A Multiplayer Guide for a Historical-Rules Japan - Part 1; Preparation and China
Here, I will be assuming you are fighting a full contingent of Allied and Comintern players. I will also assume that you have a full contingent of cooperative Axis members - IE, they're not going to tell you to go screw yourself if you ask for a license production, etc.
This is a complex game, and the best way to divide up the ideas eludes me. I have roughly divided it into sections. Construction, Research, Production, and Army. Each has little details about why I am telling you do do the things I say.
The first thing to do is max out your 8-infrastructure provinces with civilian factory construction, and build 4 more civilian factories total in your 7 infrastructure provinces. Start your national focus tree going down towards your industrial effort, which will give you several more civilian factories, and a reduction in consumer goods factories on the way to it. You start with a very low amount of usable factories. It may not look like it from the raw count, but you have so many military factories and dockyards that your consumer goods are huge. You will also be trading away massive amounts of factories while few people trade with you. Make sure you take manchukuo's steel, you can get all 38 of it for one factory. Once you have built up your civilian economy base, begin building military factories. You will build military factories from here on out until china is clearly about to be defeated. After this point, begin building dockyards. As you should, after china, have over 60 military factories, you will build nothing but synthetics (as needed) and dockyards for the rest of the applicable game. If you somehow get 100 dockyards, go back to civilian and military factories.
The second thing to do is set up your research. Get support weapons 1, basic machine tools, construction, and electronic mechanical computing. You're going to continue down these electronic trees until you have construction 2, excavation 2, electronics 2 (I can never remember the names of the electronics tree), concentrated industry 1, and machine tools 1. once you have acquired those, you must begin researching artillery and doctrine. Your doctrine should be superior firepower. Also work on improving your air force. Fighters and naval bombers are the most important, and make sure you research the carrier variant. Do not forget to get logistics company for the war in china.
The third thing to do is set up your production. Set 5 factories on motorized, 1 on carrier fighters, 1 on land fighters, and one on carrier naval bombers. Spread the rest evenly among arty, support, and infantry equipment. For your boats, assign all your free dockyards to the top of the line and continually assign them down the line until everything that was in production at the start of the game has been produced. Put all the subs in one fleet and everything else, including your starting surface fleets, into another. Now set up sequential production of 30 destroyers, 18 light cruisers, 10 heavy cruisers, two battleships, and four carriers. If you like, you can research battle-cruiser 2 and get 3 or four of them for the price of the two battleships. If you do not neglect carrier research, you will have tech 4 carriers by the time you get to building them and you can use all of your accumulated naval experience to max out the deck size. This will result in you having over 500 planes in your fleet, which will dominate the American carriers and enable you to beat their larger fleet sizes. By the time this production is complete you will have 3 fleets, your subs, your starting surface, and your high-tech surface. Replenish their losses as you go. The modern fleet will be your power projection, and will get superiority for landings. the starting fleet, battleship heavy and with obsolete carriers, will stay in land based air cover and defend your home.
The final task before the game unpauses is to organize your military. Put every division into one army and take out the tanks and motorized. Put those into a separate army and change your tanks into motorized. Change the other army into marines. You should have 66 marines and 5 motorized. Your goal will be to turn the marine template into 7 marines, 2 artillery along with support companies of arty, recon, engineers, and logistics. You will then split 10 marines off this army into two groups of 5, both of which will invade the guanxi clique's southernmost ports as soon as it joins the chinese united front. Try to get a full 24 motorized divisions up.
Fighting China
I'm expecting that in the rules, you are required to go to war with china before 1938. You should declare war on the last day of 1937 to give your superior production capacity as much time to arm you as possible. As much as your team will yell at you, you must war and conquer shanxi first. This is so that you can use some of your motorized swarm to break the main chinese line a good way south of Beijing and cut off the bulk of their forces. As stated above, you must also manage and expand the southern naval invasion. Once you have made the main Beijing cutoff, kill it, and then press inexorably south while using your motorized to push left and dominate the slow terrain of northwest china. If they stonewall you, make more naval invasions. So long as you follow up the motorized with infantry, taking a port and then swarming with motorized will guarantee you a solid land grab before the chinese player can bring in enough forces to stop you. Motorized cutoffs and continued naval invasions will ensure you win the war. If they do not manage to stop you at a major river in the north, additional landings will be unneeded.
If before the war, you continually got lots of trade and were able to build up a vast amount of military factories, more than you needed for your marines and motorized, research the self propelled gun from light tank 1 and build those. You can add one of them to your motorized divisions to give them a huge amount of soft attack that will plough through the chinese divisions. Just make sure you upgrade the reliability as much as you can. This tactic is particularly useful if the soviets send the chinese an unholy amount of guns - get 40 width motorized divisions that include 4 self propelled guns, and use short jabs to cut off a few chinese at a time. This not only slowly pushes them back, it keeps their division count down and expends soviet industry. If your team coordinates from the start and trades with you, you can liscense light tank 2, use the 20% research boost to research it, cancel the license and research light spg 2, which crushes the chinese with ease. Building enough light spg 2 will require foreign support of your industry via factory boosting, however.
