Serious and Sudden TC Issues

[piratefish]

Playing as Germany, it's late June 1941 and Barbrossa launches (a tad late for my taste, but no biggie).

Things go very smoothly for the Germans, Hungarians, Romanians, and Bulgarians. We are pretty much mopping up the Soviet Army everywhere we go, and by September I have all of the major cities west of the Urals firmly under Axis control.

Then, suddenly, around the third week of September, the bottom falls out. I go from no TC or supply issue to all of the sudden - BAM! In a couple of days time I am short about 500 TC. WTF?

So I tried liberating a several nations to reduce the occupied province and partisan strain, I have my best minister in place, and nearly every technology granting a bonus in TC researched. Still, this only bought me about 35 TC, and I am still about 450 TC short of keeping my army in decent supply - even though I am running a HUGE supply surplus each day. (Did I mention this happened in about a week's time)?

By October 20, 1941, my offensive has ground to a halt at the foot of the Ural mountains. I am using up about 46 IC to replace my manpower losses even with NO battles taking place. My dissent is around 12% from all the liberations I allowed (I maxed out my IC on consumer goods to reduce dissent by 0.17+% per day, or I would be much higher in the dissent department).

To make matters worse, a day or two after I liberate a country and take the dissent hit, I get an event fire that informs me that I lost the Kiev sector, the Minsk sector, etc. etc. and I get additional hits to my dissent (1% for each sector lost). Really? I lost these sectors? Could that possibly have been because I LIBERATED THEM!?!? And did I mention I already took the 5% dissent hit for liberating them only to get smacked again a couple of days later with an additional 1% or more in dissent because of this BS event? Seriously, WTF?

How can I go from kicking the ever loving Jesus out of the Soviets with a finely tuned and well oiled army, with superior equipment, doctrine, and tactics to suddenly (within ten day's time) reeling from massive attrition losses and major supply issues where I am losing nearly half of my army's numbers in two weeks without even fighting any battles (the Soviets are reduced to less than fifty rag tag divisions from large encirclements earlier in my campaign and are barely hanging on themselves). The weather is still warm, I did not push much deeper into the SU, but BAM! The bottom inexplicably falls out.

(And just for the record, to save someone from pointing out the obvious, yes, I know I could have went with the option of a policy favoring liberation in the SU when that particular event fires early in Barbrossa, and yes, I know I could have avoided a lot of dissent that way). But seriously, WTF just happened? This has totally ruined my otherwise enjoyable game.

 

[crold]

Have you read the log? Sounds to me like the effects of an event. General Winter possibly?

You indeed get unrest for liberating nations and additionally for the resulting loss of key sector control.

Why don´t you just start over with a policy favoring liberations (liberate them right before you capture key sectors) and make sure to pick most of the available relevant techs in the Infantry and Industry trees. By the time the Bitter Peace triggers your units will still have halve their reserve supplies and fuel.

 

[piratefish]

General Winter did not fire. I checked the game log, but since it started to occur in the last third of September, I did not think General Winter would have anything to do with it.

However, I noticed that the majority of the issue was related to partisan activity and occupied province maintenance (something like 490 TC and 270 TC, respectively). What surprises me is how quickly this became a factor. Once the scales tipped, the downhill slide was lightning fast; within 10 days time or so I was having major attrition/ESE issues and had to allocte over 60 IC toward reinforcements (and you can imagine the effect that has on manpower).

I did indeed start a new game, taking with me my new-found knowledge. I usually select the policy favoring liberations (this was the first game I did not - and I now understand the implications of such a policy), and I will go back to that strategy. I will also build a few garrison/militia units with MPs to further mitigate the partisan factor. As for the technologies, I pretty much had everything researched related to TC by the Summer of 1941; not much else I can do there.

One question, though. How much does having additional HQs help with the TC/supply issue? I usually play with 4 or sometimes 5 HQs by the time Barbrossa is in play. Is this enough? Too much? About right? Does it really matter much beyond increasing the effectiveness of combat units and increasing the ceiling for the command penalty?

Thanks for the input!