I am 100% new to grand strategy games besides stellaris. Main tips for dh?

[Colonizor48]

I was also curious to have a look.
In general you are doing surprisingly good.

Some hints:

• The most effective way to raise IC is bringing down dissent, as a matter of fact it is much more efficient and the payback is much higher than building new IC. Additionally dissent is a direct negative multiplier on combat and also severly lowers your transport capacity... and a red transport capacity is also a negative multiplier to your units speed and combat effectiveness... so it adds quite up.
  
  
• If your army has not enough supplies, they get hit heavily by attrition which leads to first loss of morale than even health.
  
  
• When producing units, it is always good to make what's called serial 99-production lines. You might not need 99 but you can delete or lower or raise the number whenever you want to. Long lines gives you the really nice to gearing bonus, practically a discount on production. But the gearing bonus is lost when the unit isn't produced at 100% (indicated by the colour changing from green to light green or even red and the tool tip on it saying "Progress is going at full speed/51% of nominal speed/no progress").
  
  
• But when at war and in combat, more important than producing more units is the "reinforcement" slider which fills up your damaged units with new soldiers. A unit at 50% health also fights only at 50% strength.

So, priority with the economics sliders should go to:
1) Always ensure that enough supplies are available and consumer goods should be at least at the minimum to get not more dissent.
2) Next important: reinforcements. Can be finetuned on a unit's level with prioritized usually going to what you deem your presently most important units whcih then will be filled up first.
3) What's left goes into production and more consumer goods to lower dissent.
4) Upgrades, in war time, has probably lowest priority. Especially since units, upgrade even without allocating IC, to a slow extent automatically IF in supply and even faster with each reinforcement. This automatic upgrade ability can be also used greatly to make rather cheap MOT out of Cav (can be set in the individual unit's menu).

Short term: Perhaps, instead of the big encirclement, a smaller one and trying a breakthru at Kirovograd might be interesting. But keep in mind that as long as the German army has access to the Black Sea, it is very likely that they won't be really encircled but supplied over the Black Sea.

Long term: Germany has double the IC than USSR and still plenty of man power. It looks like the existence of a neutral Poland is of quite an advantage for the USSR since it keeps the front short and most of the German forces away... otherwise it would look a bit troubling. So you probably should be careful not to overextend even when you are winning at the Romanian frontier.

A very unique interesting a-historical setting you have got there. Have fun!

Thanks for the tips! This is definitly a pretty interasting setting. In this timeline ww2 looks alot more like ww1 because the western front is a stalemate and the eastern front is too.

 

[Colonizor48]

My long term plan is to try to keep the stalemate long enough to get nukes or for the allies to help.
Eiither that or focus on tactical bombers and bomb germany to widdle down their industry whilst grinding down their divisions slowly but surly until they cant reenforce/make new divisions. Thats when i go in for the kill.

 

[Colonizor48]

I wish different tank models between countreis had differences besides name(the soviet t34 would be way quicker to build but be weaker just like irl for example) Or heck the aibility to design tanks and stuff to try to choose quality or quantity. If anyone knows if a mod like this exists(prob not) pls tell me.

 

[TemporalAnomaly]

So, I went through your save and I had a blast.

I gave it a few tries and the front line units were just too chewed up to hold the front where it started, so I strat-deployed them all back to Rostov and Kursk. I spent two months repairing, and it forever for Germany to capture the provinces I abandoned, as the infrastructure was so chewed up. I then reduced unrest through the winter and was ready to go when the mud ended.

(save games attached)

In the 'mud-end' save there is a huge group of fast units staged in Rostov for you. Take them down the Black Sea coast then toward the Danube and the Polish boarder. You should be able to easily get to Vienna before the Germans can put a real relief army together.

Give it a try it is fun and good practice.

 

[Colonizor48]

So, I went through your save and I had a blast.

I gave it a few tries and the front line units were just too chewed up to hold the front where it started, so I strat-deployed them all back to Rostov and Kursk. I spent two months repairing, and it forever for Germany to capture the provinces I abandoned, as the infrastructure was so chewed up. I then reduced unrest through the winter and was ready to go when the mud ended.

(save games attached)

In the 'mud-end' save there is a huge group of fast units staged in Rostov for you. Take them down the Black Sea coast then toward the Danube and the Polish boarder. You should be able to easily get to Vienna before the Germans can put a real relief army together.

