Kaiserreich Bharatiya Commune

Post 1 - Originally published on Google+ on 2017-05-19 15:26:02 UTC

So I played #hoi4 #kaiserreich as Bharatiya Commune - or Socialist East third of India.

I wanted to try something different, and not base my army on 7mar 2art - going for tanks early. Well, tiny war with Nepal showed me that this is completely non-viable. Until I changed my armies to 7mnt 2art I couldn't get anywhere at all. There's just no way without artillery. Using mnt instead of mar since I already start with them researched, and the difference isn't that huge.

So as step two instead of superior firepower and infantry support tanks to take mobile warfare and have separate infantry (7mnt 2art) and armored divisions (4mot 2mtank), which are on budget side of armored divisions. So far it's been going OKish.

Politically I got through a lot of horrible events, had two major wars and some minor ones, and I'm only coring rest of India by fairly slow events.

I didn't join any faction yet, but I somehow joined French faction's research group, so I got some massive discounts (up to -50%) - I even got some air doctrines this way as they were so cheap.

West India was even part of Entente, but after I fully occupied them we peaced out rest of faction by event. I'll continue going down the focus tree, and I'll probably try get access to resources - one I'm lacking the most is steel, and nobody near me really has any significant amounts except for Russia.

Not falling for mistake of attacking someone at war. Like Mongolia is fighting Tibet, Japan, and that pink Chinese minor; Turkestan and Don-Kuban are fighting Russia. If I attack any of them AI will grab almost the whole warscore as usual, so no point.

I'll get some CBs on Siam in focus tree (I think, or maybe event to puppet them; well in any case something Siam related), and I have zero ships to invade Ceylon, so these criteria leave me with Persia/Egypt/Arabia Axis as the only direction of attack. Sadly they don't have much steel, and they have a lot of divisions, but after Persia it's flat enough to try tank warfare.

The mod is seriously fun, at least for countries which are reasonably complete (my focus tree lacks a few icons, didn't see any other issues yet).

WW2 between Germany and France is ongoing. On the map it looks like nothing is happening, but Germans somehow lost like 7.9M to 2.3M somehow.

Post 2 - Originally published on Google+ on 2017-05-20 14:40:14 UTC

Mongolia conquered Tibet, and was fighting Japan. I decided to attack them anyway, hoping to get at least a few provinces at peace conference, no matter how unfair it will be - nope, Japan got it all by event.

I had massive steel shortage and no way to buy more. I suspect the reason is that there are for more strong countries in the mod trying to get same limited amount of resources, and #hoi4 economy model is fairly dumb and not working well under any kind of stress.

After finally getting pp, I got into wars with Qing on one side, and with Persia/Arabia/Egypt on the other.

Against Persia/Arabia/Egypt I did quite OK. Tanks running through deserts were fine, and their armies were located all over the place before the war, so I had some ability to maneuver.

I still had to stop after Persia fell just because infrastructure got completely destroyed in the fighting, so everybody had almost maximum penalty. Maybe I need to build more civilian factories just for repairing infrastructure faster?

I destroyed 90% of their divisions, but the last obstacle was Suez Canal. I couldn't force my way through (with 7mnt2art, probably could with usual 6mar2art1mtank), so I built a few subs just so AI would let me press naval invasion button.

Against Qing I rediscovered that not having infantry support tanks is indeed completely awful, and dedicated tank divisions do nothing with so many divisions out there. I'd be much better off disbanding all the tank divisions and making those tanks into infantry support.

Qing had no artillery or tanks, so I thought I'd have no trouble running over their pure infantry divisions, no matter how numerous, but they quickly showed me I was wrong (mostly due to playing without infantry support tanks - it would probably work otherwise). Instead I was on defensive and watching Chinese bodies pile up.

And just to be sure that I won't be attacking infrastructure got completely wrecked in fighting, so nobody had any supplies.

It took 3m Chinese (to 80k mine) before their attacks started weakening.

After 5m Chinese died, Japan's puppet decided to join the war to stealr some warscore - fortunately they got nothing for the trouble.

I'm not even close to getting united India focus button, as that's based on coring a bunch of provinces, and that's a very slow event. Quite disappointing.

It's pretty clear that alternative army builds are awful, and 6mar 2art 1mtank (or very similar) is the only way.

That's not to say tanks divisions were useful - they definitely were - but infantry without tank supports is just not good enough.

Even after all that I'm nowhere near getting enough steel. It's plentiful in Russia and Europe I guess.

That's it for now. I might try the mod again next version, depending on which countries get new focus trees.
#hoi4 #kaiserreich