Spanish Civil War in 1941

[WelshGandalf]

I'm playing a game starting in 1936 as Italy. It's now 1941 and the Spanish civil war is still going on.

I'd like Spain to become Axis, one way or another. What's the best way to go about it? I was wondering, if I join in the war on one side, will I keep any land I get when the war ends? It feels a rather unusual scenario for the war to still be going on, so it's not a question I've come across before...

 

[marxianTJ]

Just don't set any war goals on Republican Spain, then when you kill them off, the Nationalists will get it all. If you aim to get the land I think you can just claim their territory with wargoals of your own and grab it.

 

[Big Nev]

I'm afraid it's all too common that the SCW to drag on & on.

It doesn't seem to matter how much IC they get from lend-lease either. They don't have the shipping capability to use more than a tiny fraction, so...

Direct intervention seems to be the only way to get it over with quickly.

I don't really know how this works, but you might try tag-switching to Nationalist Spain & requesting an expeditionary force.

It's not too a-historical for Italy and Germany to send a few troops to help Franco out, just as Uncle Joe sent support to the Commie Bastards Republicans.

But it's not realistic to go mad. The navies of Britain, France, Italy & Germany were (supposed to be) enforcing the non-intervention blockade to stop ANYONE interfering in Spain's home affairs. Although, much to Frances annoyance, the RN habitually turned Nelson's eye to German & Italian intervention while doing everything they could to keep Uncle Joe out of it.

Blum was really pissed.

That said, it's actually quite easy to tag-switch and fight the SCW as whichever side you want to win. Think of yourself as a military advisor

It'll only take a few weeks, months at most to decide the issue and then you can go back to being Italy. The AI won't have done too much damage while you've been away.

 

[Kovax]

It'll only take a few weeks, months at most to decide the issue and then you can go back to being Italy. The AI won't have done too much damage while you've been away.

I can't agree with this. Give the AI about 0.0001 seconds with the clock running and it will screw up your production queue, redeploy units randomly to the far corners of the earth, and break the critical trade deals you spent weeks setting up, just so it can buy a couple more units of expensive and useless Fuel. A few years back, I accidentally unpaused the game while tag-switched, and in the few seconds before I realized my mistake, my previous country was so badly mishandled that I ended up reloading a previous save rather than deal with the mess.

Then again, if you're playing Italy, that level of mess might be relatively historical.

 

[Big Nev]

PMSL

 

[EllisDee]

The Spanish Civil War really highlights the AI's deficiencies.
Right now i'm watching a Republican armoured division (1 LARM 2 INF) corner a 2 CAV Nationalist division near Gibraltar. They have no supplies. They've been there for weeks. NAT apparently doesn't even have manpower...yet instead of taking them out, they sit there watching one another.

The whole thing usually goes round in a circle. One side pushes one way, the other pushes the other way, until eventually one of them caps enough victory points in one fell swoop to be able to end them before they can re-capture some others.

You can get it over faster with Spies early on (increasing threat from other countries lets them get lower neutrality, for better laws). You can lower National Unity for whichever side to make them die faster RE: the victory points. You can lend-lease (though the AI is currently building submarines and TACs instead of soldiers with my IC). And of course you can join in.
Not much else to do, sadly. Make sure you do the "Civil War intervention" decision the major countries get ASAP, as it grants at least a division to one side of the war. I think Germany and the UK grant a air wing as well. Maybe a CAS plane? Can't quite remember.

 

[Kovax]

If you tag-switch as soon as the SCW breaks out, it provides a wonderful insight into the workings of the AI. You get to see all of the assigned movement orders, randomly criss-crossing for no apparent reason. One division will strategically redeploy from the right side of the country to the left, while another on the left redeploys to the right. It's pure chaos......or is there a method to its madness? There's certainly madness to its method.

Then the AI will use its heavily limited transport capacity to supply some island garrison that doesn't have any impact on the war, while troops in isolated pockets with a port on the mainland starve for lack of a supply convoy.

 

[uvizachan]

Gee, I wonder why the AI has these severe panic attacks? Is it something like a bug? I mean, the AI should regularly check whether or not the units it's moving are too far from their Corps-Army-Group-Theater HQs, but no, it does not. In a Germany game, this sick mofo wrecked my entire two army groups switching sides and letting french and polish forces enter in my territory. I almost lost it when a whole army was trapped by France.
Never again should I trust my units to the roboto.

