Strategy 101

Buckeyechamp wrote:

not sure where the context of this came from but early on .. logistics can be huge factor getting through your first 1 - 2 country battles as he who gets to the front fastest with the most power has an great advantage.

he meant like; if territory isnt connected if there is a penalty etc

Buckeyechamp wrote:

In regards to ground radar have never seen 1 person make any good use of ground radar. and yes the new radar rules has made plane scouting trickier but have adapted. It just requires a more cautios approach. I play a rapid game on multiple fronts normally after day 7- 10 so 1 ground rdar isnt going to do me much good.

well you have more than 1 asf you scout with?
1-2 radars per frontline; tho i usually dont like to fight too many wars at once, i like it chill

I went nuts this game ... my coalition was so slow and helpless to push fronts. i was waging my main war in Africa after we took N and S America. had 3 countries who couldnt make land fall in asia .. so was flying there for air support.. then other partner had trouble in UK so had my navy over there. But I paid the price on Morale big time. In addition argentina sucks as distance from capital penalties as seems the furthest part from majority of land of other continents. Not a fan of starting in S America.

Now game is basically in wrap up mode but I still have to fly all over the globe to put out my coalition fires. Hate to dump coalition partners but really would have been better off solo on this game.

Right, so,... in my opinion, that's a major division between players. I'm an economy and infrastructure guy, so I build and upgrade Arms Industries A LOT compared to some players. Now, even playing it the way I do, you can still unnecessarily over-do it. Every conquered city doesn't need an upgraded Arms Industry in it. I max out my homeland Arms Industries (mostly, usually not Fuel), and I build and upgrade Arms Industries when I Annex a city or two here and there as the game goes on, if I didn't start out as a huge nation.

Many players, however, don't do anything like that. They don't build too many high-level buildings, and they rely on high numbers of cheaper, more basic units (which they've upgraded significantly) to carry them through the game.

I hate to sound like a broken record, but it really depends on what you want to do. If you're going to go crazy with NG, you probably don't need a bunch of highly upgraded Arms Industries. If you want to be a missile monster, you better start pumping up those hourly resource production numbers.





This is definitely true if you intend to use them offensively. I like to build a certain number of towed artillery early in the game, set them up in the mountains near my borders and cities, put them on aggressive fire control, and leave them there to send their message to approaching invaders.

build factories in rare material city and on high population cities of resources u need. build airports on strategical locations and naval bases but also on cities of important production. Army bases doens't give production boost build them on cities u don't care about for me usually supplies. I usually ignore army bases except in one city and If I'm not going for artillery I ignore them for like 7 days.Army bases doesn't give any thing but unit production no unit transportation no embarking time no production bonus.

usually 1 army base early is enough to get special forces/ artillery and lvl 3 is more than good. other buildings feel free to upgrade as they give production bonus and other benefits.

hospital boost to production is not that much. yes population is effective but hospital boost is not great.
bunkers increase production as they increase target morale.

local industry is the best of all with very high rot & roi and u can build it on occupied provinces as all produce same.

im the ones opposite of build mx.. start off industry 1 in all cities after that Im putting those resources to cran-k units as Perigee said. than use those units to gain occupied cities to increase my economy .. by day 7 usually top 3 overall economy even if have less homeland cities. Never build inf in occupied cities. Build other buildings early on to have at least 1 airbase 2 ; 1 navy 2 to try to build 1 plane and navy per day; a few army bases to build inf or basic armor stuff; a few Recruit centers for NG units. and the Rec centers reduce speed time in all cities so good to have in all cities really. so if 6 cities after a bit I have 2 primary navy builds; 2 air builds; 2 inf/ng builds. then add to building as needed based on unit type and resources

Day 30 - #1 economy at 65 tons w 6 homeland all lvl 1 industry.... #2 is my partner canada with 52k who think started with 7 homeland and lost track of what he has annexed.. pretty much all of USA and he has advanced lvl industries. your occupied cities slowly start to produce more and more as there morale increases each day .. but I have 128 cities now. Just annexed 1st city now as got to point couldnt spend all on 2 researches; 6 units mobilizations and building upgrades... but till you get to that point to me waste of resources.