This is a complex game, and the best way to divide up the ideas eludes me. I have roughly divided it into sections. Construction, Research, Production, and Army. Each has little details about why I am telling you do do the things I say.
The first thing to do is max out your 8-infrastructure provinces with civilian factory construction, and build 4 more civilian factories total in your 7 infrastructure provinces. Start your national focus tree going down towards your industrial effort, which will give you several more civilian factories, and a reduction in consumer goods factories on the way to it. You start with a very low amount of usable factories. It may not look like it from the raw count, but you have so many military factories and dockyards that your consumer goods are huge. You will also be trading away massive amounts of factories while few people trade with you. Make sure you take manchukuo's steel, you can get all 38 of it for one factory. Once you have built up your civilian economy base, begin building military factories. You will build military factories from here on out until china is clearly about to be defeated. After this point, begin building dockyards. As you should, after china, have over 60 military factories, you will build nothing but synthetics (as needed) and dockyards for the rest of the applicable game. If you somehow get 100 dockyards, go back to civilian and military factories.
The second thing to do is set up your research. Get support weapons 1, basic machine tools, construction, and electronic mechanical computing. You're going to continue down these electronic trees until you have construction 2, excavation 2, electronics 2 (I can never remember the names of the electronics tree), concentrated industry 1, and machine tools 1. once you have acquired those, you must begin researching artillery and doctrine. Your doctrine should be superior firepower. Also work on improving your air force. Fighters and naval bombers are the most important, and make sure you research the carrier variant. Do not forget to get logistics company for the war in china.
The third thing to do is set up your production. Set 5 factories on motorized, 1 on carrier fighters, 1 on land fighters, and one on carrier naval bombers. Spread the rest evenly among arty, support, and infantry equipment. For your boats, assign all your free dockyards to the top of the line and continually assign them down the line until everything that was in production at the start of the game has been produced. Put all the subs in one fleet and everything else, including your starting surface fleets, into another. Now set up sequential production of 30 destroyers, 18 light cruisers, 10 heavy cruisers, two battleships, and four carriers. If you like, you can research battle-cruiser 2 and get 3 or four of them for the price of the two battleships. If you do not neglect carrier research, you will have tech 4 carriers by the time you get to building them and you can use all of your accumulated naval experience to max out the deck size. This will result in you having over 500 planes in your fleet, which will dominate the American carriers and enable you to beat their larger fleet sizes. By the time this production is complete you will have 3 fleets, your subs, your starting surface, and your high-tech surface. Replenish their losses as you go. The modern fleet will be your power projection, and will get superiority for landings. the starting fleet, battleship heavy and with obsolete carriers, will stay in land based air cover and defend your home.
The final task before the game unpauses is to organize your military. Put every division into one army and take out the tanks and motorized. Put those into a separate army and change your tanks into motorized. Change the other army into marines. You should have 66 marines and 5 motorized. Your goal will be to turn the marine template into 7 marines, 2 artillery along with support companies of arty, recon, engineers, and logistics. You will then split 10 marines off this army into two groups of 5, both of which will invade the guanxi clique's southernmost ports as soon as it joins the chinese united front. Try to get a full 24 motorized divisions up.
Fighting China
I'm expecting that in the rules, you are required to go to war with china before 1938. You should declare war on the last day of 1937 to give your superior production capacity as much time to arm you as possible. As much as your team will yell at you, you must war and conquer shanxi first. This is so that you can use some of your motorized swarm to break the main chinese line a good way south of Beijing and cut off the bulk of their forces. As stated above, you must also manage and expand the southern naval invasion. Once you have made the main Beijing cutoff, kill it, and then press inexorably south while using your motorized to push left and dominate the slow terrain of northwest china. If they stonewall you, make more naval invasions. So long as you follow up the motorized with infantry, taking a port and then swarming with motorized will guarantee you a solid land grab before the chinese player can bring in enough forces to stop you. Motorized cutoffs and continued naval invasions will ensure you win the war. If they do not manage to stop you at a major river in the north, additional landings will be unneeded.
If before the war, you continually got lots of trade and were able to build up a vast amount of military factories, more than you needed for your marines and motorized, research the self propelled gun from light tank 1 and build those. You can add one of them to your motorized divisions to give them a huge amount of soft attack that will plough through the chinese divisions. Just make sure you upgrade the reliability as much as you can. This tactic is particularly useful if the soviets send the chinese an unholy amount of guns - get 40 width motorized divisions that include 4 self propelled guns, and use short jabs to cut off a few chinese at a time. This not only slowly pushes them back, it keeps their division count down and expends soviet industry. If your team coordinates from the start and trades with you, you can liscense light tank 2, use the 20% research boost to research it, cancel the license and research light spg 2, which crushes the chinese with ease. Building enough light spg 2 will require foreign support of your industry via factory boosting, however.
Comments
Post a Comment