@jpinard
What Perky_Goth said. Also, have you noticed sometimes that your units will have a little yellow exclamation mark beside them? That means they aren’t willing to move where their orders tell them to because there isn’t enough supply available in that province. The AI does the same thing when fighting against you. I haven’t found a way to exploit it, but it will slow their advance. If the AI has struggled at defeating a defense for an extended period of time, then they’ll occasionally pause and allow their planning bonus to grow again. It’s a combination of all of these things that I was referring to.
I’m not sure I’d completely ignore fighters because even if you’re hopelessly outnumbered (in my game, the Germans are able to put up about 5k fighters total to my now-dwindled 2k), you’ll occasionally get the air superiority bonus. Personally, I don’t bother with anti-air. The malus reduction isn’t significant enough to devote so many factories to it to IMO.
Since you’ll primarily be fighting the Germans, you could probably forgo decryption. But if you don’t at least keep up with them in encryption, then they’ll get a combat advantage of 2.5% per level of difference between your encryption and their decryption. So by '42, they’d be seeing a 7.5% advantage in combat against you if you ignored encryption entirely. That’s too significant to ignore in my opinion. I say you can ignore the decryption only because the Germans will probably research encryption, so you wouldn’t get a benefit.
Meh. North Africa doesn’t hold a real strategic interest for you at the moment.
Spanish civil war. Keep that fight going as long as you can. I immediately sent 5 full divisions to fight it in my game and managed to help the Republicans win it. I left it with something like 45 army experience. Also keep in mind that you get army experience whenever equipment you produced is used in battle (it doesn’t show up on the experience tool-tip, but you can see it ticking anyway), so I trickled them some infantry equipment (~200/mth) to them for that. I did the same when war broke out between Japan and China. If you want to be a real arms dealer, you can trickle your equipment to both sides.
This should give you plenty of army experience to slightly modify your divisions. Remember, adding an infantry battalion to your base template should only cost 5 experience, and the support divisions are 10 experience each. Provided you duplicate your templates at the right time, it doesn’t actually take much experience to ‘optimize’ all your templates (probably <60 by the start of the war). Also, don’t neglect Boris Shaposhnikov for his 0.05 army experience/day bonus for being your theorist.
Hah. Remember, I started my Land Doctrine tree late. In January, '42, I’m only actually taking the first of the Integrated Support techs now (I don’t put line artillery in my infantry templates – support only – so I wouldn’t benefit from Dispersed Support).
Random edit tip: don’t forget to appoint Mikhail Kalinin once you’re at war. The 30% stability hit for being at war will reduce your stability to something like 33% (assuming you forgo the Collectivist Propaganda focus line). Kalinin will restore it to to near 50%. Having a stability of less than 50% will incur increasing penalties to political power gain as well as factory and dockyard output. The production hit if you’re at 33% stability is going to be something like 20%, so this is key!
