built right now under Volunteer Army.
The Dark Side of the Soviet Build Plan:
Dark secrets lurk in the numbers.
First of all, it was such a close shave that literally a single bad event that steals IC from me would have resulted in failure (I got one). The same goes for positive IC events; I got one or two nationalization events with IC boosts. Without them, it wouldn't have happened.
Another consideration is technology. It took 19 months under Two Year Draft to get the Red Army to 85% officer ratio. This is simply atrocious, but it illustrates the hard choices the Soviets have to make. If you go with Three Year Draft, your units are more expensive and you can't meet the build. But if you did that, more leadership would be available for tech and officers, netting a higher officer ratio (which in HOI3 is what is really important). And on that note, my technology was pretty bad. You see a lot of upgrade costs, but nothing I have is higher than 1940, and some categories didn't even get that high. This build scheme precludes any kind of serious technological parity with anyone else.
The elephant in the room is manpower. I had enough, but we would all agree that 170 spare manpower on June 22nd of 1941 doesn't really model Soviet resources. Now, the Soviets can count on manpower via event, but anyone could reasonably claim that the Soviets don't have quite enough manpower to reach historical builds OR that HOI3's mechanics are heavily biased against historical builds.
The other elephant in the room is the gross inefficiency of the Soviet build. It's an insane waste of resources to build all that ARM and pair it with ARM and LARM. Then there's the pointless MOT divisions. The build is so inefficient that I'm not sure if translating the regiments to brigades makes sense. HOI3 really doesn't have the granularity to do justice to OOBs in general. This means that there is a huge disparity between being able to build a historical OOB and being powerful enough in game terms. I can literally build a Red Army that could trounce the historical Soviet OOB with no problems, and still not employ that many ARM brigades. This means that a country could hypothetically have enough resources to build a good army, but not its historical army, because the historical OOB is wasteful and stupid.
A final consideration is tech. The lack of optimization in the OOB translates into odd tech choices. It's very hard to optimize the Soviet techs in question when the OOB is such a mess, especially with the ships.
Did I leave anything out? Questions? Comments? Complaints?
