Post 1 - Originally published on Google+ on 2018-08-03 23:56:26 UTC
Millennium Dawn: Libertarian Nigeria: 2000-2006The mod is much less complete than Kaiserreich, with very few countries having focus trees, and generic focus tree being fairly weak, but at least quite flexible - letting everyone switch ideology, which most countries did.
Units are completely different, with mobile units having really high combat width. Everyone's units seem crazy bad. Obvious builds for 20 combat width:
• 10inf + support art - 850 IC, 145 soft attack, 17 hard attack, 45 org, will get wrecked by any tanks, but ridiculously cheap
• 6inf + 2art + 1tank + supports - 2.5kIC, but will wreck pure infantry
• 5inf + 5tank - 9.4kIC, 295 soft attack, 210 hard attack, super slow, but amazing punch
• 4mot + 4tank or 3light mech + 4tanks + or 2mech + 5tanks: weaker than padding with infantry: around 200 soft attack, 165 hard attack, faster, 11k-13k IC
• 10tank + supports - 18.5kIC, horrible org, but doctrines can help a lot
Doctrines are just as badly balanced as in vanilla, and 10tank divisions are far better with superior firepower than with mobile warfare.
I'm really not seeing why mot/mech would be of any use. Spamming 10inf, and then as many 10tanks as possible really seems like the best way, especially for nations with a lot of manpower.
First war against Benin wasn't exactly exciting. Then Togo. At least I'm learning geography of Africa. Then Cameroon was a bit better war, at least I needed to concentrate on one point. Then Niger, Burkina Faso, Chad, Central African Republic, the smaller Congo, and Sudan. Nothing was anywhere near challenging.
I diplomatically supported Israel and PRC, not sure if it does anything meaningful.
A lot of things were happening diplomatically - Chechnya War, 9/11, Grexit, US quitting NATO, half the countries flipping ideology - but none of that affected the map much, so it felt like a world where nothing happens. Fights between Africans generated nearly zero world tension.
The only real war was Sweden attacking Estonia, neither actually fighting, then Estonia joining NATO by event, and then Norway getting Sweden.
I ended up with 126 factories, and army that's mix of 10inf divisions, some 5armor 6mech (width 40) divisions, and a few leftover 6mots. It was completely wrecking every AI army regardless of their size.
I ended up having 7th biggest army in the world thanks to cheap infantry - with 720k troops and 2.7k tanks (of global 85k). The only thing stopping my total conquest of Africa was just how slow fabrication is. It'd probably take until 2020 or so, and by then my army would probably be fully mechanized.
Overall, the mod feels extremely unfinished. Nothing requiring player attention ever happens, and AI minors offer very little resistance, so where's the game? Road to '56 was a clusterfuck with a lot of low quality parts, but at least things were happening there all the time.
I guess getting into fight with majors like NATO, China, or Russia might be more interesting? That's probably it for me and this mod for now.
#hoi4 #millenniumdawn
I wonder if I'l remember any of those names in a week. Nigeria starts with 8 insanely expensive divisions (4x 6mot, 3x 6mech, 1x 2xtank 1xltank 6xmech), I ignored all that and started spamming 10xinfantry with all supports (from initial 4xinf template and expanding that), and once I had enough turned my mech/tank divisions into 3xtank 6xmech.
Those templates are extremely bad. All weird combat width. Mixing MBTs and light tanks in same division is just pointless with HOI4 industry system. And the support of choice is hospital? For country with nearly infinite manpower?
Is that at least what Nigeria uses IRL?
I got a lot bigger, and captured a lot of industry as HoI4 gives tiny countries way more than they have IRL, and their generic focus trees adds ridiculous amount of industry (for countries with 3+ states, up to 8 civ + 8 mil factories, a lot of resources, and who knows what else - at least smaller countries a bit less, but it's still crazy much).
None of the fights were terribly interesting, figuring out proper templates was about the only serious thinking required. I guess if I left the game running for a while until all minors got their industry going I'd be able to expand into an even stronger country. I really only needed first war asap to get rid of civilian economy.
I guess anyone who naively tries to use horrible starting templates will find the mod far more difficult.
