Looking for some hints and advice for a first "playthrough"

[Rosalis]

Well that answers everything Generally speaking you want the enemy come to you, entrenched in a city and covering all the defensive terrain arround it. Attacking can be very costly, and because supply takes time to spread in your newly captured territory, your units can be out of supply very quickly and then just stop firing nomather how good the unit is. So for example entrench infantry, artillery and AA in a city. When the enemy come you want to kill as much as possible, so have a chase group ready to finish them off, or if possible bombers can be very effective in doing so. If you have enough troops try an encirclement. Every unit killed means 1 less unit to worry about. When you keep healing/repairing all your injured units and keep killing, you will notice it gets easier and easier. When most infantry is killed they prolly try a suicide push and send all arty and AA to the front line.

If it is too much, never be affraid to just retreat 1 city further back, they will come in unsupplied territory and AI have a hard time pushing with a big stack generally. You want your infantry in cities as much as possible in early scenarios. Keep entrenching them there, they will heal very quickly in early scenarios because they are so weak. Keep experimenting with units and pay attention to their stats. This can help you very good in specific situations.
So you dont want to do what is all over youtube, select a big blob of units and send them to an enemy city. This can be effective if you have way more troops then the enemy, but if not you might loose all you have. Im pretty sure all experienced players control the troops themselves, and only in specific situations turn up the initiative. Like mentioned, there are some features missing sadly. In SR2020 low initiative would just repair your units, not move them arround. Now low initiative your units start moving. So yeah untill there is a fix for this, turn off initiative and do it yourself. You will get a much better understanding. Just wish they would fix units going for repair, or atleast make a shortcut for repair...

[GIJoe597]

To add to what Rosalis types about inf in cities. You can also build Trench's and Fortifications. Trench's allow you to hold a location better outside of cities/facilities.

I made a post on here years ago about unit stats. I was pretty detailed, if memory serves, I break down each one. I may try to find that again, so many posts though, it could be anywhere.

[xsmilingbanditx]

Hey guys! Thanks again for all the input! I learned quite some stuff now and also during my first war. What I do not really get/have problems with:

1. Unit management
AI seems to intervene in my orders (withdrawing and so on). I suppose this has to do with the setting for the minister but what exactly does it influence? And how in gods name would you manage hundreds of units on brigade level manually on a decent speed? What's a useful composition for Battlegroups?

2. Economic behavior
After having conquered China, I suddenly had a huge drop in Industrial Goods and Consumer Goods...why? The UI doesn't provide me with the necessary information to solve the Problems it indicates there are...Industrial goods need Oil so I build Petrolium gathering facilities in China which again needs Industrial Goods for building like Consumer Goods. So...despite having huge stockpiles of Oil and Consumer Goods and (at first) Industrial Goods...my industry goes to hell and I don't even know why - everything is there, enough people are there...I just don't know and I cannot find any information on it anywhere in the Tooltips, the UI or the Manual.
Any help/advice there?

edit: Just to be on the safe side, the production potential (e.g. the facilities) are there. They just don't seem to run on full capacity like they did before the war.

Thanks again.

[evildari]

1. a) this behaviour is controlled by setting the unit initiative in the defense dept. - select NONE to remove most of those issues. To be safe (at least for the battlegroups(bg) you like to control manually) go into the units rules of engagement setting and lock the ai out of control.
b) i play usually on max speed on the normal world map (those small arena scenarios run too fast for this). Use the lasso and ctrl+<number> to safe that bg, number key again to select again like in the other old fashion RTS-games. Similar to other branches.
More often than i would like to see those supply trucks are the first ones in any enemy city if used together with frontline troops (i dont use the option move at lowest common speed)
c) frontline troops like tanks,infantry, short range AA, (even AT if you care), support units like artillery and longrange AA, supply trucks (just to save those stupid suicidal truck drivers),
for air units i would suggest to have an interceptor swarm to clear the sky first, then another bg for mr and fb, (did not found bomber useful for the cost), supply aircraft, and if you are in airmobile operations maybe another bg with the corresponding ground units in their own bg.
naval: (depending on available airtransport-range, i would skip navy due to excessive costs) , if i have to, i put subs in one bg to clear sea, and landingcraft in another.

2. a) the default new-game option is that non-loyal lands have a production penalty - its around 60% or 66% (dont remember since i work around this issue with razing most of conquered production facilities), depending how many locations you had to conquer first you also damaged those facilities and the supply giving center locations, not to mention that the supply has to spread after a fresh annexation.
b) well the ui: shameless ad for my ui-mods: viewtopic.php?f=91&t=30312 , viewtopic.php?f=79&t=27675 maybe one will help you at least if the issue is resource-related. (as of 9.1.250 they still work)
c) there are also other factors like massive gdp change due to annexing a larger population with dissimilar gdpc, DAR may also influence it (never cared for this too..)

[xsmilingbanditx]

Oh my, that's alot to swallow again..thanks I will remember that for the next wars. For China...managing that huge front was a nightmare and I more often than not just did select a bunch of troops and storm the city (OK I was a meanie and cut off chinese units and all of them were in Mongolia so there wasn't much left ). Do I have to micro the support trucks too or would the AI move them around anyways? Should I include them in my batrtlegroups if I design them?

