@Mkoll13 & Sandertje Yes, with the Bear caged, the Wehrmacht can really throw it’s weight around.
@Herbert West The USA nuked Essen in June 1945, but that is the only one I have seen. I am not sure whether I would be notified if they are using them on Japan.
@MagooNZ Here is the diplomacy screen I promised, along with my “lessons learned” which does touch on the Minister changes. Let me know if anything is still unclear.
Like any good military man, I have to think about and promulgate the Lessons Learned from this AAR event. While victory was achieved there are many things that I would do differently if I was playing again tomorrow.
1. I immediately replaced three ministers, with one a bust.
a. Chief of Air Force: Milch for Goring. This one was golden.
b. Chief of Army: Installed Hoepner for Armored Spearheads. This one was a waste of time and effort. I should have gone with Ringel right away.
c. Chief of Staff: Installed Jodl for Guderian. This one worked, though I had to disband divisions at a constant rate to keep manpower flowing.
2. I immediately moved the slider to Standing Army. This I feel was justified, with all the recruits I would be installing during the war.
3. Production: I got rid of everything except some idled submarine production, then I added a line of Infrastructure in Berlin and six brigade lines, two each of Escort fighters, AT and SP-ART. This was a large waste of IC in my opinion. Doing it again I would eliminate all production and ONLY do the Infrastructure in Berlin.
4. Espionage: I spent nothing and achieved nothing and it didn’t matter at all so this seems to work out.
5. Technology: I started nine projects and I view this as another wasteful mistake. Next time I will do four, maybe five at most. I would do Encryption, Decryption, Turbojet Interceptor and Advanced Synthetic Oil Plant. The possible fifth would be Computing, which Germany has a blueprint for, to speed completion of these other four.
6. The strategy of holding La Havre and Paris and the Loire River line in the West worked out well.
7. The strategy of falling back in the East worked out pretty well. I left a sacrificial division here and there and the Red Air Force expended a lot of energy bombing them while the main force got away.
8. The master plan of tackling the West then South then North then East worked out, but I would refine that to be South first and West second if playing again. The reason is that Italy falls easily and while it is in Allied hands the bombers there are tearing up Austria, northern Italy and Germany’s allies in the Balkans. Sweeping the bombers out of Italy quickly could have saved a lot of IC for the war effort.
9. Three more ministers were changed. Klink for Himmler for more manpower. Ringel for Hoepner as should have been done right away. Oster in Intelligence for more IC. All of these moves seemed to work and I would do all of them again.
10. I kept the U-boats, formed into fleets of 6-10, and used them successfully to repel stacks of lightly escorted Allied transports. I did not use them at all for any other purpose so they survived and were cheap and useful.
11. The biggest strategic error I saw was not reinforcing and upgrading the Luftwaffe fighter/interceptor arm as immediately as possible. The Natter (rocket interceptor II) level was very effective in wearing the Allied strategic bomber command down to ineffectiveness. Had I driven this change sooner, even at the cost of postponing the Finland Operation, I may have avoided the ignominy of having my IC all the way down to 235.
12. Using the transports to move troops in the Baltic and Black Sea (by trading three of them to Romania) was extremely helpful.
13. Luftwaffe: I could not use any of the CAS or TAC without them getting shot to pieces, so I grounded them until I got some Escort Fighters in 1946. The Fighters/Interceptors should have been reinforced and upgraded ASAP, instead of at the slow pace (March 1945) that I really focused on them. By then I had a province repair need of over 2,000.
14. Heer: I disbanded HQ units when I could, keeping only 6 of them. I never upgraded any ground divisions, disbanding 1941 INF for manpower and obsolete ARM to save oil (ARM only after achieving good success on the East front in August 1945. I continually disbanded divisions to make others full strength.