Give it a try it is fun and good practice.

View attachment 738086

Thks for this. I tried to move on a bit after that posted save but i was locked in a pretty hard stalemate lol. Thks for this. Im going to try it. Fun fact. This is actually a better scenario then ww2 in otl because only 3 million soviets dead and 1 million germans dead so far. In otl like 27 million soviets died. But the condititions on the frontlines are probably friccin post apocolyptic at this point lol.

 

[Colonizor48]

Yes.

Special missions, manual page 122 ff.
Very short description (since you seem to insist not to read the really helpful manual):
# support-defence: moves to support attacked units in adjascent regions, needs only half the time to normal move order, manually ordered
# reserves: same as above but automatic once set
# anti-partisan duty: doubles the suppression value of the unit, very helpful in regions where you need to supress partisans, best done by garrison-units

General rule of thumb for land combat:
You win battles best and fastest by depleting the org of the enemy units and for this you use combined arms, mainly inf/art for mostly stationary units, infantry without brigades as your bread and butter unit, MOT and ARM(=tanks) for the spearheads and airforce to support battles according to Schwerpunkt-doctrine (thus Air Mission: ground support targetting morale is better than ground attack, both can be done by either TAC, longer range, or CAS, more damage).
You destroy enemy units by either:

• Blitzkrieg tactics (Wehrmacht): encircling them until they have no more region to retreat (which will delete them in the next defeat in a battle). Encircling is done by armored spearheads: Panzer plus MOT but usually you try to keep them out of combat so they can actually move to encircle... which means you will strife to do the actual fighting with your infantry
  or
• Deep Operation tactics (Red Army) by overrolling them: you defeat an enemy unit, they retreat to a region but a unit of yours is there earlier which will delete the retreating enemy unit upon arrival (best for this are MOT - motorized units because they are the fastest)
• (Wehrmacht) and (Red Army) shall only hint to the early developers of those tactics, the tactics themselves can be used by any country/army.

See also:
Concepts of how to wage war:

• Concepts Of Warfare by Mikkel (shortest, funniest and best introduction to military campaign planning I know and universally applicable)
• Wehrmacht:
  • Auftragstaktik (german (much better)/english (quite bad, you should learn German if you want to get serious about military theory and tactics *grin)
  • Schwerpunkt
  • Blitzkrieg
• Red Army: Deep Operations

What choice of units, especially land units, is heavily dictated by your choice of tactics and your bottlenecks. If you have lack of manpower you counter this by going for more expensive but more manpower efficient units like air units, MOT, ARM. If IC is your bottleneck, simple inf are best and most efficient. If oil and/or TC (transport capacity) is your bottleneck, use as few oil- and supply-hungry units as possible.

I am actually learning german but its completly unrelated to this and i dont know much of it.

 

[Colonizor48]

So, I went through your save and I had a blast.

I gave it a few tries and the front line units were just too chewed up to hold the front where it started, so I strat-deployed them all back to Rostov and Kursk. I spent two months repairing, and it forever for Germany to capture the provinces I abandoned, as the infrastructure was so chewed up. I then reduced unrest through the winter and was ready to go when the mud ended.

(save games attached)

In the 'mud-end' save there is a huge group of fast units staged in Rostov for you. Take them down the Black Sea coast then toward the Danube and the Polish boarder. You should be able to easily get to Vienna before the Germans can put a real relief army together.

Give it a try it is fun and good practice.

View attachment 738086

Allright playing your save this is what i have managed to achive. I got a tone of encirclements, stalled for a bit. But im back on the offensive once more.
Can i get a gg? Bouta encircle the entire friccin german army.

 

[Colonizor48]

ive annexed romania. I annexed them, made thema puppet, then realised that wasnt a good idea during the middle of a war so i used acceptall and reannexed them. Really wish there was a way to annex puppets like in hoi4. Just make them always accept all diplo agreements from their puppet master or somthing. Also encirclement inside an encirclement. Should be fine tho. I was able to get that unit out. Should have taken victory points with motorized and encircled with tanks but it worked still.

 

[Colonizor48]

How do u merge air groups?\
NVM figgured it out

 

[Colonizor48]

endsieg has began. Realized im gonna have to naval invade konnigsburg. How fun. Germany probably doesnt have a navy so i should be fine.

