Usefullness of 'overbuilding' IC and units

[Curtis Cook]

In the Strategy manual it suggests that IF POSSIBLE you should build your IC until it's about double what you start with. To me that seems… excessive, and likely NOT possible. Is there a forum consensus on how much IC (or what proportion of starting IC) a country should build in a 1936 campaign game?

Second, I'm thinking of trying a variant in which the war starts later (Poland allies with Germany, Germany attack France in spring of 1941 and Russia in spring of 1943, leaves Balkans and Mediterranean to Italy). My goal as Germany was 112 air wings (not including transports or CAG) by the time Barbarossa launches. In real life the Luftwaffe peaked at around 60 air wings at around that time. Is 112 wings really doable, or should I be aiming lower?

 

[AAA_Robert]

As you can imagine, all depend on: which is your goal ?
IC strategy depend on : wich country are you playing / will you have enoughtressources to make work the factories / when are you exepcting to begin a war / how do you expect to win this war ?
As Germany, on BICE, I use 80% of my 1936-1937 (so, two years) production to produce new factories and to increase my ressources production... But I begin the war in 1939. Playing as soviet, maybe I would produce more...
112 air wings in 1943 against soviet is doable. But doing that, I don't know how you will be able to create a strong wehrmacht... In Vanilla, to defeat soviet is possible with an attack in 1943, but you will have to face a strong red army.

 

[Curtis Cook]

Thank you for replying.

How do you increase your resource production? I thought that was done through technological advances.

 

[marxianTJ]

Basically here is the agreed upon rundown:

Countries that can build IC and mostly only profit from it:
USA

Everybody else has special concerns which may outweigh the benefits of IC production.

In general, when you play this game from an economic standpoint, there are 3 kinds of nations.

Type 1, are those nations which have an abundance of resources, and will sell them to obtain cash, to buy supplies, in order to reduce the amount of IC needed for supplies in the pre-war years, and maybe even during and after, and will typically not see war before 1940/41. Nations like this include: USA, and USSR in particular. If you pick a nation, find that you've got tons of resources, and can manage to avoid going to war for 4-5 years, it's worth it to build at least *some* IC.

These nations could really stand to build some IC so long as the game plays out more or less historically, because their abundance of resource can absorb the increased usage from having more IC, as well as having 4-5 years after the construction of the IC to allow the ic to pay for itself (if you have a single IC that takes 5 IC to build, and takes the better part of a year or more, you're better of building ANYTHING else if you need it before 5 years from the finish date). Some of these kinds of nations can also buy down their supply need to 0 even with a fully fleshed out military, and then in that case, building IC is not as helpful.

Type 2, are nations which are resource poor, or resource poor in certain areas, who will have to sell supplies so as to obtain money to buy resources. The trouble here is that you will have to invest IC in order to stockpile resources. So building *some* IC could be permitted, and indeed may even be helpful, as building additional troops would force up the demand for supplies. Germany is an example of such a nation, where building *some* IC is a great idea especially early on, because it will keep your IC going into supply production lower to allow you to maximize your resource trade deals and fully load your resource stockpiles for the wars ahead more quickly. Limited IC building as these types of nations *may* be ok, but it's sort of a "may" as in when windows 98 would say "this *may* cause problems" and then it always invariably did lol. You can easily destroy your economy if you're not careful - lots of older guides for Italy for example suggest building IC, but that can *really* limit Italy's options, because Germany is going to do its level best to buy up all the resources on the planet.

Type 3, are nations which are generally poor in everything. These include *most* minor powers, where they may have minute supplies of various resources, and will have to trade them as well as supplies to maintain their resource stockpiles. So building IC for them is actually outright harmful because they not only don't have much IC to build more IC, but the increased resource drain will kill your economy and render the new IC null.

But I'm actually a proponent of not building any IC at all as basically anybody other than the USA, because of the way practical mounts up in this game, and the possibility to operate with 0 IC in supply even at full military production, it ends up being a *lot* cheaper to produce all those planes and tanks in the 1-3 years you would have been building IC that won't pay off until 41-43' by which point the game is likely decided one way or the other already. It also benefits the USA that they really don't need to build much of an army, and ships don't upgrade, so building your ships as late as possible is the best way to do it.

 

[Curtis Cook]

That explains a lot. It also brings up another question that I'm going to ask in another another thread, as it's largely off topic here.

And I just discovered that there's a difference between 'helpful' and 'I agree'. Now I'm going to have to change what I clicked on in some other threads.

 

[AAA_Robert]

Well, that was a more coplete response. I don't see anything important to add about IC building...

About ressource production: you're right. Ressource production is incresaed by technological advances in the Vanilla.
I made this confusion because in the BICE mod, you can increase the ressource production of a province with some buildings...

 

[Curtis Cook]

Got it. Thank you for coming back to check up on this.

 

[Kovax]

While I mostly agree with marxianTJ's assessments, there are a couple of counter points to consider:

If you build a lot of military units early on, you're going to need to supply them for the next several years, and that will quickly start to eat into your production budget (well, technically you CAN shut off building supplies and let your troops starve until a couple of months before the war, but that's ridiculously gamey). I tend to front-load all of my non-supply-using construction, such as any air fields, Infrastructure, IC, and convoys that I intend to build. You end up with less military units early on, but potentially more later.

Practicals are a major consideration, so you SHOULD probably put "one of everything" (at least one, and a lot more Infantry) in the production queue to keep them on the rise. I tend to ramp them up gradually, because an early increase will tend to cause higher decay over time (it's a percentage), so if you start boosting Practicals slowly art first by dedicating some IC toward more factories, then start to ramp up military production once your new IC comes on line, you eventually end up with almost the same thing, but with a bit more IC to work with. It's dependent on so many factors (minister bonuses, techs, laws, etc.) that an accurate comparison is really difficult.

Depending on country, as said, either building IC pays off big, barely pays, or is a waste of IC. Germany is on the borderline, where it's potentially a short-term slight negative in 1939, in exchange for a significant long-term increase after 1940, provided that you can supply enough resources to feed that additional IC. That can either mean stockpiling (huge early trade deals with the US, SU), trade deals with overland partners (Netherlands, Soviets), or looting the stockpiles of other countries (Netherlands, Belgium). Note that taking a country and looting their stockpile while you've already got your own massive stockpile can mean an overflow, and anything over 100K is lost. With Germany, I can usually feed another 15-25 IC without too much trouble, and 30-50 if I really work at it, with the risk of wasting some of the extra for lack of materials to run it, if my stockpile runs out of Metal or Rares.

Playing Italy, for example, it really doesn't pay unless you expect to conquer a lot of valuable land and use harsher occupation laws to extract enough resources to feed it (meaning higher garrison requirements).