Fallback line is not as useful as you are probably thinking (or at wasn’t last time I tried it). First, I don’t think divisions will automatically retreat from their current battle. Second, they might move by rails if the line is far enough away, which can be bad if caught in that mode.
Third, last time I checked the fallback line didn’t get converted into a regular front line when the enemy caught up to it. This meant that if one section of the fallback line got broken, the unit AI would just forget about that part and redistribute divisions to the other parts of the line rather than move the fallback line back a province. This caused a gap and gaps are very bad…
In that picture, the Western Front is one of four theatres. Theatres are just a convenience mechanic for the player.
The Western front here has two Army Groups. Army groups can be commanded by field marshals, but don’t have to be (it’s a really good idea when possible though).
Each army group has a number of armies - 5 in the first, 1 in the second. A field marshal can oversee 5 armies efficiently, which is probably why the armies are split between two army groups. Each army may be led by a general.
One major source of headaches in a static defensive battle is that units that are forced to retreat will fall back one province, rest briefly, then march straight back into the fray. In many cases it would be better for them to rest for longer because once they reach the contested province they are no longer able to gain organisation, even if they aren’t directly involved in the fighting. It would also be nice if they fell back to a fallback line, but they don’t.
The only good way I’ve found to use a fallback line is to assign units that are getting low on organisation to a fallback line close behind the front. They will march there and rest, then can be rotated back into the front lines when fully recovered by reassigning them to the front. Remember to Ctrl-Click on the orders for each of these assignments rather than just give move orders otherwise the units will go where you tell them then immediately return to their assigned orders.
Does it matter where you build your Civilian/Military factories?
If placement doesn’t matter in regard to where stuff pops out, then as the Soviets it seems to make sense to build them all as far away from Germany as possible right?
Yes, but you need infrastructure to support the buildings and you can’t afford to wait for the time it takes to build it in the tundra. And Japan is never guaranteed to not attack you.
Any way to make contiguous front across 2 countries?
I’d like to make a contiguous defensive front across Latvia AND Estonia. But I can’t seem to draw across both nor properly add to the first one I create. I’d like to have just a single Army guard that entire front.
Oh boy - guess I’d better change that in my current game ASAP.
You can stack the odd factory there, and it’s really slow to move there without the infrastructure. Even with, those are large provinces.
Sadly, you can’t make a continuous front with 2 countries you’re at peace with, even if they’re in the same faction. It’s an easy way for the game to have a front AI that doesn’t get stuck if you only end up at war with one of them, but it makes things messy, especially if you’d like an army group front - I have to learn to use those better.
Yep, the symbol in the left is the army group. Wreath is the default symbol, I think, but you can select the army group and click on the symbol in the army group listing (top left) to change it, just as you can for armies. You can set the colour there too.
Ctrl-click on an order to assign the units you have selected to that order. Be careful, that can move them between armies if you ctrl-click on an order for a different army.
Ctrl-right click on an order deselects whatever you have selected and instead selects the units currently assigned to the order. This can be handy when a front splits up (usually because you have pocketed enemy troops) so you can work out which units have ended up on which front.
Both of these appear in the tooltip when you hover over an order.
Think so. It’s not something I’ve used.
Ctrl-click. Note that if you create a front (or any other sort of order) when you have a bunch of units selected that currently have no orders, they’ll automatically be assigned to the new order.
Best you can do here is to split your army between multiple front orders, one for each opponent. Just create two fronts in the usual way. The first will probably have the entire army assigned to it, the second no units at all. You can check this with Ctrl-right click or by zooming in and looking at the text on the fronts themselves which will tell you how many units are assigned to them.
You can then share out units between the fronts with Ctrl-click.
I strongly recommend playing around with fronts while you’re at peace to get the hang of them. You can try setting up offensive lines (which are effectively attack orders) as well. The game will happily let you do this even when at peace, you just won’t be able to set them attacking until war is declared.
Whatever they are, they should be in the game. Getting a new thing in the production queue is a nightmare, especially if you want it someplace other than the bottom because the scroll defaults to TOP and BOTTOM and… nowhere else. So you have to slowly “climb” the thing up the list by hand because the idea of “pages” was too much apparently.
Also it makes zero sense that Navy and everything else are together, they don’t use the same facilities, but here look at them in the same list for no reason other than to make it more confusing.
They use the same resources and that list is a priority order for those too. It’s still annoying, but I hear they added filters now at least. Also you can shrink the giant boxes to a single row with no loss of functionality. Oh and you can drag and drop now. So yeah, gradual QoL improvements.
Shift clicking on the arrows will move the item to the top/bottom of the queue. Sorry on second read, your comment may imply that you knew that. :)
Altenatively, you can click and drag production items which is often quicker for me than repeatedly clicking up/down if I only want to move it part of the way.
The problem is that it scrolls like… really fast. Or teleports to one end or the other. So you fly around the list like a bouncy ball in an aquarium trying to just add some new Naval Bomber where you want it for 2 minutes.
I think that was also causing me issues? I haven’t played a couple weeks, but I know it was slowly driving me mad. In my mind it was either insanely fast or insanely slow with nothing in the middle that was reasonable.
