Is Communism the right choice for Soviet Union?

[Tomnoddy]

I'd probably call myself a Social Liberal or Social Democrat, to me there's worse ideologies than Communism. But from a practical point of view, I just don't get how to play as a nation with Full Central Planning and Full Drafted Army. Just hate keeping outdated units, whether you continue to pay their upkeep and reinforcements or scrap them and build fresh, it all just seems so wasteful.

So, I've only had a few games as the USSR and usually end up trying to change them.

My most recent game was surprisingly successful.

To start with, I put on the "frustrated expansionist outlook" national idea. This gives you a full set of dissent reduction modifiers, you can now reduce by 0.19 per day! In addition, because you are full closed society (and start off fully authoritarian) civil expenses are quite low. Even when maxed, consumer goods production is still less than a third of your total. Being fully Hawk would help even further. You start halfway but a few independence guarantees and scripted events can max out the Interventionism and Defence Lobby. Also, you make a lot of money from trade. When dissent reduces your IC - you have more unused resources to sell. Finally, your huge unused manpower pool earns money that isn't affected by dissent.

So , you can make a LOT of slider moves as USSR, and not have it affect you too badly. I rushed towards Democracy until I became a Social Democrat government. The officer purge event never fired, it must be linked to autocratic governance. Once "Uncle Joe" was gone, a policy event helped us further along the way.

I also, on day one, got rid of all of the armed forces, with the exception of interceptors, mountain and motorised infantry. I wanted to see if it was possible to stop Germany without ordinary INF. By December 1940 we had full Standing army, full hawk, full interventionism and 2 notches away from full Free Market.

I never got to find out if I could turn back the Germans because they opted to do Sealion instead. But we had 10 modern moto/mech inf per province on our border by the start of the war, 15 interceptor wings, and a second line near Moscow consisting of our mountain inf.

 

[Mr_B0narpte]

I'd hope that 10 divisions in each province is by-far not enough to combat even an AI Germany but we'll never know.

 

[Tomnoddy]

I'd hope that 10 divisions in each province is by-far not enough to combat even an AI Germany but we'll never know.

They are mechanised inf with heavy armour brigades, not bad for 1941. I'd finished politicking and infra building and now had about 15 of them being produced in parallel, so I think we're in with a shout.

 

[Mr_B0narpte]

They are mechanised inf with heavy armour brigades, not bad for 1941. I'd finished politicking and infra building and now had about 15 of them being produced in parallel, so I think we're in with a shout.

It takes 3-4 months for just one mechanised division to be built. Even an AI Germany should be able to run wild against such a small Red Army.

 

[Pang Bingxun]

I never got to find out if I could turn back the Germans because they opted to do Sealion instead.

You may want to use historical outcome of events.

It takes 3-4 months for just one mechanised division to be built.

Using full free markets it is 75 days without gearing bonus. After 4 units build you get a mech every 60 days. This is without assembly line. So with lower start year of mech in 1.09 mech is an option as soviet union. But you would need to switch towards spearhead doctrine for better org.
Building up 180-320 Inf is the better choice. Use the decisive battle doctrine chief of army.

 

[Mr_B0narpte]

Using full free markets it is 75 days without gearing bonus. After 4 units build you get a mech every 60 days. This is without assembly line. So with lower start year of mech in 1.09 mech is an option as soviet union. But you would need to switch towards spearhead doctrine for better org.
Building up 180-320 Inf is the better choice. Use the decisive battle doctrine chief of army.

Still, 15 new divisions every 2 months should/would not save the USSR if it just has 200 divisions at the start. I agree, building 'leg' infantry is by-far the better choice. IMO the Red Army should focus on quantity, not quality. I would say a minimum of 250 divisions before Barbarossa if it wants a chance of winning the war. I know a mod which has enabled the USSR AI to wield 500 divisions (all unbrigaded) before Barbarossa. The mod didn't give the USSR artificial bonuses, it just edited the Soviet build scheme.

