In Tsarst Russia, Survival Puzzles You! -- a Darkest Hour WW1 "AAR" AAR

[JasonPratt]

Okay, (almost) final preparations:

1.) Can we increase our intelligence funding? Not yet, we'll need 450 silver and at the moment we only have 30; also while intelligence funding is important, other things are probably more important (such as for example using our seed money to trade supplies on the world market and make gobs more money -- which can be spent on national projects like another level of intelligence funding.)

1b.) Suffice to say that we don't really have much chance of accomplishing any spycraft against anyone we care about right now anyway.

2.) What about the Ministers? We can replace everyone except the Tsar and the Head of State, but several are already optimal choices. I do take a few which grant bonuses to IC production (paying for that in increased material usage) and to reduction of research time and the production time of anything on land that moves and has big guns (armor and arty, mainly arty right now). I also pull in a Trench War Expert as our Chief of Army, since he adds more reductive bonuses to infantry and arty build times; infantry and arty build effectiveness; and a huge 25% reduction in building land forts (with some decent reduction in building coastal forts, too.) This, if you'll pardon the pun, "reinforces" my belief that land forts == the coming trench system. I also put an Army Air Support proponent as chief of the air force (giving bonuses to the few things we're already working toward in the air, namely tac bombers.)

3.) Now for the cultural sliders.




Sometimes the sliders change automatically based on things that happen to us; and the sliders can also be changed as a direct result of strategic decisions; but once every... two years IIRC?... we can tick a slider one way or the other directly. Not including the mobi/demobi slider: that one only moves as a result of plot events or strategic decisions.

Demo/Autho: various stages on this slider trigger certain state conditions which affect things like what some strategic decisions cost and/or require for activation. Right now we're a dictatorship. Moving rightward decreases dissent growth per month, even to the point of reducing dissent by an increasing amount per month, but increases partisan activity per month (though not as much as dissent growth decreases). It also decreases the basic one-time dissent hit for a declaration of war, but increases the dissent hit for releasing a puppet state into independence. It also makes the relationship threshold for declaring war against another nation higher (thus easier, i.e. we can be closer to being friends and still declare war). Sliding left a notch reverses these effects in the other direction.

Political Left / Right: mostly this slider affects who's available among the minister pool (which is also affected by date).

Open / Closed Society: sliding rightward reduces dissent growth or even increases decent reduction, including decreasing (or more strongly eliminating) dissent in national provinces. It also reduces researcher costs, and increases the effectiveness (I think, not the cost) of both counterintelligence both domestic and military (though at different rates of effectiveness, moreso for military counterops). But it increases dissent in occupied provinces. Going left reverses the effects.

Free Market / Central Planning: sliding rightward increases available IC, gives a boost to gearing bonuses (the speed bonuses which represent increasing factory efficiency in producing a run of the same thing over and over), reduces tech team costs, and increases resource production. However, it reduces any money earned from consumer goods, and rather significantly increases upgrade cost and upgrade time. Leftward reverses the effects. Currently we're dead center.

Hawk / Dove: going rightward (shouldn't hawks be on the right?) reduces diplomatic costs and money earned from making consumer goods; but it also increases dissent per month. Rightward reverses those effects and also reduces production costs and time.

Intervention / Isolation: oh gosh this slider affects a bunch of things, mostly to do with political and intelligence costs including what it takes to go to war.

Generally, at this time war is more likely to find us whether we want it or not, so making it easier or harder to get us into war is not something we should bother about yet. We need to get our troops up to speed asap, so whatever increases our IC and also our reduces production time and costs will be the way to go.

Unfortunately, the only slider that increases IC also increases upgrade time and speed, and right now we need upgrades more than direction production of new things. A 5% increase in IC would only give us another 8.65 IC, whereas it would sock us with a 10% upgrade cost (and 5% upgrade speed) increase on EVERRRRYYYTTHHINNGGG! -- all 160ish divisions and brigades need upgrading. If we had an up-to-date military or a very small one but a lot of factories, that would make sense. As it is, the net result would be an increase of probably around IC needed for upgrading. Granted, we won't (and can't) be upgrading everything all at once, but we'd be losing the ability to upgrade a few more units more quickly. At best there'd be a tradeoff between IC gained and more IC spent on the same few units upgrading at once, but the upgrade process in itself would be intrinsically slower.

