taw's blog: HOI4 Japan AAR

Post 1 - Originally published on Google+ on 2016-06-23 18:42:30 UTC

Playing as Japan:
• not doing anything too cute, just focuses for wars so far
• mostly size 40 divisions (11inf 6art), a few marines, cavalry+mp, motorized etc.
• I got civil war in Spain won
• supporting fascists in US so they hopefully flip (they're at 40% now) and leave me alone
• war with China was painful - it's huge, low supply, and somehow both Nazis and Soviets sent volunteers for the Chinese (Soviets sent them to both KMT's China and Mao's China; Nazis just to KMT's)
• started own faction - as Nazis are assholes, and refused to stop supporting China when asked by focus
• Poland started own faction
• I'd like to spam fabrications on countries I don't care about to have France and UK counterspam guarantees, just to make sure Comintern, Axis, and Allies have a 3-way war (Miedzymorze's existence makes it a bit less likely) - this way I'll be able to strike Allies or Soviets safely
• I really shouldn't attack anyone as long as USA is Democratic, as that's not a war I can win
• I'm a major power and my military factories can barely produce equipment for my infantry, how the hell anybody can afford fighters etc.?
#hoi4

Post 2 - Originally published on Google+ on 2016-06-24 00:32:38 UTC

Soviets attacked Latvia starting Comintern-Miedzymorze war, so good guys Hirohito and Hitler sent volunteers to protect Latvian potatoes. I could only send 5 divisions, but they're weight-40 (11inf 6art), not the usual weight-20 (7inf 2art), so they

I managed to get Leningrad for Estonia, who then gave it to Poland. AI is really obsessed with preventing encirclement, which is a good thing, much more competent than I expected - at least while having overwhelming numbers. Unfortunately my infantry, even if it punches well, is fairly slow so it can't encircle too well - Soviets can easily throw 20+ divisions wherever they want.

Soviet losses are 268k vs our side's 69k. Unfortunately there's no breakdown of volunteer forces' losses - not a big deal now, but I wish I knew how many Germans and Russians I killed in China.

I got my CB on Soviets, and I could take over the Far East, but I think game would automatically recall my volunteers if I tried that. CB on Sinkiang (which is Communist but not in any faction) finishes in a few weeks.

Elsewhere:
• Hungary and Romania have a non-faction war
• Axis is strong, getting Italy into the faction and taking over Austria, Czechoslovakia, and Albania - I wish they kept supporting Poland, but AI Germany will probably randomly backstab them
• Allies are getting nowhere so far
• America is 45% fascist, it's basically RNGesus if they press anti-Japan button before their next elections or not. They have almost two years for it, and that's like 9 more focuses. It would suck if all my efforts at getting USA on my side did nothing.

So the plan now is to wreck the Commies. I built a lot of infrastructure, but that will be for naught as soon as I cross the border into Soviet wilderness. One complication is that Mongolia is in Soviet faction, so that will be a very long front - and even if I take over the whole Far East, it's very far with very crappy infrastructure to move any further, and all Soviet victory points are on the other side of Ural.

I guess it would be fun to divide Soviet Union between myself and Latvia, but it's going to be very long war - I don't expect any European faction to attack me, but USA could press some nasty buttons, or Axis could press buttons to backstab Miedzymorze doing Commies a huge service.
#hoi4

Post 3 - Originally published on Google+ on 2016-06-24 04:18:37 UTC

• USA embargoed me - they can use focus buttons to declare war on me now, even if they turn fascist (they're at almost 50% fascist, but very far until next elections)
• I attacked Sinkiang hoping to get it in a quick separate war, unfortunately it joined Comintern, so huge Soviet-Japanese war erupted
• War meant I needed to recall my troops who helped Miedzymorze - Soviets focused on Western front, and were doing better (getting Leningrad back and pushing border a bit), but very slowly
• And then Germany backstabed Poland (it was literally sending volunteers to Poland), Miedzymorze couldn't survive that attack
• And now Germany is taking focus for war with the Soviets - this will hopefully reopen the second front sometime soon. I would have very difficult time fighting full Soviets forces that far from supply bases. Or if I got backstabbed by USA now, that would hurt even more.
• I've been doing well, but supply levels are awful, so the push is very slow. All that land looks big on the map, but it's worth very little in terms of victory points, factories, or resources
• Germans and Italians both sent me some volunteers
• I went free trade. Logic is that I have massive surplus of tungsten and chromium which there's no point hoarding, and I have no oil/rubber/aluminum anyway, so free trade cost me nothing there. The only resource that I both produce and need is steel, and that costs me a lot. On the other hand bonuses for free trade are huge, so it could maybe be worth it.
• I researched a small bit of tanks and air stuff, navy is left completely neglected.