 

[Autolykos]

Completely eschewing foot INF seems a little radical to me. They are by far the most cost effective unit. MEC or even MOT are completely wasted in a static defense. That said, having a bunch of MEC-MOT-MOT fire brigades a few provinces back will massively reduce your need for INF. You've got room to play with, use it. Let them break through, cut them off and disassemble their fast units. A Germany without armor is so thoroughly castrated, there isn't much to fear from them. A human might be too smart to fall for this (at least for the second time), but the German AI likes to go Leeroy Jenkins at every opportunity.

 

[Emmanuel_M]

As SU, your main asset is huge manpower. INF is the way towards leveraging it. MIL is not worth the cost. Spamming INF-eng+2*INF-art Korpus is avery effective 1 player strategy, especilaly with SU

So build has much as you can, force bloody battle to create attrition in Germany, and keep a modern maneouvering force (MOT, ARM, some Mech if you like) as both firebrigade and couterattack spearhead. If you want to micromanage upgrades so taht they go in priority towards mobile units, feel free.

If you hate walking so much that you want no footman in your army, Germany (but you had better be a master of blitzkrieg, cause your OIL stack will dive quickly) or USA are far better choices.

 

[MagooNZ]

Tomnoddy, now that you are Social Democratic, how well off are you for choice when it comes to useful ministers? I have been thinking about the purge / do not purge SOV decision (their most important prewar decision), but as you have illustrated, there is a third choice which is to get rid of Stalin and then the purge event does not fire. 10 divisions per province is probably enough to restrain the GER AI (there may be some retreats), I will check my current game, but I gave the AI advantages so it wasnt normal/normal.

 

[Tomnoddy]

To be honest not a great choice of ministers. The head of government and head of state changed when I went democratic, nobody else walked out of their job. I made a mistake in not accepting the MR pact, thats a lot of free ic. Mostly infra and ic builds at first but a lot of moto inf with tank destroyers got built from 1939 onward, now those lines are stopped since 1940 its been mech with heavy armour. Good combined arms bonus and low softness on both, dencent hard attack too. I do have a lot of mountain infantry to, been building those since 1936

Im scared of leg infantry getting overrun.

 

[Mr_B0narpte]

Im scared of leg infantry getting overrun.

Well with 300-500 divisions, the sheer amount should prevent most units being over-run. It's called defence-in-depth.

 

[Pang Bingxun]

Still, 15 new divisions every 2 months should/would not save the USSR if it just has 200 divisions at the start.

Having switched to blitzkrieg doctrine and having used a guarantee of independence on yugoslavia i was able to defeat germany in static offensive style of combat using only 180 Inf1941-Art1940. The only change in territory was taking Memel to attack Königsberg and deliberatly losing the undefendable stryr. This allows to annihilate all axis amoured divisions in 1941. 120 Mech-SpArt might do similar damage if bulked out with some Gar.

MEC or even MOT are completely wasted in a static defense.

Is that so? Mech-SpArt has approximatly 1.5 times the soft attack of Inf-SpArt, but it only uses 14/12 the manpower. So in terms of manpower it seems to be a rather good idea.

 

[Mr_B0narpte]

Having switched to blitzkrieg doctrine and having used a guarantee of independence on yugoslavia i was able to defeat germany in static offensive style of combat using only 180 Inf1941-Art1940. The only change in territory was taking Memel to attack Königsberg and deliberatly losing the undefendable stryr. This allows to annihilate all axis amoured divisions in 1941. 120 Mech-SpArt might do similar damage if bulked out with some Gar.

I guess I keep looking at things from a multi-player perspective. But even for the Germany AI I would've hoped 180 Soviet divisions were easily beatable, I guess not.

 

[MagooNZ]

I only had 93 mot/mech divisions on the front in June 41, and the German AI advanced (AI had +60%IC, +50% resources, but GER ran out of rares so couldnt use the extra IC). The starting GER-ROM front has 12 provinces if Stryj is vacated. My fall back to the Dvina-Dneiper river line has 14 provinces (incl Kiev), so if retreating, extra divs would be required to maintain the same concentration. Faster mobile units reduce overrun prospects and allow pull in of additional divs from the rest of the front to help hold provinces that are currently under attack.