On the other hand, if we slid left on the free market, we'd sacrifice 5% of our IC (which benefits from a 5% bonus right now) for a 10% reduction in upgrade cost and 5% reduction in upgrade speed. But doesn't that also wash out with only a relatively few units upgrading at a time? No, because the intrinsic speed is improved.

Whereas, we can slide the Hawk/Dove toward Hawk and get a 5% bonus to production costs and time. But that might only count if we're trying to build some fortifications which are going to take a while in any case; we don't want many NEW units yet, we want to IMPROVE the ones we have.

On balance then, I judge the best choice to be sliding a tick toward free market, which will at least get us a small bonus to upgrade time (and even to production time) broadly speaking; and maybe also a net bonus to IC we can put toward upgrades. We can modify the sliders directly again toward the end of June 1916.

4.) Strategic Decisions. Remember those?




I'm going to permanently ignore purging the army (and choosing music).

Investing in anything on that list is important, but we need money to do so and we only have 30 silver right now.

I'm not a big fan of reducing our industrial efficiency by anything even 1%, but we need cash if we're going to buy and trade supplies effectively on the world market. This will also allow us to make investments, as long as I don't let the cash drop below a certain amount from which I can quickly make significant cash again. Eventually I can spend cash reducing inflation and slowly improving our industrial efficiency. (Not kidding when I say this game is mostly a supply trading game!)

So first choice is to print money. Bang we now have 1030 silver, and a little less dissent! We'll need 6000 silver to return that 1% efficiency by the way.

This opens up a new strategic decision, War Games, which can increase the skill of a random number of generals, but costs 800 silver and 300 supplies. It's important but we need that money to make more money so we can afford nice things like this.

Choosing a low minimum wage this year will reduce national dissent again, and still give us one more IC without hampering our income.

Choosing low taxes will reduce our national dissent again (almost to nothing as a result, only 1% remaining), and even increase our IC a tic again, at the cost of only 1 silver a money which we can and will easily recoup.

Now to take the dissent hits. On the theory that we don't really know how long it'll be until we go to war and then get massive instant reinforcements, we need more manpower to fill out our divisions -- not least because I think upgrading a division may involve also simultaneously filling up its reinforcements. We can do that by enacting partial mobilization (which as a dictatorship we can instantly do without needing other qualifiers), or by prolonging service terms. The latter will give us more experienced troops, which considering we're so behind in land doctrines right now we need all the edge we can get, and also plop down a big start in manpower; but it'll hit national dissent for about 6% total. We can start whittling that down as we start investing in national projects (and with a surplus of consumer goods every month), but it'll affect IC until then. On the other hand, our IC was already affected more than that so on the balance we're still ahead! -- plus by September we'll have a number of (exhausted) divisions near Finland we can spread around for police effect near factories, and likely enough we'll have lost Poland anyway ha ha. ;)

Bam: just like that we have 18,630 manpower.

As an experiment, I accidentally click the "Partial Mobilization" button instead ::) and learn that this gives us war mobilization, all land units fully reinforced instantly, and more than 42 thousand manpower beyond that! -- at a cost of adding 20% to national dissent. Yeek! But we could do it if we had to, though it would be better to let a plot trigger do it and maybe avoid the dissent hit.

So, we have 18.6K manpower (where 1.0 mp == roughly 1000 militia equivalent, though less for more elite soldiers who need more logistic support.) What does that really mean? How many do we need for total reinforcement?

That leads us back to the economy screen at last.



5.) Unfortunately the economy screen doesn't tell me what I want to know, but that isn't its fault: I turned off all reinforcement calls, so it doesn't report any needs. I also turned off all upgrades, but the brigades still need upgrading and those can't be toggled on or off exactly (though I can tell any unit to automatically be assigned to upgrade once produced) so they still register.

Here's the econ screen:




Well, actually that's a subwindow of the econ screen, which looks at convoys and AI economic diplomacy.

