Road to 56 France

Post 1 - Originally published on Google+ on 2017-06-21 07:13:45 UTC

Since Kaiserreich is still not updated, trying some #hoi4 #roadto56 as France. I thought it would be embarrassingly easy, but there were actually a lot of silly problems.

I had only 35 days to get everything in place for Rheinland troubles. It's hard to plan anything before that gets resolved one way or the other.

Britain supported us, and Hitler folded. A bit of a shame, since it would have been a real fun war. And time wan not on our side - Germany starts with 40 military factories to our 6, not to mention what they'll get from focuses, Austria etc.

Nationalists won Spanish Civil War, Japan attacked China, Germany attacked Switzerland (who created own faction, so we couldn't even join, wtf?), China attacked British Raj.

After taking Switzerland Germany demanded Slovenia, Britain bailed, so I left Allies and created faction with Yugoslavia by event.

My whole plan was to seize Rhineland fast. Unfortunately Swiss war magically remilitarized Rhineland without any ability to intervene. The idea that Yugoslavia might defend itself for a while also failed, as Croatians backstabbed them, and that gave Germans pretty much free encicrement of entire Yugoslav army in Slovenia. Then nobody moved, even though Croatia and Yugoslavia had close to zero army.

I was slowly pushing Germans when they managed to D-Day me in two ports because notifications about naval invasions are so shit. I managed to just deal with that and break through Switzerland into Munich, when Italy joined the Axis.

That was real awkward. I got Rome with my 9 motorized + 1 light tanks rush. First time I'm using them, and they performed better than expected.

Unfortunately the mod had a silly idea of giving everybody a law with 0.2% weekly national unity for 150pp, so absolutely everybody had 90%, and Italy wouldn't capitulate with just Sicily.

Mod stacked so many pp penalties against me, I couldn't increase my recruitment laws past limited conscription. And I couldn't pass war economy (got to partial mobilization by focuses at least). I had to delete a lot of divisions mid-war - and by the time I got to 150pp I didn't fulfill criteria for choosing it.

So annoying. In this case if I knew, I could have prepared for this. But it's really dumb that even at 100% war tension and while at war with zero manpower I can't just change the laws.

Even my small army (80 divisions by end of war) was enough - I held the line with 3/4 of it, pushed with 1/4. I pushed South Rhineland, Switzerland, Munich, Rome, South Italy, Venice, Croatia, Austria, North Rhineland, then straight for Berlin, and only another D-Day dealt with Sicily.

After that Soviets attacked Latvia, who joined British factions. And Poland created their own. So presumably Soviets would rampage Europe, but if nobody wants to join my faction, what can I do.

So new AI complaints:

• Somehow frontline AI is now a lot worse, and is crazy aggressive about reshuffling to "balance" the frontline, causing pointless delays and attrition. 1.3 did not do that.
• Czechoslovakia had more divisions than me, but did not move one tile in the whole war, and was happy to sit on its forts.
• Yugoslavia, Netherlands, Belgium were just as passive. Luxembourg had zero army, so not blaming them at least.

(some extra comments for each pic)
#hoi4

In theory Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia were on my side. And later Netherlands and Belgium.

In practice I did over 90% of fighting. The only thing AIs did was reinforcing my frontline after I connected to them capturing Zagreb and Vienna - and probably more due to glitch where frontline autoexpands than any serious intention to help.


Somehow game decided to give Vienna to Czechoslovakia, even though their troops were nowhere a few tiles away, and they didn't have claims or anything.
Yugoslavia got their land I liberated as it was their cores, so that makes sense.


Napoleon would be proud. He'd also find a way to get extensive conscription.
I got prince of terror minister, who doubles noncore manpower in new patch, so I got something from the colonies. Sadly only some countries have that option, so some minors just got a lot easier, others didn't.