EDIT(it seems like they have a tone of naval bombers. How fun.

 

[Altruist]

How do u merge air groups?

You select the air base which will auto-select a single air unit. Now you drag over all units in the region with a LMB while holding SHIFT which will select all air units. Shown in a list to the left. If you want to merge all, just press the "merge" button to the lower right. Deselecting any unit from the list with SHIFT-LMB onto the unit which you want to deselect.

I've noticed your intense usage of brigades for militia and how costly they are...
Just a few month ago we had a small discussion about brigades here in the forum started by Pandrea.
Which ones for what units, wether at all, that stuff... might be interesting stuff to read: The big brigades' book!

 

[Altruist]

ive annexed romania.

Good work.

endsieg has began. Realized im gonna have to naval invade konnigsburg. How fun. Germany probably doesnt have a navy so i should be fine.

Cakewalk *grin
I reckon they not only have double your IC but (still) a bigger army, probably 4 times your airforce and navy (and not at Vladivostok but nearby).
But they will be demoralized after having lost Romania. One kick into the rotten door and the whole system will crumble... for sure.

 

[Colonizor48]

You select the air base which will auto-select a single air unit. Now you drag over all units in the region with a LMB while holding SHIFT which will select all air units. Shown in a list to the left. If you want to merge all, just press the "merge" button to the lower right. Deselecting any unit from the list with SHIFT-LMB onto the unit which you want to deselect.

I've noticed your intense usage of brigades for militia and how costly they are...
Just a few month ago we had a small discussion about brigades here in the forum started by [B]Pandrea[/B].
Which ones for what units, wether at all, that stuff... might be interesting stuff to read: The big brigades' book!

Ight thks. Ill check that out. Now im in a bit of a stalemate in germany so im going to naval invade denmark and konigsberg. They dont have anavy but they do have a tone of bombers over the baltic sea. But i can prob gain air superiority.

 

[Altruist]

Shown in a list to the left. If you want to merge all, just press the "merge" button to the lower right.

Forgot to mention, there is a max how many air units can be in one unit. Can't remember for vanilla, might be 8 or 16. So if merging isn't possible that might be the reason.

 

[Colonizor48]

Funnily enough france is still in the exact same place as before the war. What the hell are their generals high on?

 

[Colonizor48]

Okay. Probably not going to need to naval invade denmark. beause one of my motorized groups was trapped behind enemy lines during an atempted encirclement. But i realised i had sea acess. So i made a convoy to supply it and use it as kinda a calvary raid type thingy but with cars. And its actually been going very well. Ive encircled 2 divisions and am about to caputre berlin with its help.

 

[Pasha]

Funnily enough france is still in the exact same place as before the war. What the hell are their generals high on?

You probably "broke" the game when Danzig didn't fire. The war in the West is event driven starting with Austria and follows a narrow path. Are the low countries at war? Plus you got to hide behind Poland and the Baltic States, thus creating a narrow path for the German. Not saying you're doing anything wrong, but your game would be a lot more challenging if Danzig had fired.

 

[Altruist]

but your game would be a lot more challenging if Danzig had fired.

Probably, but for a first game of DH as the USSR that's absolutely ok, actually even good... and with all other frontiers quite and the whole Wehrmacht and Luftwaffe at home, there will be still enough of a shock when he reaches the German coreregions.

 

[Colonizor48]

Probably, but for a first game of DH as the USSR that's absolutely ok, actually even good... and with all other frontiers quite and the whole Wehrmacht and Luftwaffe at home, there will be still enough of a shock when he reaches the German coreregions.

Allright. After several in game months of intense fighting and multiple stalemates germany has capitulated. Now to use some hax to make the borders not make your eyes instantly die upon looking at them. Anyway this was a wierd game. The free city of danzig still exists in 1944. I guess guaranteeing poland as the USSR breaks the game sorta.

 

[Colonizor48]

Fun fact this isnt my first game ever. Ive done a few usa games but non were very sucessful(ussr took like half of europe) And one was in an infinite stalemate with japan. And i did several other ussr games. The only pther "serious" one was one where i started in 1939 and got absolutly anihalated during barbarosa and germany made reichskommisirats out of me. they like stormed through me in several months. Seems like the basis for a mod or somthign lol.