My only resource depot at the moment is at Petrograd, our capital -- Darkest Hour is one of those wargames where the capital counts as the main or even only resource distribution point, which makes no sense but whatever. Clearly I can create new depots, but I'm unsure how. My understanding was that factories near resources also served as depots; maybe the fact I haven't started the game clock is giving me wacky data here...? (It certainly is in other regards which I'll talk about in a minute.)

Anyway, I do have a convoy transport fleet which is treated somewhat abstractly by the game; it's usually best to let the computer create convoys, which it has already done from Okha to Magadan (wherever that is, out near Vladisvostok if I recall correctly). But an enemy could assign an on-map fleet (like subs or a battlecruiser) to a sea zone with a suspected convoy line and run anti-convoy duty there. We have 20 destroyers on convoy duty, but I'm unsure what their tech level is. Convoy destroyers are produced separately than on-map destroyers, but at the current tech level for destroyers; but clearly I have the most ancient possible destroyers floating around in other regards so maybe so here, too? No way to tell.

Above that you can see the auto-trader option window, which is temporarily opened (the convoy and depot columns are permanently on this window.) I've already made tweaks: without going into all the details, I've given the computer permission to make trade agreements of anything (including supplies -- though on second thought I'm going to deactivate that as I want to have that control in order to get the best deals) for money, which it is instructed to stockpile as well as import (though since I haven't given it permission to spend money those are the same thing. But just to be safe. ;) ) It can initiate such trades, and accept or reject trade offers of this sort but can only accept deals rated at 100% (don't give the other guy any slack, we don't need money that badly we want the best trades possible.) It cannot send things freely to our allies; and is not allowed to reply to single offers, only to daily ongoing contracts.

This is all because money and supplies are super-important for empowering strategic decisions (and supplies for running the military, even if they're just standing around but moreso on the move and moreso again in a fight), so I want final control over what goes in and out of Russia in order to pick the most lucrative deals. Even little Ethiopia can be capable (as I know from experience) cornering the world market in money and supplies; moreso Russia, if we can stay at peace and out of war.

Okay, now for the main economy screen overall.





Ignore the stuff on the left for the moment and focus on the upper right block.

Well, first thing to do is uncheck the little box that turns on AI management so I can tweak those sliders myself. The way the engine works (I assume this was true for HOI2 generally not just Darkest Hour), the gameclock has to be running for two game days before the figures accurately slot, so we don't actually have a clear idea yet what needs to be done where.

But we can divide our IC (which is currently around 174, and operating at near neutrally perfect efficiency so not much above or below 174) into the totality represented by those sliders; as I move one slider around, other sliders will move in a zero-sum response unless I lock them down (which I'll normally do for tweaking purposes).

CONSUMER GOODS: there's certain demand in our nation created and adjusted by a dozen various factors, and this is where we set our Industrial Capacity to meeting, exceeding, or, um, notting it. :D Producing less than demand proportionately increases dissent everyday, costing us money also; producing more than demand erodes dissent every day and also generates some spare cash (presumably in taxes). Things like the daily intelligence budget and trade deals are factored in, too. In my experience dissent is most quickly reduced by spending large cash on national projects, so I just work at keeping a balanced net-zero income here: any IC we spend on supplies will come back as much better income one way or another, which we can then spend directly reducing dissent faster with many other benefits.

PRODUCTION: this assigns IC to making whatever I've got in that list to the left; which some genius has decided should be battleships, all of which have been constructing for years already and some of which still can't possibly be completed before the ships are obsolescent already! The IC rates there aren't accurate on that screen until the gameclock has run a few days; it's more like 4.x IC per battleship, not .4 per ship! I'm going to be cancelling most or all of those, maybe not the one which could be finished this autumn. That'll free up the production load and so also free up IC to be spent elsewhere. Assigning more IC than necessary to run everything at full speed is technically impossible and worse than useless even if it's possible; assigning less IC than necessary will result in the last item on the list slowing down, then stopping, then the next item up slowing down then stopping, and so on in proportion as the IC available reduces.