But thats me .. most guys on here are all successful with different strategies and philosophies. Find out what works for you and run with it.

Reason I focus on growth through conquest are for:

1. I usually start in a small / medium country (sometimes economy / starting VP like below 50 pct of cities)

2. im churning and burning first week to get as big as possible to a. make up resource deficit and b. its a big fish little fish game. you want to be the bigger fish eating little fish to avoid getting eaten by nearby bigger fish.

3. To me Building is boring if Im not taking at least 3 - 6 cities per day I feel like wasting time.

Bunkers are very effective use to build morale which increases production. in addition to city enchrench bonus and adv lvl shield population buidings from any damage.

this game my morale got so bad was building levels 3 nd 4 (still fairly chaep builds) just to stay afloat on morale.

new city =25% but with low morale ~ 15% less than lvl 2 arms industry so ... but in conquering u might not lose units while u pay for the upgrade.
its pretty hard for me to live without lvl 5 arms industry in rare city. I buy all rare offers and keep trying to get any from market. They are called rare for a reason!
if arms industry didn't cost rare I'd have said building it is very important but hard to afford upgrades with rare.

Wow. This is a lot. Let’s break it down.

1. HQ Defense

Indeed, this game mostly doesn’t favor the continuous frontline or the combat outpost strongpoint method of defense initially, and many people do run their units around willy-nilly, with many mapping months worth of travel lines over the entire planet. (Mild literary hyperbole, but not too far off.) What I would recommend here is to concentrate your defense in your cities. These are the main targets and points of interest, being worth eight provinces in VP by the end of the game, along with many other important advantages. If you can concentrate along a relatively small area though, there was one time where I managed to get a continuous frontline as Algeria against Morocco, complete with multi-tiered levels of reserves, strongpoints, central divisions, allocated support regions, and prepared fire arrangements. It was beautiful. My troops advanced in lockstep leaving no gap. If the enemy managed to slip through during a phase of the advance, reserves were immediately deployed to block and fix them for the application of decisively destructive fires.

Moral of the story: concentrate offense and defense on cities. Add QRFs prepared to immediately counterattack any enemy offensive when necessary. Preserve the homeland security at all costs.

2. Recon

Here, mobile radar are still pretty good if you’re trying to get an idea of what’s coming for you from where, preserving operational security and decreasing enemy disruption and reducing their freedom of action by denying them the element of surprise. I’ve found these save me much loss and much recon. In RSTA, there is recon, scouting, and target acquisition. Radar enables rapid target acquisition. Other scout platforms are useful, almost essential, but discreet target acquisition is also a critical capability, particularly when acting in a hostile and denied operating environment.

3. General Early Defense

Here, I recommend just stacking up infantry at the start or ships for island nations and coordinating initial defensive fronts prior to invasions. If you can get your starting units decently organized, it’s going to Ben hard for an enemy to attack without massing significantly superior quantities of force on their objective, forcing them to sacrifice force concentrations in other regions Andy leaving them open to other attacks. To help with this, get in a good coalition if you can. After this, the best defense is a good offense. Advance against the enemy while maintaining your own strategic security. Neutralize any threat by means of diplomacy or military.

4. HQs

Here, it is often good to designate optimal operational theater transportation hubs, hospitals, support facilities, and defense areas depending on the situation. If you’re engaged directly homeland-to-homeland, you can easily use each of your cities as whichever of those requirements it fulfills, e.g. capital for air support, border cities for hardened defense areas, etc. If you use one HQ for all of these, as will often be requisite for long-range operations, don’t simply use it for static defense, in which case your enemy may simply bypass it. However, if you establish a static fire base to support a dynamic defense, you can operate with security in the region, defeat enemy threats, and maintain your defense.

