Spock
1736
My USA game is now in early 1941, having started in 1936. Even though I made lots of mistakes, I’ve still managed to produce 9 or 10 carriers and a decent air force. I fear I’ve neglected my army. I’ve been slowly building ports and airfields in the Pacific. I haven’t explicitly chosen Japan-first, but I might.
Heh, I dreamt about HOI4 last night too. Something about building civilian factories. :)
Was accidentally up til 6:30 am last night Eek! But was so excited because in latest game I’m a little ahead of schedule and for the first time I think I have the perfect setup for testing out doing encirclements in my new Soviet campaign.
I’m using spearheads of tank and horsies with infantry support coming in to fill gaps. I did a test run last night and the medium tanks up in the Baltics easily made it to Danzig (did not do encirclement plan then), but the light tanks in Romania had a tougher time getting to their goal of Constanta. I could wait to have a lot more tanks, but don’t feel like it would be worth it.
And once again, kept dreaming over and over again about this encirclement plan. Hope to catch and crush a massive segment of the German army.
BTW - there is a massive naval group of Germans who’s been prowling the Baltic sinking all my subs. I only know from the post battle reports showing my guys being destroyed. How does one deal with this besides telling your guys to do nothing? If I could put together some kind of force to harass or sink them I’d like to do that.
MikeJ
1739
1940 Fighters and 1940 Naval Bombers with enough range to cover the baltic? It would help if you knew the composition of the German force. If you want to build ships, apparently light cruisers with light cruiser batteries and torpedoes are reasonably good against everything. Maybe a few DDs for sub protection.
I’ll see if I can spot it again, but from the last report it was roughly 2 Battleships, 10 cruisers, 14 Destroyers, and some other stuff. It is huge.
MikeJ
1741
If you think that’s huge, you should try facing off against the US Pacific fleet :)
Probably the 2 BBs are old pre-WWI leftovers (though their stats in game are the same as late-WWI BBs…). Destroying them from the air is probably easiest. It wouldn’t take a whole lot of good CLs to beat them I think, but then you’d have to research the naval tech and doctrine. I guess it depends on what your ambitions are post-Germany.
Why is there a play button for defensive troops on the front? If I activate it what is different than not having it active? Will they attack troops that are surrounded automatically?
Good question. As far as I noticed, they do probing attacks either way, maybe they’re only supporting without the play button?
KevinC
1744
As far as I know it won’t do anything if you just have a front line set. It’ll activate any attack plans you have but if you don’t have any, I think it just doesn’t do anything.
There is a Probing Attack that can be unlocked, which allows defending forces to attack without losing Entrenchment bonuses (at a penalty to their attack rating). I’m not sure if they would do anything in that case, I haven’t really played with it. I’m guessing not, though.
jpinard
1745
How bad is it to not train new pilots? In middle of war so not sure if I should take time out to level him, or just throw his rookie ass into the fight?
Spock
1746
Hmm, can you rotate trained crews to the front line and put new aircrews on the map behind the lines? Or are you already scraping the bottom of the experience barrel? If the latter…hrmm. If the air model is at all realistic, I’d train 'em first, but I don’t have enough experience with this air model to be sure.
I didn’t know if it was a death sentence sending fighters (or navy) out with no training.
Spock
1748
I don’t know either, but as the Americans, I have the luxury of not finding out. I train ships and aircrews away from the front most of the time. Not all of the time, though!
My current game is utterly absorbing. It’s October 1941. The Germans rolled through Poland and France and the Balkans quickly, but after some initial progress in the USSR they’ve now stalled. Thank goodness!
Japan, on the other hand, is on a rampage: it’s taken China out of the war, it has most of Burma and has cut off British positions in Malaya. Japan declared war on me in the summer of 1941, earlier than I expected, and has done a fine job so far of carrying out the historical landings. It’s taken Wake Island and is about to take Guam; it’s landed well in the Philippines; it’s got half the Dutch East Indies. Japan is not messing around: it landed with 6 divisions at Wake, and 13 (!) at Guam. (Much more than historically, but with China in hand, Japan can afford more ground troops.) I think I can hold Pearl Harbor, but my garrisons every where else are weak – one division typically. I’m moving troops out from the west coast now.
I’m playing “historical” setting, so I’m sure much of the Japanese AI is scripted, but I’m still impressed. Amphibious operations are usually problematic for computer AI. So far Japan is up to the task. Which is great with me – I wanted a naval war, and I’ve got one.