This by the way means I don't have to strictly lose all the work done on those ships, just cut off IC assignments to production and make sure anything else I decide to build is set above the ships I don't want to keep working on. (Otherwise if I cancel the game has to pretend the ships were hit with a Tunguska black hole. ;) )

SUPPLIES: this produces Supplies (duh), which can be sold very efficiently for hard silver and/or used to keep the military going. Ideally I'd have all my IC here, if I had nothing else to produce or upgrade or reinforce or whatever. As it is, I try to stay on a net-zero budget. The lag-time inaccuracy when starting the gameclock from a reload can result in me losing a supply contract if I tweak my supplies down before the game catches up and we don't have enough supplies in stock to meet our contracts.

REINFORCEMENTS: this represents arms, kit, and equipment for training and outfitting new soldiers in a division (not for brigades except as assigned to a division though). Until they're outfitted they can't fight. Strictly speaking, it converts manpower to division power through Industrial Capacity. Divisions (and corps) near the front line should have their reinforcements always turned on in case they need it, but they won't unless they're taking damage.

UPGRADES: this represents turning old divisions (and brigades) into new ones by means of applied Industrial capacity. We'll be using this a lot, and not the production slider much, for a while. If I recall correctly from playing prior campaigns (as Russia and as Ethiopia), upgrading also counts as reinforcing, which can increase time to completion.

This brings up wasted IC: no slider can move up beyond the IC sum of all the sliders, but production, reinforcement, and upgrade sliders, can all technically move beyond what's necessary for 100% speed in the process. But that effort is completely wasted, they can't be made to go faster that way! So those sliders have to be monitored somewhat closely, especially reinforcements day by day, so that IC isn't being wasted but is properly going somewhere helpful (like supplies).

And that, at last, brings us to the final thing to do before we can start the gameclock (though we'll need to make some decisions and adjustments once the clock starts, such as assigning brigades from the pool: I de-assigned them all to reshuffle them around, and it takes a few days for them to go through the teleporter prototcols. ;) )

Namely, I've got to figure out who should be assigned to upgrade and/or to reinforce.

[JasonPratt]

Now for the final pre-clock step: deciding who should be upgraded and/or reinforced.

This turned out to be easier than I was expecting. Logically, I should turn on the reinforcement of every corps (even if it's a single division marching around as a 'corps') that might be on a front line in the next several weeks, whether there already or on the way, whether they're already full or not -- that way I'm not caught with divisions taking losses without reinforcements! Massive manpower is just about our only advantage; there's no reason for us to lose any division unless we're completely outmaneuvered and cut off -- which is why it's important to keep that Polish salient open for a retreat when/if necessary. The fact of the matter is that if/when we go to war with Germany (and Hungary), sooner or later the Huns will march an advanced superstack or two or three up into and around Poland and we won't be able to resist retreating, so we'd better keep a path open. Later I'll issue some planned defense orders so that once organization and morale fall below, say, 50%, the corps will fall back where I want them to instead of in a random direction which could be disastrous.

I'll need to remember to turn on reinforcements for other corps as they get close to the line later, but this way the troops will be slotted most efficiently for the IC spent.

As for upgrades, the obvious answer is to upgrade all the cav divisions close to the line first, since they only need 71(ish) days, and the results will be better than upgrading Inf2 to Inf3.

But Inf-2 only needs 59 days to get to Inf-3, after which they'll have a bit easier time surviving until we can ranger them up which currently would take 225 days. It's possible but unlikely that this time will reduce once we're up to Inf-3, so going this route through Inf-3 will probably take 26% longer to Mtn-3 but they'll have a real upgrade along the way.

If I knew for sure I could stay out of the war until being ready to jump in and save the day (or stay out altogether), I'd go straight for Mtn-3, since after all the direct route will be 26% faster! But I'm fuzzy about being able to stay out for a year (or even for two months really.)

On the other hand I don't want to overload our IC trying to upgrade divs.

In the end, I decide to wait until clock-start to see what our IC load will currently be in reinforcing all nearby divs, and in upgrading all nearby cavs; and then if we have anything significant left over I'll look into upgrading infantry, too.

BOZHE MOI! WE MAY BE READY TO ACTUALLY START THE GAME NOW!!!

...so, off to play Far Cry 3 a little. :D

[JasonPratt]

OMG OGM GOM! The time has come to start the gameclock!

