Resistance and Peace Conference Strategy

[ppccctu]

I confess I am still struggling to learn all the ins and outs of the Resistance rules, so I have a couple of questions. I'm playing Germany, and I was forced to go to war with Czechoslovakia since they refused my Sudetenland Demand. As an aside, I'm playing non-historical, and I did all the recommended things to get Czechoslovakia without war, but they still refused, and I'm wondering if their answer may be related to timing, in the sense that I was 6-9 months early (than historical) in reaching that focus. In any case, since conquering the Czechs, their resistance has been nightmarish. Even with a military governor and two agents assigned to root out resistance, I'm still slowly losing ground. That brings me to my first question, namely, at the Peace Conference, I'm assuming my only rational choice for Czechoslovakia is to puppet them. If I annex them, I'm guessing I will still have lots of resistance problems. Is that right?

My second question is related. In this same game, my intelligence agents have twice completed the collaborative government mission in France, and I am about to force France into capitulation. I've never done the collaborative mission before, but I gather that when France capitulates, I will get some kind of puppet government there, but I'm not sure how that works. In any case, supposing that puppet style government to be put in place, what should my strategy be at the Peace Conference down the road? If I annex France, will I throw away all I gained from my spy missions? Will annexed France become a hotbed of resistance? If so, should I go the puppet route instead?

 

[shachazhul]

I don't own La Resistance, but I think the resistance thing is not much different from base game, so as I understand, these huge resistance spikes (especially with "has capitulated +10%" and democratic "in exile +20%(max)") stay as long as you are at war with their faction. After peace conference they are gone for good, so annex them if you want to.

 

[Orbs]

I confess I am still struggling to learn all the ins and outs of the Resistance rules, so I have a couple of questions. I'm playing Germany, and I was forced to go to war with Czechoslovakia since they refused my Sudetenland Demand. As an aside, I'm playing non-historical, and I did all the recommended things to get Czechoslovakia without war, but they still refused, and I'm wondering if their answer may be related to timing, in the sense that I was 6-9 months early (than historical) in reaching that focus. In any case, since conquering the Czechs, their resistance has been nightmarish. Even with a military governor and two agents assigned to root out resistance, I'm still slowly losing ground. That brings me to my first question, namely, at the Peace Conference, I'm assuming my only rational choice for Czechoslovakia is to puppet them. If I annex them, I'm guessing I will still have lots of resistance problems. Is that right?

My second question is related. In this same game, my intelligence agents have twice completed the collaborative government mission in France, and I am about to force France into capitulation. I've never done the collaborative mission before, but I gather that when France capitulates, I will get some kind of puppet government there, but I'm not sure how that works. In any case, supposing that puppet style government to be put in place, what should my strategy be at the Peace Conference down the road? If I annex France, will I throw away all I gained from my spy missions? Will annexed France become a hotbed of resistance? If so, should I go the puppet route instead?

I think there may be some info missing from your post so I’m going to make some assumptions. Generally if you annex anything without any type of advanced collaboration, resistance can usually still be dealt with in a relatively straight forward manner. Where you suffer from lack of collaboration is from a lack of compliance. In other words because the annexed country doesn’t like you, they don’t work for you, and You only get a tiny fraction of what you’d normally get pre-LR in both industry and resources. So collaboration makes resistance easier, but it’s most important feature is that collaboration provides an easy path to high compliance (ie. high industry and resource utilization from the annexed lands).

So you mentioned you had no collaboration in advance with Czech, that makes them resist more and give you less from the conquered lands, but squashing the resistance should still be straightforward, especially if you’re hammering them with a military governor. The fact that resistance has not decreased even with MGov means you’ve got a garrison issue. Either your stability is too low (increases resistance targets in conquered lands), or you ran out Of manpower (no one to staff the garrison), or you don’t have enough guns for all the garrisons required (can‘t shoot those troublesome rabble-rousers). Are any of these the case?

