Here's my industrial buildup, the key to decisively winning the war early.
Starting with the Ideal game start military factory breakdown, in order of number of factories (in my opinion):
Germany starts with 28 military factories.
15 on fighters
5 on infantry equipment
2 on motorized
2 on CAS
1 on NAV
1 on light tanks
1 on artillery
1 on support equipment
15 factories on Bf-109 from day 1, use 175 air xp from Spanish Civil War to give your Bf-109 +5 engine, switch to the +5 engine variant as soon as you get enough air xp to make it. 2 factories on CAS, increase to 5 when you add extra mils from German War Economy. This will give you air superiority by the time war breaks out. Your air force will slaughter the allies with both numerical and qualitative superiority. Eventually over the course of the game you'll go up to 50-100 factories on fighters. Air is king.
Only 1 factory on light tanks to make up losses for your starting panzer divisions and for the introduction of armored recon companies in your tank divisions. This will be all you need the entire game.
5 factories on guns. This may seem counterintuitive, as Germany needs to build up a large army, but let me explain. The reason is that Infantry in my German playstyle is a purely defensive force outside of a few special forces divisions. You don't need them to have good stats from up to date infantry equipment, just 20 or 40 width pure infantry with whatever tier equipment is enough to hold the line against anything that isn't a 40-width tank division. You get a large stockpile of guns from Anschluss. You get an even bigger stockpile of guns from Fate of Czechoslovakia. You get further stockpiles of guns from the capitulations of Poland, The Netherlands, Belgium, and Luxembourg. You don't need many factories on guns because you get so many for free. I will have a massive infantry equipment deficit before I defeat Poland, but once Poland is gone I will have filled all my needs, and by the fall of the Benelux I will have a massive stockpile in the green.
Putting support AT and AA in your infantry can be good in multiplayer, but isn't necessary for SP. Likewise, the 1 factory on artillery is enough for the early game until you start making divisions of 40-width mountaineers. I don't even put support artillery in my defensive 20-width infantry at the start, just engineer companies. 1 factory on each of artillery and support equipment is plenty at the start. I add up to 5 factories on support equipment when I start building military factories to produce enough for my expanding armored divisions, but you don't need it at the start of the game.
2 factories on motorized. Motorized is really cheap, and not used except in tank divisions. I don't use any support companies in my infantry that require motorized equipment, so the demand for it is very low at game start. I may put up to five factories on it later once my tank forces are large enough to require increased production, but it's not needed at game start.
2 factories on CAS, and 1 on NAV. This is enough for game start, and will produce a sufficient amount of CAS to get you through the Spanish Civil War with a small naval bomber force built up for the early war. You don't need large numbers of naval bombers until after the fall of France, so they're not an early game priority.
I start building military factories in mid 1938 after building a large number of civilian factories and synthetic refineries. First I round out CAS to 5 factories, then support equipment to 5 factories, then everything goes on Fighters until I have 1941 medium tanks researched, which should be around the start of 1939 or sooner if you prefer to rush them even faster. Once 1941 mediums are researched I go back down to 15 factories on fighters and put every excess factory on Medium 2s to pump out as many tank divisions as possible before the war. Once I have 25-30 factories on medium tanks I start putting them on fighters again, and up the number of factories on motorized to 10. I typically go for 25 factories on tanks, then up the number of factories on fighters to 25, then 50 tanks 25 fighters, then 50 tanks 50 fighters. After I reach this point, I up the number of factories on CAS to 15 and put more factories on Artillery when I start producing some 40-width mountaineer divisions for difficult terrain, or marines for Sea Lion.
Army composition:
I deploy 120 divisions of 20-width pure infantry with engineer support companies before I declare war on Poland. They will lack guns at first, but as you annex and capitulate each country in Europe their equipment will fill up completely. After Fate of Czech you should have almost enough, and your forces on the French Border should be fully equipped, while forces on the Polish border are lacking.
40-width panzer division should be your tank template, either 13 medium tanks 7 motorized with superior firepower right-left, or 15 medium tank 5 motorized with mobile warfare left-right. If you're concerned about enemy air superiority, swap out one medium tank in either template with two self-propelled anti-air, with +5 to air attack in the variant designer. Support companies should be Engineers, Armored Recon, Maintenance, Logistics, and either Signals or Artillery. These divisions will stomp on anything the vanilla AI will throw at you and be more or less invincible as long as they have supply and fuel.
I typically expand my starting tank template (the light tank one) out to 20-width, with 5 light tanks and 5 motorized, just for the sake of making use of the tanks I start with and have produced prior to the war. I don't build any new divisions of them, but since the three you start with tend to get to veteran EXP in the Spanish civil war, it would be a waste to disband them when they would still be useful until around 1940. You can send them to man lower priority fronts like Africa later on and they'll still hold their own. Light Tanks have lower terrain penalties and less supply use than medium tanks so they do better in African jungles than mediums would. I will usually have around three divisions of 40-width medium tanks by the time I declare on Poland, one more coming online during the battle of France, and 10-20 for Barbarossa. I like to take out Norway after France if I'm not planning to go for Sea Lion, and so I send one of my 24-division infantry armies to Norway, while my light tanks take care of the African front and my medium tanks prepare for the invasion of the Balkans and Barbarossa. By Barbarossa time, I will have 120 divisions of 40-width pure infantry with engineers and logistics, 10-20 divisions of 40-width medium tanks, 3 light tanks in Africa, as many 14-4 mountaineer divisions as my special forces cap will allow, and as many spammed out 20-width pure infantry with no support companies divisions as I can to hold the Atlantic Wall.
Hope this helps. It's one German strategy among many, other players may have other things they like more, but I can say from experience that it works every time.