For those who haven't been following along but instead prudently jumped down to this post from the new link in the original post (mental note, add new link...), here's whassup:




We're Russia, a little more than a month before the historical start of World War One. Russia (thanks to the "AAR" mod, unlike "vanilla" Darkest Hour Full) starts with one of the (perhaps like in history the) largest land armies in the world: 160 divisions, which I've already combined down (and for administrative migration purposes also somewhat split up) into what the game calls 46 "armies" though actually the basic movement "container" of the game is a corps with one or more divisions. (One or more corps only function as an army in range of an Army HQ, of which we have less than a dozen, so definitely not 46 armies in that sense.)

That's some of the good news; we also start closer to Russia's historical strategic movements already complete or near completion: that screenshot above shows all existent corps out to the farthest east. (The map goes farther east than that, all the way around the world, and south to the tips of Africa and South America though not to Antarctica. You can see the minimap at the bottom left.) Most have already moved near where the western front will start stacking up if we go to war. (More on the "if" later.) The blue arrowy lines show all the initial troop movements I've already assigned to complete the reforger.

Russia also starts with more latent manpower (though I had to activate it by instituting a 3-year enlistment) than anyone else, perhaps aside from the Republic of China (or whatever they're calling themselves in late June 1914, I forget. China will be going through a lot of civil wars in the near future.) See that 18K+ number a little to the right of the very top center of the screen? Each one of that number could equal one thousand basic militia troops. As long as we keep our heads together, and our factories properly working to train new troops, we shouldn't ever lose a single division. Which is good because in this game, as in real life, building up one new division takes a lot of time, close to or even more than a year!

To this good news we can add that we have a ton of factories, as befits a current Major Power, though probably not as many as some other powers (like the US). Specifically we have 175 factories (that's the number on the very far upper right), thus a base Industrial Capacity value of 175, although for various reasons right now they're only operating at 169 IC. Fixing that is something we'll have to address as we go along.

We also have a full suite of researcher slots (seven, the game's maximum I think), and a large number of individual or institutional researchers to choose from (the game doesn't distinguish except for color's sake), whom I have already given their initial assignments. More on that soon.

Last but not quite least we have a lot of land to trade for time, should that become necessary. Hopefully it won't come to that, but we have a number of serious problems. Let's go down our list of problems in no particular order, shall we?

A.) Unlike the historical Russia, we don't have the second largest pre-War airforce in the world. We have a pitiable four tactical bomber squads, two of which are only experimental from back when we were developing combat aircraft! We also have no airports anywhere close to the German/Hungarian/Romanian borders, and probably no time to build any. I've already assigned them to our largest (actually only) "cluster" of airbases down near Turkey; assuming the game allows them to legitimately fly down there to rebase since technically the distance is far beyond their ranges from their initial starting points at Moscow and St. Petersburg (Petrograd in the game and hereafter).

B.) Our navy is largely whack out of date, though we have two up-to-date sub packs (and one squad of up-to-date destroyers). Also, we only have three naval groups and the only one capable of doing much of anything is in the Baltic Sea at Petrograd, though I've assigned it (in three flotillas) to rebase as close to the German coast as feasibly possible. Some genius (among Russia historically? -- among the developers?) decided we ought to be building battleships, despite our technical superiority in battlecruisers; all of which are from 25 to 75% complete but all of which will also be obsolete by the time they launch (in some cases as late as 1917, assuming we bother to keep factories working on them, which frankly I'm not going to). Our naval research right now is pretty bad, too, and not likely to get any better any time soon as we have more pressing research problems to get up to date on. In other words, if we go to war we're likely to be blasted to the bottom of the ocean in the first few months by the Kaiser's High Sea Fleet (if Germany lets it loose, which in my previous experiences with Darkest Hour it will).

C.) Our land troops aren't much better off. We do have infantry and cavalry, not relatively useless militia; but we don't have much artillery yet (unhistorically), and our infs and cavs are all equally up-to-out-of-date turn of the century. Specifically they're all Inf-2 and Cav-2, and up to date would be levels 3. Many of those divisions are only partially filled, and many of those partially filled divisions are only the minimum ten percent filled! (In game terms I think that means they're starting as though they've only been recently formed.) Fortunately, most of the full divisions are already at or near the likely war zone, including in Poland; but that brings us to...

