HOI questions from newbie

[unmerged(54503)]

Good to know thanks. I can therefore build up my forces without concern of being hit on my frontiers, and make efforts to go at some of my enemies' african possessions. Speaking of, italy eventually joins axis and declares war. I dragooned up some fairly useless calvary (figuring it'd be good enough against the italians) and sent them to africa to stop/counterattack them there, along with a good chunk of my tac air (plus moved my navy into the med). I was doing quite well actually blunting the enemy initial assault, however suddenly I found all my troops/planes out of supplies. Come to find out my convoys were apparently getting hammered by enemy subs/planes, and I had nearly no convoy transports left. A harsh lesson in their importance, however this brings up even more questions.

Is there any way to track this stuff, other than to constantly look at the convoy status panel? Until the WTF moment came where I ran out of all supplies, I had no idea that it was going on. In short, is there a way to know how you're doing against enemy anti-convoy forces? Conversely, if I had my subs out attacking enemy convoys, how do I know how well they're doing? Since it seems you don't get a report when they find and do attack something, how do you know if your efforts are succeeding or failing in this area? If someone could provide information on how to manage this area (well lol) that'd also be appreciated.

You should be getting pop up messages whenever you sink enemy convoys and escorts unless you have them turned off. The default install has them turned on. I get the little black message boxes pop up everytime I sink a convoy/escort.

I don't think you can tell how overall effective your doing in terms of how many the enemy has left in the pool, or how many he has being built.

As far as keeping track of your own. Well the information is there in your production screen. I don't feel safe unless I have upwards of 400 extra convoy ships extra over and above what I need for my convoys. You get down to just 250 extra you better start building more. That presumes your playing a major power of course with the possible exception of the Soviets.

 

[unmerged(41649)]

As France, it is hard enough to hold your own against the Germans come 1940. I only played it once, but what I did was abandon all of the colonies, and just build 100s of infantry divisions so that I outnumbered Germany. Then I just held out against them and eventually pocketed a bunch and then invaded them.

 

[Black Watch]

Is there any way to track this stuff, other than to constantly look at the convoy status panel? Until the WTF moment came where I ran out of all supplies, I had no idea that it was going on. In short, is there a way to know how you're doing against enemy anti-convoy forces? Conversely, if I had my subs out attacking enemy convoys, how do I know how well they're doing? Since it seems you don't get a report when they find and do attack something, how do you know if your efforts are succeeding or failing in this area? If someone could provide information on how to manage this area (well lol) that'd also be appreciated.

As Tris said, your convoy sinking updates are probably disabled for some reason, it should be appearing in the events panel at least. You can change this in message settings.

As to convoy numbers, many players of maritime powers like the UK keep convoys building the whole game, especially when Germany's the enemy. You can quickly keep track of unused convoy capacity in the production screen, but if you're allowing the AI to manage your convoys, this number can fluctuate wildly. The Convoy Summary screen in Statistics provides a better overview.