Best case scenario:
• Axis attacks Soviets, Allies (without USA) get in war with both thanks to guarantees, USA gets fascist coup

Wost case scenario:
• Soviets focus on me, Axis stays asleep, USA declares war on me and joins the Allies, so I'm screwed from every direction

Loses in Soviet-Japanese war are 733k to 35k, so in terms of manpower I'm wrecking them, but that was Soviets throwing desolate land and peasant bodies at me to delay me (successfully), and they're nowhere near running out of manpower.

I've been using motorized infantry as fake tanks to do some encircling, unfortunately they aren't really tanks, so they got cut from supplies themselves many times, and I lost two big motorized divisions (that's like half of my total manpower losses this war).

There were some fun medium-sized encirclements, like Vladivostok and the steppe of Central Asia, but mostly it has been a lot of slow pushes. Random lakes are great for encirclements, otherwise I can use my overwhelming firepower to push Soviets away, but with so much land between me and Moscow such pushes are not decisive at all - if I did that against let's say France, I'd be in Paris in a month, here it's more like five years just due to distance.

I got Central Asia thanks to such motorized push followed by heavy infantry advance (and then got my motorized divisions cut a lot of times), but that's a huge supply bottleneck right now, so I can't continue from there unless I build a lot of infrastructure or something. At least I prepared for the war and infrastructure in my previous borders is decent now, so supplies don't have that far to travel.
#hoi4

Post 4 - Originally published on Google+ on 2016-06-24 17:01:08 UTC

Politics:
• I continued the war against the Soviets
• Germany did not join, instead they attacked France
• USA got some bullshit event or something reducing fascist influence, so Democrats won elections, and whole game of influencing them got me nothing
• War against the Soviets got really tedious after a while
• Allies invaded multiple times and even got Berlin briefly, but Hitler got better after that
• Here's a clusterfuck of fail - after Soviets surrendered, war continued because their puppet one state Poland was somehow a major power. Then Germany declared war on the nonexistent Soviets (not Poland), sniped Warsaw, and somehow got shitton of warscore this way. That's 3 fails in a row (puppet being major power, declaring war on country that's not on the map, crap warscore system), fixing any of them would prevent this nonsense.
• Speaking of bullshit, Soviets really shouldn't have decision to annex Tannu Tuva when Tannu Tuva surrendered.
• If you have free trade (or export focus) you'll end up exporting and importing same resource a lot. That's dumb, and worse of all you need shitton of convoys for it. I managed to run out of convoys for importing my own resources somehow as I didn't consider it. Trade system could use some work.
• Resistance suppression minigame is unfun and miserable. You can't even move units in resistance map mode so you'll need to flip units way too much. They could at least fix the UI so it's not as miserable, but even then it wouldn't be fun.

War:
• The whole war got tedious as hell. HOI4 is fairly fun on war like Poland vs Germany, or Iran vs Turkey, but world wars are just way too tedious. Unfortunately it's a world war game.
• I had to micro everything - battle planner is so retarded I could only safely turn it on after I got 80% of Soviet territory and just lacked Moscow, Kiev, Sevastopol and Odessa to get them to surrender. Even then it was painfully bad.
• The game really ought to automate simple things like units standing idle in province next to a battle should support the battle, or moving newly deployed units to frontlines instead of manually sailing every one of them from Japan.
• Navy, air, and trade stuff is so boring I wish there was AI control toggle.
• I got motorized + medium tank-based self-propelled artilery divisions. They performed really well. Maybe I should have just gotten straight tanks?
• In early days of the war I had air superiority because Soviets couldn't be bothered to transfer their planes to my land. Later they threw everything they got at me.
• Everybody's national unity is way too fucking high. There are tons of victory point provinces everywhere so you need to get 80%+ of their land to get them to surrender. Even getting all victory points (Mongolia and Sinkiang had one or two) is often not enough because random clay has some tiny fraction of victory points too. Base national unity should be a lot lower, and casualties should lower it even more. Historically in WW2 France, Italy, Japan and pretty much all minors all surrendered very early; and not a single country fought much after losing its capital.
• And there's no possibility of ending war early. Unconditional surrender or bust.
• I wish there was some kind of destruction option - for example my volunteers fighting Soviet-Latvian war captured Leningrad. What they should have done is blow up every factory and every piece of infrastructure in it. There's no such option.
• Germany and Italy sent me volunteers. They mostly did suicidal attacks or just stood idle very far from frontlines.

This campaign is done. I could probably backstab Nazis now, but it would be unfun, and warscore system means that even if I took all Nazi land myself, UK would get 90% of everything just because of bombing.

I think I'm done with the game for now. Maybe I'll play some mods in the future. I assume they're going to fix most UI issues and ridiculous warscore, but that still leaves big wars being too tedious and everything turning into a world war.

#hoi4