D.) Russia picked up Poland and Finland (and some parts of Romania, and one Turkish province) recently, and the locals are still in relatively strong dissent about this, which is even more problematic because a significant number of our factories are in those territories (which I sometimes call "counties" instead). I made a few popular strategic decisions already which had a side effect (or in some cases an intended main effect) of reducing dissent nationwide; but then I also instituted the 3-year enlistment, which instantly ate all our supplies and jumped our dissent back to a national average of 7%.

Poland is also a problem because even with 160 divisions there's no way humanly possible to defend it against the combined strength of Germany and Austria/Hungary, even if/when France (and presumably England) opens up war on their western flank. The GermyHuns can and will march up two or three superstacks and start gobbling even our best defended territories like Pac-Man, not even counting the counties we have to leave undefended in order to pull together respectable speed bumps elsewhere! The best I can do is to create a Polish Salient out to Warsaw, along which our troops can retreat if/when the war starts. (More on the "if" in a minute.) We definitely do not want our divisions there to be cut off, as that's practically the only way the enemy can kill our divisions outright.

Unfortunately, this means if/when we go to war, we're going to be socked with some ongoing dissent penalties for losing Warsaw; but on the other hand, Germany gets to suck up a lot of our dissent problems, too, along the way! :D But they'll also get a significant number of our factories, which they'll be able to use eventually even though not immediately (due to instability after conquering a territory).

E.) We don't have many brigades yet (proportionate to the number of our divisions), which are sub-units that need to be attached to divisions in order to operate on the map. This is something we'll be trying to fix in the early game, but it'll take a while.

F.) Our national infrastructure could be a lot better, even in the relatively industrialized west. This won't be easy or quick to fix.

G.) Among our several substandard techs, we've barely entered the 20th century in land doctrines (though we're oddly pretty well caught up in Naval Doctrines, and even Air Doctrines with some notable exceptions like the Interceptor doctrine.) These doctrines grant very significant stacking bonuses, and also open up new effective tactics for our generals to use in a fight; and you can bet Germany is up to date! We're seriously about five steps off whack here.

H.) Russia starts with a promise to Serbia already made that we'll support them in a war that we aren't anywhere really near ready to fight.

I.) What relative preparedness we've achieved starting with in the west, comes at the cost of denuding our borders back to China (except for a token few divisions in the Caucases near Turkey which you can see at the bottom right of the map itself.) This could prove a problem later: literally any of several large militia armies could march up into our guts and take everything we own as far west as Petrograd -- maybe farther depending on whether we're distracted by war with the GermyHuns by then! Fortunately, Darkest Hour has several speed bumps built in to keep just anyone from effectively declaring war any time, but we'll be in unspeakable trouble if, say, Afghanistan navigates those bumps.


So what are our plans to begin with?

1.) STAY OUT OF WAR AS LONG AS POSSIBLE! This means saying no to Serbia, which will result in a huge dissent hit and possibly some equally problematic diplomatic debuffs, but I see no other way to survive even with our upgraded capabilities in the "AAR" mod. (Vanilla DHFull starts Russia in even worse shape with maybe 50 divisions, or less, some of which are even more out of date and/or only militia, and some of which are scattered back to Vladisvostok near Japan.) It also means saying no to France and England if they try to drag us in. On the other hand, it's possible that if we say no to Serbia we won't be the trigger which historically dragged France and England in to begin with!

2.) UPGRADE AND REINFORCE! -- my stat comparisons indicate that light infantry (of which we have none) and cavalry are the two best divisional types right now, especially cavalry; so I've instituted a plan to get our cavalry updated to Cav-3, and eventually to upgrade our infantry divisions to Mountain Infantry (though I may run them through Inf-3 first just to be safe) as well as some going to Cavalry so we can have more of a 1:1 parity. Ideally, if I can stay out of war altogether (until we're ready), I'd convert everyone to Cavalry and then mix in some armored car and artillery brigades. As it is, I'm better off in the medium run converting some infantry to Cav and some to Mountain Infantry (the next step in Light Infantry) and building cav brigades for them all until I can get something punchier for them. So I'll start producing Cav brigades when I can, and then more shooty brigades (some fast some slow) later. But meanwhile I'm setting our IC to upgrading the Cav divisions closest to the western borders; and to reinforcing both Cav and Inf divisions near the western borders.