5. Units

All of these have been covered pretty thoroughly, but here, you want to research enough to provide you with enough effects to mass, but not so many that your effects to lose mass; that is, if you can, don’t research more than three units in each of five areas, and that’s considered a lot. Generally, one infantry, one armor, two or three support, 1-3 helis, 1-3 fighters, a couple naval, a missile or two, and maybe an officer, perhaps a few more or less depending on the situation. Most of these will be necessary if you go solo, otherwise, if your coalition is well-coordinated enough, you could comfortably concentrate on just 2-4 unit tech lines and max them out, not more than 6.

now we have thoroughly confused him by now and he quits

i’m Confused! Tl;dr version please

Great update. Two quick things:

1. Yes, your planes landed in cities/provinces will benefit from hospitals like ground units do.

2. Most people are probably going to suggest (and you'll probably soon agree) that you want some type of military production facility (Army Base, Air Base, Naval Base) in each of your Homeland cities, maybe even a combination in some. Almost everyone produces units in every Homeland city, and many people later Annex additional cities and mobilize units in those cities too. Just as an example, if I'm starting a nation with five Homeland cities, I might (depending on the nation, situation, etc.) designate three Army cities, one Air city, and one Naval city right away. The composition will vary between players and between nations, but regardless of what they mobilize, most players have all homeland cities designated to mobilizing some kind of unit.

As just one Naval port. Navy not a big issue but get some corvettes going to block that port from invasion by sea. frigg would be good to fter that to provide AA to coastal cities.

overall looking good as key to have turkey as ally to have back covered. just finish off iraq. kind of swing those units around to have an even front. think other side of iraq alot of mtns so wouldnt go that way yet as slow and use s naturl defense in that direction. maybe focus on israel if can take out early get a lot of resources real close together and easy to defend. And if let him get dug in will be a bigger thret down the road.

Mideast and Desert having Arm Fight Veh are very good as fast and good bonuses in desert. of course always going to pitch my Strike fighters. But day 4 if not researched on these alreday falling behind the curve on weapons.

Also to address plane slow healing. Build up hospitals at central airbase (not right on border.) This will speed healing and adv level hospitals are a must if plan a big airforce. if get 3 HP heal per day down the road when you have 5 - 6 planes it basically will heal a full plane worth in 1 day

Right, spreading too thin is a problem of which almost all players are guilty at some time. In fact, I'd say that in order to win a game on a full-globe map, it's possibly unavoidable. You simply can't maintain a valid defensive force in ALL of South America and ALL of Africa and beyond at the same time. At some point, you'll end up leaving open space/cities.

I'm more like you with the smaller Army thing, probably. I don't do the infantry zerg that a lot of folks do (popular strat in this game).

Fuel production is probably an issue for most people in the early game because building/upgrading military bases requires A LOT of fuel. In most games, and especially in the region you're in, it won't take long before your fuel production vastly outpaces your need, though, and you'll have plenty of excess Fuel for the remainder of the game. Fuel shortage is really only usually a problem in the very, very beginning of the game.

Buckeyechamp wrote:

Am I the only one that noticed turkey getting ready to attack. And alleppo and all the NW cities are totlly exposed. Which is hy I said be careful of pushing to far into Iraq as Flanks will be exposed from North and South.

Turkey is his ally/coalition mate.

Thats why Air power is a must. There is a Reason Rome ruled (they built militry roads) ll roads lead to Rome; then British Empire ruled the sea and controlled a big part of world with little army. Now modern day besides Nuke deterrance USA Air dominance is reason can influence the whole world militarily. (although in this game cant build 7 Aircrft carriers and succeed)

So Build a big Airforce and pop up airfields in every area you need to protect. Countries read the CON ... they see the destruction coming their way if someone attacks my unguarded occupied area. I have ships and some port troops to guard Homeland .. rest land force is on conquering frontlines.

