HOI4 Spain AAR

Post 1 - Originally published on Google+ on 2016-06-26 16:26:34 UTC

The best thing about  #hoi4  is that you can have satisfying quick campaigns - in other strategy games I would be barely getting started by same clock time. This time as Spain into Republican Spain.

• after civil war started both sides got about half the army, and then shitton of crappy noob units with no equipment or experience or anything
• it was a nice fun war - Soviets on my side, and Nazis and Japan on their side made rather little difference, we were mostly fighting each other. Nazis mostly chilled on the Northern coast for very long time even after they arrived.
• I start with Basque country cut off, but I managed to connect it - then later in the game I managed to get one noob unit trapped there - then I asked France for military access to get them supplied. I should have done that right away.
• the big thing in the war was trying to keep everyone connected in North-East, and rush as many of the troops as I could spare from Madrid to Portuguese border, to cut the whole South Spain into one big pocket
• we had about same number of planes, but I got air superiority, as Madrid is more central in Iberia air region, and as long as you have low range fighters more central location wins - by the end of the war unfortunately I lost it as I was left with 1 fighter to their 2, literally
• even after getting a pocket, it was very hard to clean it with my crap troops, fortunately here Soviets were quite helpful - they sent 2 armored and 1 inf divisions - infantry just took holidays, but armored divisions helped with pockets at least
• North-East was a stalemate, after I cleaned the South I just rushed everyone from Madrid to North coast
• Nationalists didn't do much, their troops were just as crap as mine and their attempt at attacking were mostly unsuccessful
• It was important to use different icons for real infantry vs crappy noobs I got, by default they have same icon, and that was confusing as hell
• after the war I disbanded all noob units and I was down from 35 to 8 divisions. I started recruiting 8inf, and then once I made some artillery 7inf2art (and switching everyone except mountaineers to that template)
• it's really no surprise that volunteers can make so much difference - I had 27 crappy noobs, 6 infantry, and 2 half-sized mountaineer units - even 2-3 divisions of plain regular infantry could be huge, and sending armored elite divisions can very easily turn the war around. I had no idea it was that extreme from the volunteer sender side, as there's no way (that I know of) to view other countries' templates

I managed to win before Italy got Ethiopia. After that I started fabricating on Portugal.

• Portugal is long, narrow, and very easy to cut
• They were doing industry focuses, so I left them in two pockets for like a year while they were building new factories for me to capture
• As it was clear they were not doing any more of that, I rushed to get Lisbon. That wasn't enough, so I got the rest of Portugal. And it was still only 99% needed warscore.
• If that's not a good example how everybody's national unity is ridiculously high, I don't know what would be. I needed to bunnyhop two European islands to get the last points.
• Its African holdings were out of naval invasion range as far as I can tell, and even though I had military access through France, you can't invade crossing border unless that country is also at war with the target. It makes sense, but it's a fairly frustrating mechanic.
• Somehow Portugal's colonial holdings are its core states.
• If they somehow got even more national unity bonus (they were at 80%), they'd be literally impossible to defeat - I can't walk, paradrop, or naval invade their African or Indian holdings unless France decides to join the war on either side.
• National unity needs some massive nerf. This was just ridiculous.
• Because they kept trying to break from their pockets, ratio of our losses was over 300:1 in the end