I won't be able to assign brigades from my pool until a few days after game start (I took all previously assigned brigades back into the pool already), but when I do I'll add arty to various infantries and cav to cav (since I don't have enough cav divisions around to rely on them for defense or an attacking superstack). Engineers will go to incoming groups eastward (unless I need them sooner to help retreat the Warsaw group over rivers, or to help the superstack up in Sia to start running down the German northeast coast.) I don't recall us having any police brigades, but if so they'll go to a stack I'm sending to Petrograd for policing Finland eventually (and thus recouping our lost IC points there.)

3.) CATCH UP ON RESEARCH! -- which is going to take a long time in any case, so I'm focusing on getting our Cav infantry and our artillery up to date (in the short term); our Mountain/Light Infantry up to date (in the more medium term); our Land Doctrines; some logistic and mobilization techs; some production techs; and perhaps most importantly our research speed techs!

4.) PLAY THE SUPPLY MARKET! -- I'll be doing this behind the scenes once a month, working diplomatically to buy and sell supplies internationally for increasing our cash, allowing us to purchase national projects to increase various efficiencies like research and production speeds; which also will help reduce dissent. Relatedly...

5.) REDUCE DISSENT! -- At the end of the day, World War One Russia survives or dies on internal dissent. We're going to take a huge hit by refusing to help Serbia, so the dissent has to be reduced pronto in various ways which I've already described above.

Annnnd, that's it.

Gameclock on.

[JasonPratt]

The reason this campaign starts on June 27 (all months in DH last 30 days by the way, meaning the year is only 360 days long), is probably so that the game has a couple of days to synch everything together. This is an issue that affects any start after a reload, too, by the way, one side effect being that any attacking forces simply quit (with a loss chalked up for their general) on a clock start after a game load!

Anyway, I'm pleased and relieved to report that our bomber groups only took a day (really?) to fly down to the Turkish border and rebase, and more importantly did so without crashing.

I'm also pleased to report that despite the huge number of divisions currently on march, our Transport Capacity hasn't been overwhelmed (yet) and still has a significant amount of leeway at 231 out of 281. Had we overtaxed it (or if we do so later), I'd need to tell some troops somewhere (most likely out east) to stop a while so as to let everyone else move at full speed. (This also I think affects supply rate and thus also reinforcement rates where activated.)

Having paused the game again to take stock a couple of days later (now that the game has synched up its internal processes), I can get an idea of how quickly our researches will go by looking at what has been accomplished in the past two days.




The quickest (as might be expected from a level 10 researcher working on a project where the stages are all specialties of his) is Census Tabulation, i.e. research speed research. We can expect that to be done around mid-October at worst, maybe sooner; and once done it will help everything else research faster.

Note however that several things like Mobilization, Cav-3, and Mtn-3, are currently going so slow it would take 600 days to finish! It isn't really that bad; none of those techs start on specialties of the researchers, and we may (should) be able to trade for blueprints which will double research speed. Still, we're probably looking at late next spring in the best possible case.

Over to the Econ screen:




Interestingly, our auto-trader has already picked up a deal from Romania to export energy for a little cash every day; and I'm okay with that! Energy is cheap and easy to get if I need it.

Hilariously, despite my having set production to zero, the battleship project with highest priority is still trickling along! I fix that pronto. (I'm not going to cancel the battleships, since I might need/want two or three of them later and they might auto-upgrade -- they have a checkbox for that which I've checked! But I'm not going to allocate enough IC to production to work on them for a while.)

Since instituting the 3-year enlistment instantly ate all our supplies, I set our factories to supply production (mostly, plus a nominal fulfillment of consumer goods to keep the people happy) for a couple of days while the game synched; so we've got a nice pool to work with. I immediately run that slider back to one tick above net-zero production (since we can produce supplies usually much cheaper than I can buy for resell on the market, so I might as well produce a little although I want most of our IC on other things for a long time to come. Still I may occasionally turn off the other sliders and run supplies for a week or two in order to enter the market better.)

