UK Industrial Strategy

[scroggin]

one question, if TfV is on, do players try to annex British Malaya (and other puppets?) or do you guys play with mods that change that?

I always annex malaya that allows you to sell rubber and means you dont have to keep giving them things to stop them heading towards independance. I have tried annexing india but it is better to have them as a puppet using their manpower to provide armies for the allies

 

[Lord Dakier]

On a realism scale I'm not sure the UK should expect to stand toe-to-toe with Germany in the early. I've done a few, none recently but you kind of just pop every aircraft out the sky that flies over Britain and start trimming the fat of the European goliath that is Germany.

Hell the Russian's will do the hard part for you, you just need to beat them to Berlin.

 

[Zeodexic]

Yeah, this is pretty much the right approach for UK, especially in multiplayer. In single player, you could do more or less whatever you want, of course.

Before 1.3.3, it was somewhat more worth it to build civs with the UK, but now it takes much longer to build up production efficiency, and industry tech (machine tools) makes a bit less extreme of a difference in your production. This means that especially as a country like UK that needs to be ready to fight early, you had better get those mils rolling out early and starting to build up their efficiency. At most, it is maybe worth building a few civs at the start in 90% infrastructure London, but 3-5 civs is about the limit.

In multiplayer, if you are playing with other good Allied players, they will trade buff the UK heavily. This also means that much of UK's civ industry ends up coming from trade. If you have a good USA player in particular, UK will be buffed so much that they will often run out of building slots in the mainland UK.

If UK tries to play 'the long game,' France is likely to fall too quickly, Italy is likely to take Africa, and the UK itself is liable to be sealioned. And if Japan is allowed to join early, the Raj and Singapore are likely to be lost. UK simply cannot afford to risk those things.

How exactly does trade buffing work? And are there any other MP strategies like this?

 

[grandad1982]

How exactly does trade buffing work? And are there any other MP strategies like this?

Trade buffing is when you buy resources you don't need from an ally so they can use your CIC.

 

[Beethoven]

How exactly does trade buffing work? And are there any other MP strategies like this?

The basic thing is it means that your allies prioritize trade with you when they need resources, rather than trading with neutral countries or the enemy. This way you get more civ factories.

But in particular, the MP games I play (and most MP games I am aware of) have a rule that you cannot trade for resources that you don't need, solely for the purpose of transferring your civ factories to another country that needs industry more urgently. They also typically have some limits on lend-lease in the rules.

Given this, if it were allowed, the optimal strategy for USA (if you are playing competitively as Allies as a team, and are playing to win) would probably be to trade away literally all of their civ factories to the UK/Soviets, for resources that you don't need.

So instead, while USA is under the Isolation economic law (which does not have penalties for dockyards, but does have penalties for military factories), USA builds only dockyards until they have a large number of docks, and builds basically only capital ships (battleships/carriers/etc) with them. This way, USA has to import large amounts of steel and chromium from the UK or USSR. They can then build more military factories and will stand up better to the Axis. In addition, USA will end up with a very good/unbeatable navy. Not necessarily the ideal navy (ideally you might want some screens), but one that is certainly good enough to secure naval superiority for the Allies.

But even aside from this sort of intentional trade-buffing (from USA), countries like UK and USSR can expect to get a lot of support via trade in MP. Other countries such as Australia, the British Raj, etc will all trade first from UK, and later on will probably switch their trade over to USSR in order to give the Soviets a boost going into Barbarossa.

In 1.3.3., this is pretty much essential to have a balanced game, because the Allied commonwealth minors are nerfed so much, but the Axis minors were not. Previously, we sometimes had rules that e.g. the USA could not build dockyards until the start of the Sino-Japanese war in mid 1937. Perhaps if the new patch nerfs Axis minors with their focus trees, then we might go back to having that rule.

 

[Beethoven]

Trade buffing is when you buy resources you don't need from an ally so they can use your CIC.

You can still trade buff quite a bit even while trading for resources that you 'need' by choosing to go on free trade, not research excavation tech, and produce expensive sorts of equipment that require lots of resources.