I see people try to defend every occupied area and it cant be done and win. Even some allies I had would put 1 inf in every occupied city even if in middle of country, like what is that 1 inf going to do on a real day 30 invasion.

So someone may get a city of too but 9 hrs later im suppressing that invasion via air then going to smoke their homeland (via Navy).

I have 130 occupied cities and what maybe 1000 prov all around the globe. If I stayed and defended every territory I would be 1/3rd the progress I would.

Now this depends on regional threats... Im not going to simply leave africa till all threats are gone. then after that the odds of russia sailing troops all around asia or europe in mass are pretty low.

But back to point Airforce is the great equalizer. My ally Aussie got sacked by NZ and lost capital and NZ had a foothold and he was at risk of losing whole country .. flew 10 planes from my main front in Mid East.... took out all NZ troops sunk some ships . that allowed Aussie to restablish then he got 1 city in NZ that had an airfield. I flew planes over there and completely wrecked his country to open path for Auusie to just stroll on over with inf . And NZ was a builder he was getting level 5 bases ; heavy bombers almost stealth; aircraft etc. built up for 30 days never attacking anyone and ended his game in 1 day with 10 strike fighters with missiles

- its day 4 and you dont seem to have much more than just starting troops?
- the amount of bunkers confuses me; 4 lvl 2-3 bunkers are quite an investment, especially that early on + you'd need troops to actually hold them
- you dont really need to build local industrie on oil (or are you really that low on oil?), you usually have a shitton of oil leftover
- your troops are all over the place; you're in war with your neighbor yet you dont seem to have made any serious attempts to kill him off (how long do you wanna drag out the war?); you could easily get togehter a 10stack, take his capitol and conquer him
(once you've conquered him these bunkers there will become quite useless?)
- if you're worried about attacks; scout with your aircraft (you can fly over foreign territory without triggering war as long as the center of patrol is outside it); also: getting inf to lvl 2 helps a lot with defending
- if you're unsure how turkeys war with iran will turn out then maybe send something to support him once you're done with iraq (just one towed artillery is already really strong )
- 1 lone infantry wont be any "safety net" if someone would invade you that inf would just die (except maybe against a single attacking inf) so get it somewhere usefull
--> either scout the seas with your fighter or put that inf in a transport on sea and scout that way if really needed

Okay, so, before this gets too confusing for @Sickel101, we should restate/clarify something:

Different players play differently, and there is more than one successful philosophy for playing the (public) game.

Right now, I think you're getting advice from two opposing, but equally valid, philophies.

You've got your "Build 10-stacks and attack!" philosophy. It's effective and definitely the more favored philosophy among players game-wide.

Then you've also got your "Let my enemy's waves crash against my rocks" philosophy.

Personally, even though it's less popular, I tend to prefer the second one, and here's why: Motorized Infantry (and NG, especially) defend better than they attack just using base numbers. When you add entrenchment bonuses and bunker defensive bonuses to that, it creates a huge swing in the numbers in favor of the defender.

Some people believe that pushing forward in a steady wave is the best approach. I'm a counter-puncher. I WANT the enemy to exhaust themselves on my defenses and to open themselves to vulnerability BEFORE I move forward. I do a lot of kiting and luring. I'll poke my enemy a couple of times to entice them to follow me back into the teeth of my defenses, then I'll cover up while they punch themselves out. Once they've exhausted themselves, I start moving forward and taking their land/cities. To me, the numbers just make more sense that way.

Not everyone enjoys themselves doing it the way I do it, but it sounds like you've already begun trying that and having some good success with it.

Oh, and I'm not sure if you noticed it or not, but your enemy doesn't see your bunkers. So, when you're moving into enemy territory your enemy knows what forces you are bringing, and they can prepare to defend. When your enemy is advancing into your territory, not only are you able to see what they are bringing, but they don't know what you have waiting for them when they arrive in your cities.