 

[Autolykos]

Is that so? Mech-SpArt has approximatly 1.5 times the soft attack of Inf-SpArt, but it only uses 14/12 the manpower. So in terms of manpower it seems to be a rather good idea.

If you're playing USSR, you're not short on manpower. If you're playing Germany (or UK/USA in late game), you should have better things to do for your MEC than soaking damage (except when preventing your ARM spearhead from being cut off, but I wouldn't call that 'static').

 

[Tomnoddy]

I agree that in a stalemated war, you need a hammer and an anvil, and vanilla inf can economically make up the anvil portion of your army - more than half of your army on wheels, tracks or skis is a waste at that point. However, once the front starts moving substantially, the inf just bulk up my TC load but can never keep up with the front line. The fast guys OTOH end up fighting over and over.

Anyway, this game was a little ill disciplined. I should have experimented with one concept, and ended up going two -

1) can a country succeed without building any INF

2) can the Soviet union go democratic and succeed

I need to restart, because I didn't make any intermediate saves around the time of M-R and whenever it was the AI made the Sealion vs Barbarossa decision.

As regards moto/mech in the defensive role, bear in mind that

Moto - TD has 71% softness, Mech - Heavy Arm 56% softness

The moto gets a combined arms bonus of 13%, the mech must get even more. An elastic defence minister will add another 5%.

The low softness will significantly reduce the incoming damage these units get from INF, ARTY (soft attack) vs plain inf (100% soft).

I like to put a corps in each province static, left to dig in with no mission, but the bulk of the forces be on a "reserves" mission. The AI starts an attack 18 vs 9 thinking it is sure to win, then 6 reserves arrive from each province either side and suddenly it's 18 vs 21. And the AI still keeps the attack going till it's forces are fought out, making your loss figures look good. Of course, the reserves see a lot of combat, it is good to combine this with high org regen.

 

[Commander666]

I’m scared of (Soviet) leg infantry getting overrun.

You should be if Germany is doing a proper Blitzkrieg!

Well with 300-500 divisions, the sheer amount should prevent most units being over-run. It's called defence-in-depth.

I thought it was called “annihilation-in-depth!” :rofl:

 

[Tomnoddy]

I played this game through again to see if a thin red line really stops Germany. Order of battle in June 1941 was 76 Moto-II and 60 MTN-III.

The mountain troops all had engineer brigades , the motorised had one engineer per corps, the rest being TD-III.

In 1941 the Germans only succeeded in retaking Bessarabia, Stryj and Pielsk. The 1939 Inf, Arm and L-Arm they threw at them weren't making too much of a dent.

When war broke out i'd just completed the research necessary to make Mech-Heavy armour and set up a nice big parallel run. However, I ended up shoving these to the bottom of the queue. Reason? As soon as my 136 division army starts actually fighting, TC goes into the red. ESE at the front line is just 70-80%. So, I end up filling my production queue with INFRA and IC builds instead.

I suppose this is partly due to being Free Market, our effective IC is smaller therefore our TC is smaller. Downside to having more easily upgraded units. And I suppose this is where INF-AT wins. You can have three of those for the TC load of a MOTO-TD. Think you still want some mobile firebrigades however, for "reserves" missions.

1942 was for some reason much harder than 1941. Over the winter i'd conquered Scandanavia, then demanded territory from the Baltic states, annexing them without suffering the DoW dissent. With the Baltics gone I had a much larger front to cover however.

Perhaps I should have just fallen back to the Dnieper, but I was loth to loose 10% of my IC. By 1943 i'd finally built enough infra to manage a Bagration or two. Captured the last Axis VP (occupied Bordeaux) in Jan 44.

 

[MagooNZ]

Good to know your experiences Tomnoddy. As the SOV player, I havent had TC shortages that reduce ESE but I have always gone full central planning. Shows that having too much mobility can cause problems too.

 

[Pang Bingxun]

I suppose this is partly due to being Free Market, our effective IC is smaller therefore our TC is smaller. Downside to having more easily upgraded units. And I suppose this is where INF-AT wins.

Having build enough infra you can still use Inf-Art. Infra is quite important for the war.