And to be thorough, you set MGov through the occupied territory screen not just the local state/province correct? When you hover over the worst state/province what does the tooltip say is the resistance target? Especially if you have 2 spies working on ’root out resistance’ plus MGov you really should have a resistance target in the single digits. That’s a lot of oppression!

And separately what garrison template are you using? 40w cavalry with a MP support company is most efficient without requiring new research or expensive new production (armored cars).

With regards to the second question about France, if you have collaboration feel free to annex. Again with your spy work done in advance high collaboration will help lower resistance, allowing you to use softer garrison laws, and also ensure higher compliance along with higher compliance growth which means much, much higher access to the conquered industry and resources. Some prefer to create Vichy but that’s another discussion. For the purposes of your question feel free to annex if that’s your play style. Also just because you have collaboration the peace conference choices don’t necessarily change. You still have the same options the only thing that changes with collaboration is they like you more and give you more access to their stuff after you annex if that’s what you decide to do.

I always prefer to annex but in some cases if you want to steal a navy (looking at you GB), I’ll puppet first then annex the puppet by decreasing autonomy. A good tip to be aware of is even if you annex a puppet that adores you and has benefitted from investments you’ve made in industry/radar/airfields/dockyards/naval bases, you’ll still have to deal with resistance and compliance and reduced access to industry/resources when you annex a puppet. But that’s ok because you’ll have a space marine navy of doom so you can shell the resistors from just offshore

 

[ppccctu]

Thanks. I did resolve my problems with the Czechs, although I'm not sure exactly what worked since I was trying several things. I do think your analysis was excellent, and I think the experience I've gained with the new resistance rules will make future games easier. Even so, I'm still encountering little issues here and there that surprise me. For example, I did annex France at the Peace Conference, and, as a result of my spies working to establish a collaborative government, I wound up with a compliant France which provided me with a lot of resources, factories, and military recruits, just as you explained. Later, when compliance reached the magical number (80, I think), I had the opportunity to create a collaborative government in France, but when I did so, the benefits decreased, and I was not expecting that. Perhaps there was an offsetting benefit I didn't see, but I was better off, in my view, letting them remain an occupied territory with high compliance. Something strikes me as odd about that.

Another example came when I subsequently repeated my formula for France with the United States. My spies executed two missions to set up collaboration, and I conquered the US (they capitulate much easier after those collaboration spy missions). As with France, I chose to annex them. But, somehow, the annexed "country" inherited the US navy, and they're now docking those ships for repair in my west coast cities. What's up with that? How can an annexed country have its own navy?

 

[ppccctu]

Thanks. I did resolve my problems with the Czechs, although I'm not sure exactly what worked since I was trying several things. I do think your analysis was excellent, and I think the experience I've gained with the new resistance rules will make future games easier. Even so, I'm still encountering little issues here and there that surprise me. For example, I did annex France at the Peace Conference, and, as a result of my spies working to establish a collaborative government, I wound up with a compliant France which provided me with a lot of resources, factories, and military recruits, just as you explained. Later, when compliance reached the magical number (80, I think), I had the opportunity to create a collaborative government in France, but when I did so, the benefits decreased, and I was not expecting that. Perhaps there was an offsetting benefit I didn't see, but I was better off, in my view, letting them remain an occupied territory with high compliance. Something strikes me as odd about that.

Another example came when I subsequently repeated my formula for France with the United States. My spies executed two missions to set up collaboration, and I conquered the US (they capitulate much easier after those collaboration spy missions). As with France, I chose to annex them. But, somehow, the annexed "country" inherited the US navy, and they're now docking those ships for repair in my west coast cities. What's up with that? How can an annexed country have its own navy?

Ok. I figured out the navy thing. At the Peace Conference, Italy got Nevada and Alaska, making them puppets (I got all the other states). The residue of the US navy went to that new puppet state. I still don't understand why the conquering country never gets the conquered country's navy.