Glad my speed “helped”?
But yeah had similar issues with Italy. For a while there I was using the “no retreat” warplan literally as often as I got the command points to do so, because I just couldn’t catch a break long enough to entrench on the three big fronts.
Of course, this lasted right up until I made the same realisation as you- the fronts system is stupidly flawed, and just created a crapton of one-region-wide fallback positions. Suddenly I could have six divisions in the places they were always attacking, and two divisions in the places they were never attacking. Then I started getting downtime, then they started entrenching, and from there it was an upwards spiral and didn’t need any micro at all.
The advice did actually help quite a bit against the Italians. Otherwise I probably wouldn't have build up those forts and would have had a really nasty time.
If I had went into that battle with 2 forts along the border I probably would have needed at least another dozen divisions (or to be playing intelligently from the beginning) to defend the border.
I also feel like the front system is fairly uniquely bad for this war as well.
Notably:
Your troops far exceed the front size, which means that you have like 1/2 your army doing nothing but sitting there being locked out of fighting or organizing.
The terrain is flat and the provinces are small, so moving back or forth to reinforce is fairly quick and doesn't have a bunch of attrition. (You have some in the south, but not the weeks of constant attrition you experience in South America or Asia).
And finally you aren't attacking in any meaningful way and the enemy is pounding you over and over, so your troops aren't reorganizing behind the protection of your attacking troops.
Can’t remember the last time I had an enemy country run out of supply though. Do you just stare at the brown bars until they start failing to replenish?
The war was going pretty difficultly with a bunch of micro for like a year (although they never broke through Belgium or luxenbourg) with them just constantly fight me in every single non-maginot line tile of the border.
I typically had air superiority (cause they threw all their planes into the ocean) and thanks to the help of the Belgians was managing to hold the line pretty evenly without really gaining or losing any ground for around a year.
Note that my situation was steadily improving for multiple reasons.
1) I was steadily progressing from a pure 9 infantry template to a standard 7/2 template with anti-tank, artillery and engineer support as my artillery production ramped up.
2) I switched out from "have your units randomly wander around and have 15 divisions pinned and not recovering by a single enemy attacking them for a day at a time" into manually controlling all of them and pulling some back to recover. This happened in waves (a army at a time over about a year) as I got disgusted by how badly the AI was handling things.
3) I was gaining a bunch more troops as my blitz in africa winded up and I brought dozens of divisions north into both my european fronts.
and as it turns out 4) They were running out of infantry equipment and some other stuff (notably tanks, as all my troops started off the war with the anti-tank support attachment which made all their tanks tank massively more casualties).
So my situation was just steadily getting better over time as their war machine ran down. I was keeping a pretty steady eye on the loss numbers between me and the enemy because its pretty motivating to see that the Italians are losing 5 times as many troops as you and the Germans over twice as many as you. And then suddenly their loss number just skyrocketed. Over the course of a few months (just after I went from 8/1->7/2) they suddenly lost a million more men and stopped their constant theater wide attacks, and I was able to push back and take a few provinces.
After they stopped attacking I began using plans and armies again. Not because plans are good, because I suck at them, but because I had a 77% plan bonus, which equates to a 77% attack bonus which is massive and has an effect that cannot be understated (provided your enemy is willing to not attack you for a month to let your troops get up to strength). Over the course of about six months I did two major 77% strength+attack bonus attack, which just bashed through their line and let me take like 10 provinces.
So when I was preparing the third one I noticed the text where it says if you should attack or not it said "inferior enemy" which was odd, because the french aren't really superior to the germans at all. A bit of digging showed that a bunch of their divisions were low on strength even when they hadn't fought me recently which was odd.
I figured that the only real possibility was that they were low on equipment given they still had manpower left, so I swapped tags to confirm and yup, they were majorly low on infantry equipment.
I then realized that if they were that low on infantry equipment that their infantry was at like 1/2 strength (which I could tell by just looking at them after I swapped back) any losses would hurt them much more then it hurt me, so I hyper agressively just pushed them to the other side of germany before anything could change. I took a bunch of losses doing it (as much as the entire war proceeding it) but I was too lazy to micro, and I wanted to push things as fast as possible so that Russia couldn't get involved and grab land.
Note that I was really darn surprised when it happened. I was honestly expecting that I would need to wait for Russia to get involved to split their attention so that I could just push across and kill them. Before it I had managed to take like 3 provinces in like a year, and then another dozen provinces (aka, the rest of Belgium) over the next six months. I figured that I might say, take another few dozen out of the literally hundreds that Germany controlled. But then they collapsed and I managed to grab the whole thing instead.
Author
Topic: Hearts of Iron IV (Read 104565 times)