Unable to blitz the soviets

[Hellwalker]

Hi,

I'm quite new to hoi4.
I'm playing as ahistorical hitler and took poland and now I'm invading russia. I'd a army group of 5 armies with 24 infantry divisions and an army of 12 panzers divisions. I planned to use my panzers to rush to kiev and i succeded but the russians counterattack and the whole front is now red bubbles.

I've attached my save file, please help me check what i did wrong or anything that i can improve.

 

[thebard]

Two things I noticed directly from the start launching this one up:

First of all, Air Warfare is way more important. I would aim for ~3000 planes, all fighters + CAS, since you gotta go fast as germany, there's no way around it.
Second: There's a good reason for first doing FR before going after the big one. The industry you get from low lands + france and the possibility to extract ressources you need from vichy and the other puppets are massively worth it and you get to align the other European countries into the axis, in effect broadening the Frontline, which is in that state of the game actually making Stalin weaker, because he needs to spread his forces out.

Regarding the current state of the game you got two options. The first I'd recommend is going on Total Mobilization, put them women in the work force and then try to raid the other partys for stability, as long as you have two 2 PP ministers in power, to get going. Since you decided to go for the Soviet First, we need to go through it...
I have deleted the two Armys you had in the back, created a new template with just inf to fill in the gaps you got, then I decided to massively focus on Art/Supp Equip to fill the gaps. I'd recommne for the moment to remove the two artys from the line since it's just too many cannons which you can not produce at that moment.

Before going for the next offensive I suggest strongly you get Air Superiority. The Jägernotprogramm decision is a good one to shoot down these nasty planes the soviets have. Once these are taken care of and you consolidated the ground force I'd go at them again. Since this will be along war I also suggest going for the Desperate Defense thing in your doctrine to unlock additional manpower to secure that you have enough manpower and enough production to go through with it.

I'm not realy sure if you can turn it around though. I'll give it a try.
Fuck the Italians, don't let them in the faction, once they DoW Greece or anything else guaranteed by the Allies they'll fuck the game for you because Italy will get smacked by UK and then probably invaded too, giving you another front to take care of. Or even worse, they could be pulling the Americans.

 

[Quantum_AI]

Just had a quick look.

First of all, your divisions are all severely under strength. You have selected "aggressive mode" under your FM which means he will attack non-stop like a buffoon. Change it to "balanced" so that he is slightly more careful. And stop the attack for a while - let them receive some equipment from the stockpile. Within a few days, all those red bubbles will turn to green (because you will be defending). Once your divisions are back, you can attack again, but do it in balanced manner.

Secondly, your troops are under supplied (Minsk area). Their effectiveness is severely reduced and they are losing equipment to attrition. Move some troops out of that area (or repair the infra there if you don't want to micro troops). Always keep checking the logistics map.

Thirdly, your air forces are at less than 10% effectiveness. They are losing 80% because of under supply (because they are also in Minsk area). Redeploy your planes to some other air base which is not under supplied (supply map mode can be viewed with the F4 key). Also, those over Ukraine are suffering from a further 50% reduction due to lack of range. Deploy them somewhere closer and with supply. Also, you have slected ALL missions for them. That should not be the case. Put fighters on air superiority and CAS/ TACs on close air support. TACs also have longer range so you can deploy them further back.

Just do this and within a week you'll be back on track.

Edit: Also delete those three armies in reserve. You don't need them. They are just sitting there locking up equipment that is needed for the front line. Once you delete them, you will get thousands of equipment and you can then focus on fighter/ CAS and artillery production.