So, before I get down to a bit of playing today, industry and research. Certainly, these are important parts of any world conqueror's planning.
Industry first. It's not just the number of factories you have, although that's an important factor. That number (your base IC) is modified by factors like your overall industrial efficiency (an increase in industrial efficiency means that 10 factories' worth of base IC makes 10 + (IndEff% * 10) effective IC), the ministers you've chosen, the positions of your government's sliders, and the policies and government type of your nation as a whole. The USSR is blessed with self-sufficiency: it has enough in the way of resources to support a very large amount of industrial capacity without having to trade for resources. Nations like Germany and Japan are less lucky. Without trading partners they won't be able to grow their industrial base sufficiently, and that leads to long-term problems, which tend to crop up in games which go all the way to 1964.
Production, too, has an additional subtlety or two. The one that comes to mind right away is the gearing bonus. It takes time to retool factories, which already suggests that long production lines are good, but in addition, the longer the line the more the gearing bonus goes up. It reduces the time but increases the cost of the units produced.
Research is also a bit more complicated than it looks at first glance (although I guess I haven't even shown you the research page yet). You have research teams, each of which has a skill level and several areas of proficiency. Research projects have a difficulty and several sub-projects which correspond to areas of proficiency. Project difficulty sets the base time required to finish a project, from ~40 to ~50 days. The skill of your research team relative to the difficulty adds or subtracts from that. Areas of proficiency reduce the time required to complete a matching sub-project by half, and blueprints from your allies (which the USSR doesn't really get, thanks to a lack of major powers as allies) reduce it by half again. There is an additional factor: time. Researching a technology ahead of time adds a massive penalty, up to 90% at two years or so in advance.
Now for a few words on overall goals, since it's best if we have a unified national idea of where we're going. Let's call it Plan za Krasniy Mir (the plan for a red world):
1. By 1939: be prepared to turn back a German invasion in terms of units. Take our half of Poland and all of Pribaltika after the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact. Annex Finland entirely in the Winter War.
2. By German invasion plus six months: halt the German advance and turn it back upon them.
3. By May 1942 (if the Germans have not attacked): attack Germany.
4. By German invasion plus one year, or May 1942 plus one year: reach Berlin.
5. By Dec 1944: control China.
6. By Dec 1945: invade the Allies in Europe (including Finland and Norway if we have the forces) and begin island-hopping toward Australia and New Zealand.
7. Long-term: invade the United States across the Bering Sea.
For 1-3, we'll be focusing on building a large land army. Following that, we'll begin to shift our production more and more toward air and naval forces. We'll need a strong land-based naval bomber force to help our fleet out in battle, since I doubt we'll be able to compete with the Americans on equal ground in the open sea. #7 is a response to that. The Americans will be capable of defeating our supply lines across the Atlantic with surface action. By using naval bombers based in Kamchatka and the far eastern part of Siberia, we'll be able to cross in somewhat greater safety.
Precisely how to accomplish these, the ordering thereof, and even adding or subtracting things to that list I leave as a topic for discussion.