It's been very long while since I last played HOI4, and back then it was mostly Kaiserreich minors.
So I tried to run vanilla Japan, with all AIs set to random. And the initial setup took forever. So many totally dumb templates, armies, navies, air forces all scattered nonsensically.
Even worse, I couldn't even change the templates because I didn't have army XP for it. Oh well.
Initial situation. I really hoped I'd get Beijing for some space, as supply situation as Japan is awful.
It turns out my shitty 12inf division barely used any supply, so my worries were unnecessary.
For first fun event, German army couped and overthrew Hitler in a civil war. Then China refused to give me Beijing, so I attacked them and Shanxi. Other warlords did not join at all. It used to be completely scripted that they would, but then again, it's AI at random.
The Beijing frontline got absolutely nowhere. Not one tile. I did two landings, as capacity is just 10 - one in Shandong failed, the other in Shanghai succeeded, but didn't get too far before getting stuck as well.
Somehow China and Shanxi had zero coordination, and there were no Chinese division in Shanxi territory. Well, that's my way to win. I pushed them real hard through the mountains, and without Chinese reinforcements, they had to surrender.
After Shanxi fell, Chinese frontline completely collapsed, and I just rushed my infantry microing the hell out of everything.
Shanxi fell and then suddenly everything started collapsing.
First big pocket was this one around Beijing. Then I connected Shanxi with Shanghai landing by direct route, and pocketed the whole Eastern China.
After that they really didn't have much left to fight with.
Having ridiculously long frontline is actually great, as AI has no idea what to do in such case. AI is only reasonably competent when frontline is narrow.
The whole war lasted 5 months and I suffered hilariously low 7403 casualties to their nearly a million. With the shitty basic 12inf divisions, to which I just added support artillery sometime halfway through the war. I am not even sure why they were so bad. And I had massive penalty to attack and defense against China, which I only slowly got rid of over time by spending some fuhrer mana. So not a clue why I'm getting such Space Marine ratios.
Combat losses - 692 equipment. Attrition losses - 5890. Enemy combat losses - 109,088. Like wat? By the way, the game really needs a damn ledger. All this information is scattered all over the place, and only half of it is even present.
At this point I used to have focus to gain CBs on remaining Chinese warlords, but that's gone now. I can only attack the Allies. Soviet CB is in completely separate branch as well.
Anyways, I hoped I'd learn new mechanics, but I failed completely.
I still have no idea how the hell the new fuel system works. I ran out of fuel because my navy was using so much, but really, that navy was a total overkill patrolling Chinese coast. It looks like my navy alone uses >10x more fuel than I can generate, by just patrolling and not engaging in any fights. Is this meant to guarantee that nobody except US can have navies? I don't hate the idea of fuel, but those numbers are just dumb. Isn't this going to destroy Royal Navy even worse than Japanese Navy?
And as for general traits, I totally missed that I could give them traits, as there doesn't seem to be any notification of it. Not like that would help, I assigned units basically at random anyway, so none of them got any meaningful traits. This probably works better for people who rely on AI to do the fighting. Can I get some notification somehow?
Since I don't know why it is so damn trivial, it feels quite pointless to continue this campaign. Ledger would definitely help me figure this out.
It was fun enough. Maybe I need to watch some let's plays to see what I'm doing too well.
Oh and before this, I ran a quick AI observe game, and Japan lost to China even after multiple successful landing. Then again, all the warlords joined China, and its Manchuria rebelled and joined the Axis, so it wasn't exactly comparable situation.
