I've started and restarted as USSR a few times now and find their strengths and weaknesses very intriguing and would really like to play all the way to 'end game.' I feel like I now have a sufficient handle on their OOB, economic and industrial situation, techs and diplomacy to play and have developed some general strategic principles (which I'll list below).
Last night I started up a new game with the settings that I've come to realize are most suited for my interests: Hard Milit; Normal econ and diplo; High random events; enhanced spotting and range off; Sphere victory (this seems to me to be the most realistic in that, it should hypothetically be feasible to 'win' without ever actually declaring war on anyone and simply growing your sphere through 'philanthropy' and diplomacy; pretty much everything else default.
My question to anyone who has also played as USSR is:
What do you do with all those UNITS!?
My God what a tangle of crappy obsolete aircraft, and units the Soviets have strewn across Eastern Europe . . . In previous games, I simply did the rubber-band select on _everything_ and told it to go to Reserve. This was before I realized that there are Russia hexes INSIDE Ukraine, Lithuania, etc. and later wound up moving nearly all those units back inside or Russia to garrison hubs or go to reserve inside Russia.
So what do you guys do? Garrison on the border with the West? Garrison in a strong defensive line in your WP allies, else farther back inside your colonies? Send everything to reserve?
A few observations/strategic principles I've developed:
1. USSR starting OOB is strangely lacking in infantry, though I suppose with a close combat defense of 12 their SU-100 anti-tank is just as good for garrisoning in close combat hexes?
2. USSR has an overabundance of artillery, motorcycle recon, unmounted Engineers & old Lavochkin squadrons. In the past I have gifted these en masse to warm relations with N Viet, N Korea, Eritrea, etc., but to be honest I'm not sure that I was really helping them by soaking up their manpower with these seemingly antiquated units? I'm now tending toward just plain scrapping any interceptor that has less than 10 or 11 mid air strength, any arty with less than 15 or 20 attack, and the moto recons and engineers I'm not sure about.
3. Having played through a couple times now and tried different things, I'm not sure what real use keeping such a large and overall antiquated army on active duty serves me as USSR. I have yet to see any Blue aggression up through about 1952, and by then I can have produced a couple hundred Light Infantry which are apparently better than the standard leg infantry in every respect and quick to build. Mountain Infantry are substantially better at attack and defense though slow, and Combat Engineers are also much better but take considerably longer than the Light Infantry. But in any event, it seems that pretty quickly 'replacing' most of the existing Soviet Infantry, Engineers, Tanks and artillery is the smart way to go? I wouldn't imagine that those older designs would do much more than act as 'meat-shields' in actual combat.
4. USSR has paratroops, but aparently no air transport designs that are capable of carrying them. Should I split those para battalions or forge toward better transport aircraft designs? Related to this, I noticed the U.S. is not the least bit hesitant to trade any and all of its designs for the right price, which I was honestly a bit disappointed to see. U.S. should just NOT trade its designs to anyone that it doesn't have truly awesome relations with _and_ is in its sphere if not also allied. I will follow a house rule not to exploit that, but I did find it slightly immersion breaking.
5. The Yak-23 Flora versus the Mig-15 Fagot. Based on the in-game stats, the Flora is a better aircraft, though only a bit. In contrast, based on my wiki studying, it seems the Fagot was the main Soviet plane used in the Korean War and the Flora only had a few models built?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yakovlev_Yak-23
Just an error in the stats?the Yak-23 was quickly replaced in the Soviet service with the more complicated swept-wing MiG-15, which offered superior performance. In all, only 310 Yak-23 aircraft were built before production ended in 1950.
6. As far as economy/production the pattern I've tended to follow so far is:
a. turn off as much of all facilities as possible. Given the low level of supply throughout most of the country (even Moscow only has about 60% at start!) I think leaving all those facilities putting out a trickle of production is a waste of manpower and serves to do little other than drive up inflation and employment.
b. spread a high supply network from Moscow to the nearby regions to boost productivity
c. focus on social/medical/science techs
d. try to get coal and uranium production up a bit, build more petrol and coal power plants while upping petrol production to keep up, then as the supply network gets spread a bit, bring more consumer, military and industrial facilities back online.
7. Military: I have mainly built Light Infantry, which seem to be in most respects as good as Mt. Infantry except mobile, quick to build and rather cheap. Almost seems kind of overpowered for such a generic unit though. None of the Soviet bombers I've noticed so far seem to have the range to hit targets inside the continental U.S. so I'm at a bit of a loss for how to pose a credible nuclear threat.
Oh yeah, the IS-6 Shashmurin seems to be a pretty decent tank, but with all of that forest and villages in Eastern Europe I don't see those as being that useful in early game? Even in Turkey there is an lot of close combat hexes and I have yet to see a really potent soviet mobile infantry design as far as I've gone in the Tech tree, which is admittedly not far.
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