Surrounded by Enemies (Germany 1936)

[Irsh Faq]

IC isn't as valuable to Germany in this scenario as manpower, and Luxemburg doesn't have enough manpower to repay what I'd lose defending it 1939-1940.

A navy and bombers are the high-IC low-manpower items, and I haven't built either. If I can successfully Seelowe Britain I won't need to spend much IC constantly repairing my fighters either.

Speaking of Seelowe, to do Seelowe without a navy against beefed up UK, you need effective air recon. Anytime your air unit is above an enemy province, you get an accurate count of how many divisions the enemy has in that province. Bombing is even more effective, since you can look at the combat screen and see exactly what divisions are there, but really what matters most is just the number, not the composition. The UK doesn't build any of the realy meaningfully weak divisions, like cavalry or militia, and on beach guard duty, the difference between 3 arm and 3 inf is smaller than the difference between 3 inf and 6 inf.

With a stronger UK airforce and Commonwealth planes everywhere too, you can't get this info during the day lest you draw the wrath of a hundred angry fighter wings, but night missions are an effective way to do it. The AI always runs daytime missions and never nighttime ones, so with the right timing you can fly around over Britain unmolested. You do have to micromanage the timing, you can't just set it to an autotimed night mission - otherwise you'll run into enemy fighters in the early evening coming back from their daytime missions, or your fighters will take off a couple hours early and get massacred because your AI thinks that night mssions mean getting to the target province just as night falls, not doing the whole flight path in the dark.

It's still best to use fighters. Actually bombing the enemy isn't the point, and if you do get the timing wrong, fighters will get shot up less. Nighttime air superiority mission over a certain province is a good, low-risk source of the basic number, nighttime bombing if you need the exact division info, but either way, ironically, run your recon missions at night.

 

[Irsh Faq]

Hopefully the French will be able to put up some sort of a fight after taking such heavy losses attacking the Siegfried line!

We'll see.

 

[Pang Bingxun]

But it doesn't.

If used properly it does.

I believe that a hard attack hitting a hard unit deals double Str damage (with the baseline 1x being a soft attack hitting a soft unit). I am not 100% certain of the 2x, but I am certain it is increased.

Let's assume that the factor 2 is right. Let's further assume the enemy is Inf1941. That is 14 softattack + 4 hard attack. This means 4 x 0.7 + 14 x 0.3 = 7 attacks prior to the factor 2 and 2 x 4 x 0.7 + 14 x 0.3 = 9.8 attacks. That is still way below the 14 attacks another infantry divisions would suffer.

a) there is less overall manpower in the division, so a point of str loss is a bit less of a manpower loss than a point of str loss in an infantry division (However, this is not a huge deal - 9 vs 12 manpower, brigaded)

It is unbrigaded manpower that counts, brigades donnot suffer strenghts loss. You can have brigaded divisions with 1% strenght left, detach the brigade and attach it to a full strenght division.

, armor can't win attrition battles. If you intend to fight a war of attrition against a superior foe, armor is not your friend.

I dare to claim the opposite. In a static offensive style of warfare armoured divisions excel all other kind of land divisions. But for this to be completely true 3 conditions need to be met:

1. Warfare is limited by manpower, not by icd. If armoured divisions are used in much smaller numbers they do not do good in a war of attrition.
2. Warfare is not limited by tc. In practice it will be limited by tc and rares.
3. Warfare is not liminited by oil. In practice it will be.

In case of the USA all 3 conditions can be met. For all other countries they likely cannot be met. Major powers allied with USA may also be able to met the conditions to some degree, so the UK and the soviet union might try it aswell. Germany however will save serios problems with rares and oil, so there some serios kind of compromise would be needed. A simply coup d'etat in the USA might also do the trick.

Put two late game armored divisions against each other and you'll see that their battle deals a lot more str damage than two late game infantry divisions fighting each other.

That is not in contradiction to what i say. Replace one of the armoured divisions by another kind of division. Will that make this side lose less manpower? Very likely it does not.

 

[Irsh Faq]

I'm afraid that the computer issues I mentioned at the bottom of last page did not abate, and this game was lost along with the decaying motherboard of my old laptop. I did play ahead some and I had screenshots that ended soon after the fall of France and the UK (latter achieved by a nighttime paradrop in Dover during the Battle of France, followed up by unescorted transports - which are somewhat more survivable than escorted ones in small sea provinces when the enemy navy is way stronger). Not sure I will post them though since the AAR is truncated either way.

I will continue the two-year-old discussion with Pang, though. That's something that people ordinarily do, right? Pick up ancient conversations on the spur of the moment?

First off I will say that if I feel the bug to play AOD again I will test your point about brigades not taking strength loss (probably by setting a brigaded and an unbrigaded division on VOV and comparing casualty and manpower-to-reinforce results). You may be correct, I am not sure.

I dare to claim the opposite. In a static offensive style of warfare armoured divisions excel all other kind of land divisions. But for this to be completely true 3 conditions need to be met:

1. Warfare is limited by manpower, not by icd. If armoured divisions are used in much smaller numbers they do not do good in a war of attrition.
2. Warfare is not limited by tc. In practice it will be limited by tc and rares.
3. Warfare is not liminited by oil. In practice it will be.

1 is where I disagree. In this kind of game if I have 24x Inf and 24x arm fighting the same sort of battle against similar, large USSR forces, the armor will come out with more damage even if both start the combat fully reinforced. The death-spiral issues that result from being slower to reinforce compound the problem, but armor is worse for casualties even if you can keep it fully reinforced.

In case of the USA all 3 conditions can be met. For all other countries they likely cannot be met. Major powers allied with USA may also be able to met the conditions to some degree, so the UK and the soviet union might try it aswell. Germany however will save serios problems with rares and oil, so there some serios kind of compromise would be needed. A simply coup d'etat in the USA might also do the trick.

That is not in contradiction to what i say. Replace one of the armoured divisions by another kind of division. Will that make this side lose less manpower? Very likely it does not.

I can say unequivocally that infantry loses fewer strength points in heavy midgame combat than armor does. Armor is not the best choice for a manpower-limited country even given arbitrarily large oil and ic/tc resources.

After the infra and supply changes this was the biggest land combat change between hoi2 arma and AOD - that hardness is not so great in combat as it was (the speed of armor can still be useful, but you can get decent speed with divisions that are better in combat).

...Or at very least this all was the case in the version I played some years ago. I see you have been busy with a new version.

 

[Pang Bingxun]

...Or at very least this all was the case in the version I played some years ago. I see you have been busy with a new version.

I donnot believe there have been changes relevant to this case. I see you have opened a thread dedicated to this discussion so it is best to continue there.