KevinC
1749
Historical Focus only means that the AI won’t follow the ahistorical paths in the focus tree, i.e. Germany will not try to replace Hitler with the Kaiser or go democratic. None of the war operations are scripted.
For reference, the Japanese just took Hawaii in my game. They also own all of India and everything else across all f Asia and the pacific. Hope they don’t declare war on me.
Spock
1751
One question: can I order different task forces in the same fleet to patrol (or Strike Force, or carrier escort) different regions? When I’m deciding where to send a task force, I’ll see all sorts of zones lit up green already. I’m not sure if this means I have naval superiority already, or if this is where my TF will go. I’m guessing the former, but if so, it’s confusing, since the destination of my TF is also indicated in green.
Some people on the boards have suggested that Japan needs to be toned down a bit so that it doesn’t conquer China so easily every game. It’s pretty ahistorical, but I don’t really mind, as it’s more fun to fight against a strong Japan.
The new naval and air systems are much improved over the last time I dug into the HOI series. They’ve struck a good balance between playability and realism. Air missions in the Pacific often were twice-a-day things, as presented here, so I like that. The “patrol for a strike force in port” thing is a bit ahistorical, as ships didn’t do most spotting for other ships – aircraft did – but it’s a reasonable abstraction of the importance of naval search historically. It’s great we get to train aircrews and do shakedown cruises on the map. Above all, it’s fun to assign all these missions, and I don’t have to spam them – choose once, revisit as necessary.
I’m trying not to be too fussy about historical fealty, but there are a few things that bug me. It’s too easy to move and supply massive corps and armies around the Pacific; the battle of the South Pacific historically involved only a few ground divisions. Carriers should carry torpedo bombers and dive bombers, not “naval bombers” and “carrier air support”.
But overall, I think the air-naval game is pretty awesome. If I want a more granular, grognardish simulation, I can always play War in the Pacific. But for a more playable, reasonably historical challenge, HOI4 is great.
I have wondered the same thing! I ended up making an entirely different task force, but mostly because I have one guy who can do better sub stuff so I made him focus on subs, and then did another task fleet with another commander.
Spock
1753
I got an answer to my question on the HOI boards: if you want two TFs to cover different areas, you have to put them in different fleets. Now I know! (I post there as Chester Nimitz, incidentally.)
So far the responses to your question (on training) are more mixed. Interesting.
I wrapped up my Japanese invasion of America.
To win the race for Chicago we tried to break through the American lines but overextended our supplies and got cut off. Hitler, not wanting to lose to a “lesser” power, took the low road. As a symbolic farewell to the American way of life, a German bomber dropped an atomic bomb over Wrigley Field. German units marched into the city and the war was over. Now it was time to divvy up the spoils. Here I learned one of my tactics backfired on me.
By starting a civil war in the United States all their states went to the Fascist faction of the civil war, which means we didn’t get any territory from the country. On the plus side, we did get Canada. Um…yay?
I then play a second game as Japan. This time I went China first. It was going well but then the Soviets declared war on us. Luckily, they didn’t declare on Manchuria so they couldn’t sandwich my forces in China. We took out China and then broke through the soviet lines in Mongolia. After they capitulated we turned to Malaysia and the East Indies. We gobbled them up along with the Raj. The one annoyance is that we were beat to some territories by the Turkish Empire and Siam. Those weasels took Singapore and Borneo. It was pretty easy after that. The one interesting thing about this round was the United States was a mess the whole game. I checked at one point and they had become fascist and were planning on war with the United Kingdom. That sounded fine to me. I looked later and the country was now the “Confederated States of the Workers”! WTF? We had already wiped out the Soviets and now we had to deal with an even more dangerous communist threat? They had low stability so I figured I would sponsor another coup to keep them busy and away from me. This worked out quite well as the fascist faction had all the military units when the civil war started. It also gave us a diplomatic coup.
With the Americans in the Greater East-Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere, I’m in a better position if there’s any backstabbing from Hitler in the future.
Looking at the Americans I can see quite a flaw in the AI.
The civil war also put them at war with the Philippines. Instead of marching over the empty communist states on the east coast, it sent all it’s forces to the west coast to deal with the Philippine “threat”. That leaves the communists time to build an army. sigh.
I’m tempted to go war with Hitler and also kick the Turks out of India. That’s mine dammit!
jpinard
1755
Holy crap (pile of units in SW US).
I think I’m going to play as Japan or the U.S. next game. Still trying to decide which way.
