UK surrender - puppet or not?

[World Hegemony]

Hi, I'm playing a game as Germany (TFH and on normal). Really familiar with HOI2 but not so much HOI3 (not being able to release Scandinavia after taking NOR, SWE and DEN was a surprise, for example, so I went back and puppeted NOR and SWE instead). It's about April 1941 and the UK just surrendered, giving me all of their territory and also all of the territory of the minor GiE.

USSR DOW'd me as soon as I landed on UK (Oct 1940) but apart from a couple of attacks that didn't go anywhere, the M-R pre-war line held while I finished off UK.

I'm wondering what people do with the UK lands after they get them? I'm pumping out units like mad for war in the east, because I built navy heavily early on. So I'm not going to be able to spare a lot of land units to garrison India, Central and Southern Africa or Indonesia. Canada, Australia, NZ, and South Africa are continuing the fight - maybe another lightweight or two as well. USA is not in war yet.

My LS and IC increased by a lot after the fall of UK - I think I have about 54 LS now, and 560 total IC after modfiers.

I was thinking about releasing India so that it could generate its own armies, as well as Indonesia. I'm kind of torn on the UK because I presume the majority of my new leadership and IC are coming from the home island.

I can probably spare enough men to put an army on Newfoundland and try to finish off Canada before the US declares war, but that's about it. If I do decide to keep UK, I've recently completed 2x10 runs of GAR that were originally intended to cover the beaches in Nat Spain, since they sent their entire army to Africa and have a lot of open ports. I could use this GAR army in UK and build another for Spain if the USA continues to stay out of things for a bit.

What do people like to do here? Will a puppet UK shorn of her overseas lands be useful in keeping the USA off my back? Or once you own (not occupy, but straight-grey own) UK do you keep it?

 

[SirArthur]

It really depends on the situation. If I need manpower, I keep them, if resources are fine there is not much reason other then puppet them in the war goals and take Gibraltar and some other regions you want. I mainly puppet them to keep their fleet.

The other reason to take UK can be, if you want to attack USA. At least I need some provinces in the New World to prepare the infrastructure.

 

[Oof]

Puppeting majors can have extreme effects. The biggest problem is that as their puppet master you’ll be supplying them till they have enough supplies again to supply their own forces. Considering the size of UK territory and the time supply needs to travel, it’s not unlikely that you run out of supplies within a couple of weeks. At some point you’ll get those supplies back, probably after 3 – 6 months, but you’ll be in deep sh*t, zero supplies, for at the least the first couple of months! So occupy them and don’t puppet them or the USSR will finish you off….beating units out of supply is kinda easy

 

[Kovax]

Once you've already annexed a country, releasing them won't restore their fleet and other units which were eliminated when they surrendered. If you've got the convoys to spare to supply all of those far-flung bits and pieces of the former British Empire, and to collect resources from them, it's not something to surrender lightly. Either I place a Puppet wargoal in the first place, or else I annex. Releasing after the fact has its own share of issues.

Be warned that a puppet on the same continent will share its supply chain with its master, so all supplies would need to ship from Berlin to wherever, if they are your puppet. In one game, I placed a puppet wargoal on the SU, and when they surrendered, I suddenly found my supply stockpile plummeting by several thousand per day for over a month, as every remaining Soviet unit from Minsk to Vladivostok created a new supply corridor to Berlin and demanded that the severely overstretched supply pipeline be filled. If you think supplying the German army deep in the SU was bad, picture trying to supply BOTH the German AND the Soviet army from Berlin. Despite diverting every last scrap of IC that I could spare for over a month (everything but the minimum of Consumer Goods), my stockpile dropped from over 99K to just under 5K of supplies before it started to stabilize. Eventually, all of the "spare" supplies, plus all the supplies in the Soviet stockpile, came pouring into Berlin. My stockpile jumped back up to 100K, and the huge surplus was wasted. Be careful of who or what you puppet.

In most cases, you only need to solidly garrison one or two cities in any occupied or annexed country (mainly the former capital), and cover the rest with a couple of mobile units and minimal air power (I use a single TAC, which can be redeployed as needed to any friendly airfield in the world on short notice, as long as you keep a fuel-using unit at the airfield to "hold" a supply - a division of CAV/AC works for this). That's certainly affordable for Germany, and if some minor island province revolts, it doesn't take a lot of effort to send one division to retake it, along with a CV to provide adequate air support. In essence, the air unit breaks the partisan unit's ORG, and your ground unit merely strolls in to accept their surrender.

 

[World Hegemony]

Thanks for the tips, all.

My though with India and Indonesia was that I would get more rares, etc., by puppeting them, since they would get full production potential instead of a capped one. But it sounds like that might screw up supply (not sure if India is considered "on the same continent" since it can trace a land path to Berlin).

I'll just keep UK. I didn't expect it to surrender like this - in HOI2 games it would keep hopping its capital around if you took the island - but they can be incorporated into the reich.

 

[Kovax]

My guess is that Japan took enough of their VPs in Asia to tip the balance, so they surrendered instead of moving the capital. You will very likely get more Rares by making a puppet out of them, and if you used a "Puppet" wargoal, they should bring their remaining fleet over to the Axis side.

India is on a different continent, so as long as your own country isn't physically adjacent, it shouldn't connect their supply chain to your capital, but I'm not even close to 100% certain of that.