Hint: If new features are ever planed I'd like some kind of template designer like in HoI4 because scrolling through hundreds of batallions to create battlegroups of e.g. 7 or ten is a nightmare

About economy: Will keep that in mind. As soon as I can fire up the game again I will check my saves to compare it (and edit or reply here). Any chance of checking which buildings need repair and so on?

[Rosalis]

You dont need hundreds of battlegroups. I only have battlegroups for stacks of planes and if i order troops to another front i dont pay attention. Then i move initiative for those units to the max. Low, medium, hard initiative. Its all the same now.

You can control how the enemy (AI) moves troops to you. If you take territory then it send reinforces. So if you only take territory at 1 spot... A cheesy way is let the lemming run come, kill till you think its enough and turn up initiative.

So theres basicly you have a choice to make. Either you put up initiative and take the negatives for granted, or you play a bit cheesy, defend and then conquer. Supply trucks wont move if you turn off initiative, but you can turn them on and leave the rest off.

There are tricks like select all units of same type to help you control units. But that should be in the manual.

[GIJoe597]

One point about speed; At some point in the past, BG changed the way things work, depending on what speed you are playing at. The faster the game speed, the less things happen under the hood. This was to appease people playing on Casio calculators using AI control and 10,000 units. These people would complain about game speed. Spotting is the biggest casualty of this, in my opinion. As you increase speed, spotting calculations are skipped. This means, units do not see, nor fire at the enemy. In many cases, hostile naval units can pass undetected though choke points such as the Suez and Panama canals.

When at war, it is best to not set speed higher than Fast. I forget the details of when and what kicks in at what speed.

[Balthagor]

...The faster the game speed, the less things happen under the hood...
When at war, it is best to not set speed higher than Fast. I forget the details of when and what kicks in at what speed.

To clarify, all speeds are the same except Fastest. On fastest some calculations are reduced. All other speeds use all features.

[GIJoe597]

Thank you Mr. Latour, I could not remember the details.

[SixthtySixthSix]

i run russia everytime. my regular practice is to set the low and high income tax rates to a flat %10 and every other tax to %0. how do i do this?

[xsmilingbanditx]

And yet again...many thanks tonal of you! I'm getting somewhere here
I'm afraid I haven't yet installed the UI Mods as I am still trying to understand the current UI (hehe).
Special thanks go to you Mister who told me about repairs...I tried tonread about it (not much there though) in the Manual. But it was enough for me to play around with it.
So for example...if I setzt the whole Theatre to "automatic repairs" it will cost about 250kT Industrial Goods - which would about deplete the worlds stock in my game in about three or four days I also do have stuff building from the war which I cannot find anymore :-p like Supply depots and those drain IG too.
To make things worse, even if I reset the Minister to different priorities the AI seems to priorize Military Facilities. Even if I only activate the subregions autorepair the IG cost skyrockets to 50kT so...yeah.
To make things worse, I can lock out the Minister from repairs but...how do I find Facilities that need repairs then? Is there a Ledger, a List or can I make him priorize Resource Facilities first?

Analyzing my Situation a bit further, I lack alot of oil. I do produce about 100k (barrels?) but need 1.2 Million..
Sooooooo my Idea now is to first focus on oil because no oil leads to no IG...no IG means dead meat.
BUT alot of the oil seems to go to the military. The AI sends them around and around and around in circles draining fuel. Which would be the best setting to just make the AI deploy/Reserve units and not move them around in peace? Is this a Minister setting or should I just let the battlezone/theatre have a lower priority and aggressiveness setting?

So to sum it up, you already helped alot buuuuuuut more Input is always appreciated

[evildari]

1. do not use theater auto-repair unless you have a huge pile of IG (you see how huge that pile needs to be - you would need depending on damage this amount for at least 20 days)
I would suggest scrapping (will give some IG back) some (depends on damage) of your freshly conquered facilities - especially if you think you cannot hold them. Multiple exchanges of a hex will do a lot of additional damage even without any combat.

2. in the land department there is a list where you can filter all your building by type of building and filter further about their status like active / repair damage. (..not that usable due to its small size).

3. you sure that its the military wasting your oil - usually its the civilian petrol usage that consumes most of the oil and unfortunately it is also the number one priority - even if you need a puny 10k barrels for your military - no it wont get those, cause your 2Billion SUV drivers get their 100M barrels first.
Quick mitigation for it is to lock petrol out of minister control and increase domestic markup to the maximum. If you do not like your military drive around the world, you need to set initiative to NONE.

[xsmilingbanditx]

Thanks! Will try that today I think. Got a savegame right after I ein the war so that's quite the good start.

Wouldn't need that if the Scenario Editor be able to load a scenario...could just Design a custom Scenario and start 1949 (my preferred one).

Will report back

[xsmilingbanditx]

Well I think I will try the UI Mod next...I just don't really know how to ever even get close to cover my Oil needs. I mean, I now have 120 of those damn things running and it's still only covering a third of the usage. And yes, it's nearly all used by civilians...meh...