Total Soviet Economic Collapse
Ok I know that I probably should have this in the USSR thread, but I thought that this was significant enough to warrant a separate thread.
In my most recent game of CORE the soviets declared war on me as Germany in Sept 40 due to my aggression in the Baltic’s. No big deal really as I fully expected this. So I begin my push from the former Romania into the Don River area and hold out over the winter with mass infantry garrisons. When April 41 rolls around I think ok time to lay the wood to the soviets so I begin pushing my infantry into the rest of the Ukraine taking Kiev and Sevastopol. Note: I don’t have any tanks yet as I have Me-262's rolling off the line starting in June 41, my first divisions of panzer 4 70mm longs will arrive in June 41 also.
So cutting to the chase here I notice something odd as I am fighting my way forward with my infantry. I started the war with 342 divisions of infantry in Sept 40 and the soviets had 218. By April 41 I hadn’t really killed that many divisions off of the soviets so I expected them to have close to parity with Germany by April 41. So I look in the military strength folder (option14) and find they have only added 6 divisions in those 7 months
.
Ok so to really cut to the chase. I was pretty confused on what was going on so I save load as the soviets. They where running at 126 IC out of 638 available, thats less than 20% efficiency
. So I do some looking and they have 0 oil surplus, 0 rubber, and 0 coal surplus. Then I look in their tech and lo and behold they only have the base conversion techs from the industrial tree. The soviets hadn’t even researched mass production. So the real problem was when the world market crashed as a result of the winter war for the soviets they lost any rubber imports.
So the soviets run through what ever surplus they have managed to accrue within 6 months or so @300ish rubber per day * 180 days that’s 54k rubber an amount I would be shocked if they had. So by winter war + 180 days the soviets are converting oil to rubber. Well when you need 300ish rubber at 2 oil per rubber that means they need 600+ oil per day to convert. So once again after another 180ish days they go into coal to oil conversion at 4 to 1. To keep the economy running at 600 IC they need 900 coal plus 2400 coal per day to convert. So by winter war plus 540 days the soviets are totally tapped out.
At the point the soviets can not keep up with the coal to oil to rubber conversion at 0.125 efficiency they become total gimps they have an army they cant feed and a production queue that has in excess of 1k IC's worth of units in it that they will never get to produce.
All right so to see if this wasn’t just a one off case I save loaded into all my different Germany games. I tend to run the game up to 1 Sept 39 using different gambits to see what would be the most efficient way to approach the war; the war is won or lost by 1 Sept 39 regardless of what happens after that date. In each case by the time the soviets were at winter war plus 1 year they were totally bankrupt running at one third or less of optimal IC's and unable to resupply their own armies supply needs.
The total lack of conversion technologies is IMHO what is causing the total collapse of the soviets that we tend to see in games. I know that there comes a point right in the middle of my Barbarosa pushes that the soviets just go totally limp and roll over and die.
Either the soviet AI needs to place a far greater emphasis on the conversion techs, at least to improved synthetic rubber and oil conversion. Or they need to receive those techs via events, lend-lease comes to mind. Otherwise they are totaly screwed by war plus one year.
As it stands now as soon as Germany gets those conversion techs, improved synthetic rubber and oil conversion, they can declare war on the soviets. Even with no common border the goal being in one year or so the soviets are totally tapped out and are running at 150ish IC's hell the Italians have more industry at