 

[uvizachan]

I can't, I won't believe your words. You mean that by year 1941 the Spanish Civil War is still on and going?
Well, how come? In all of my vanilla 1.4 games it's the republicans' win because the nationalist AI freaks out/Germany doesn't intervene or it's the nationalists' win because the republicans get no supplies whatsoever and the nationalists just round them up and beat the heck out of them. It starts in the middle of 1936 and generally ends by the dawn of 1937 if the AI are doing stupid things like redeploying from one corner to another simultaneously, if not earlier (as of the end of 1936 through a massive blitzkrieg).

 

[Kovax]

From what I've seen, the Nationalists win more frequently if the SCW starts early, before the Republicans have boosted their techs and doctrines. If it happens late, the Nationalists are stuck with the unimproved default starting doctrines, while the Republicans have had sufficient time to research a few. In most games, though, either the Nationalists randomly get a couple of key cities/ports/airfields at the start or they don't, and the results hinge pretty heavily on how much (in terms of divisions, planes, IC, and resource locations) each side randomly gets.

Occasionally I've seen the war drag on for 3+ years, but usually it's all but over in 2-4 months. If the Nationalists win at that point, they're often behind a lot of the third-world countries in techs and doctrines.

As for lend-lease, Nationalist Spain typically gets only 2 convoys, and usually doesn't have enough time to build more before the SCW is over. Either the Nationalist AI uses those convoys to supply its cut-off troops in the south, to supply some remote island garrison that has no effect on the war, or to bring back some resources from its colonies. Any Lend-Lease it gets is generally completely wasted. Not positive about the Republican side, but I think they get a few more convoys, so transporting a SMALL quantity of Lend-Lease is at least a viable option.

Setting your own wargoal may be pointless. The historical Wargoals are resolved LAST, so any changes made by other wargoals may be over-ridden by the historical ones. If you take land from one faction, it may be automatically taken back by the other faction when they win their own war, regardless of who owns or is in control of the territory at the moment.

 

[EllisDee]

Mine's still going on. It's mid 42. I started lend-leasing Republicans in 39. According to spies, the Republicans have 5 manpower and the Nationalists 0, and it's been that way for a year now.

I've noticed the biggest problem is that they always try to garrison ports. But Spain is so many provinces, and there are so few soldiers on each side. So every time they advance, the advancing force has to sit there on the port as a garrison. From the looks of it, it's the HQs who are doing the back-and-forth capturing. It's sad to watch.

 

[Leovigild32]

Here is another oddity of the Spanish Civil War. The Nationalists seem to have been a little thorough.

 

[Big Nev]

@Leovigild32

SNAP!

But check-out the date!

 

[Leovigild32]

@Big Nev

Well played. I think I have something strange and you show it too, just weirder!

Also I was wondering how Belgium was attacking Vichy... and realized it was you as Japan.

 

[blackonblack]

If you tag-switch as soon as the SCW breaks out, it provides a wonderful insight into the workings of the AI. You get to see all of the assigned movement orders, randomly criss-crossing for no apparent reason. One division will strategically redeploy from the right side of the country to the left, while another on the left redeploys to the right. It's pure chaos......or is there a method to its madness? There's certainly madness to its method.

Then the AI will use its heavily limited transport capacity to supply some island garrison that doesn't have any impact on the war, while troops in isolated pockets with a port on the mainland starve for lack of a supply convoy.

Very true. I normally let Nationalist Spain do their own thing and eventually join the Axis... but in my recent playthrough, Franco was losing badly so I jumped in with about five corps of light infantry to encircle a bunch of units in the north. Italy immediately joined too. Eventually the Republicans only had a few provinces in the south, and Franco didn't appear to have the manpower to finish them. I assumed he was very weak and I really needed Gibraltar to box in a lot of UK naval units for my NAV's to play with, so I turned on the Nationalists.

That miserable SOB was somehow losing with a very sizable army that I wasn't prepared for, at least 4 times that of the Republicans. With Barbarossa only a few months away and myself already being low on manpower, Franco had unwittingly become the best ally that Stalin could ask for.