Even with "production" turned off, and "consumer goods" and "supplies" net-zeroed (or a tick above rather), we don't have enough functional IC (or even enough base IC I think) to run upgrades and reinforcements at full speed. So, since if we go to war there's at least some chance we'll get instant full reinforcements from the manpower pool, I set the sliders to run upgrades full speed (on most of our cav divisions, the ones farthest west); and the leftover IC will go toward slowly reinforcing the short divisions I marked for reinforcements (i.e. the ones farthest west).

Now to see what I can do buying and selling supplies (and maybe blueprints, where those can't be harmful to us) this month.

[JasonPratt]

JULY 1, 1914
------------

Meh, I should have realized other nations either wouldn't start with much money yet, or they did (and/or printed money) but would spent it pronto on their own strategic decisions; so I might as well wait until August 1 to start market trading.

Once my Baltic Fleets arrived at the port in Liepaja, my supply usage dropped sharply off; so I immediately popped those IC over into reinforcements. We should see more dropoff once divisions begin arriving at nearby destinations for the next several months.

Archduke Ferdinand and his wife were assassinated on historical schedule at 10:00am June 28, by the way.

[JasonPratt]

JULY 15, 1914
-------------

Traditionally I do my trading at the half-month, so I went out anyway despite the early game to see what deals I could strike. Very little "silver" for sale, but I bought almost 7000 supplies at no more than .10 silver per supply (and often much less, sometimes much much less), largely by offering up blueprints in lieu of cash (though never anything dangerous to nearby possibly hostile nations of course). This is important early-game for another reason: a lot of nations don't yet have "Early Construction" tech and so cannot build factories yet, so the sooner they can research and put that into play the more money or supplies they'll have later for us to trade with! (Though that usually takes a few years to start paying off.) Ditto for early production or agricultural techs, even though not to the same extent.

Many nations we can't trade with at all because they're puppets of someone else (a lot of nations in the Western Hemisphere are puppets of the US or more rarely Great Britain for example); and some didn't want to trade or not at terms I cared for. Once I went through the list, I came back offering an ongoing trade agreement for no less than .20 silver per supply (twice what I paid for, or rather a lot more than twice on average) -- and actually struck up several .33 s/s trades along the way! Including with Germany, rather amusingly! They'll be paying us 100 silver a month for 330 supplies, which I'm sure they'll put to good use. I would do more supply trading for cash (or vice versa) if I could, with them and the Huns both, simply because it helps increase our relative relationships and so makes it harder for them to declare war on us. But until that time we'll take what we can.

[JasonPratt]

July 18, 1914
-------------

Well, here comes our first big hurdle (good thing I saved the game a couple of game-days ago! -- where I can surely find it again! ::) )

Serbia is asking us to support them if they refuse the demands of Austria-Hungary. Historically those demands weren't terrible, and Serbia was unofficially looking for ways to prod the Huns into war (both of which were related to Serbia allowing pan-Slavic terrorist factions to operate in their country not only with impunity but also with members in high levels of government.)

So, sorry Serbia, the Huns have a right to ask you to root out the corruption in your government. Good luck with that, or with saying no to the Powers!

We take a twenty point hit to our relations with Serbia (we'll live) and a ten percent jump on our dissent -- which is far more troublesome as it affects both our IC and the chances of revolutionary corps activating in Finland. But since a lot of Russian troops are arriving on station recently, I'll see about posting some of them to anti-partisan duty in and around factory areas, and try to fix some of that problem.

...wait, what? Did I read that wrong?

WE ACTUALLY LOST TEN PERCENT OF DISSENT!

Effectively we have almost no dissent now! -- the average is so small it doesn't even show up as a centimal fraction on the national dissent meter! We still have a bit, mostly in Finland -- every county there is still in dissent but only at rates like one or two percent -- along with three remaining Polish counties and that Romanian bloc, each at only 1%.

WITH THAT ONE MOVE I MAY HAVE SAVED RUSSIA AND EVEN STOPPED WORLD WAR ONE YOU GUYS!!

(Oh, and Italy had Italian Concerns, which sounds like some kind of female problem, and left their military alliance with the GermyHuns.)

[JasonPratt]

Still July 20. In celebration for almost-certainly stopping WW1 (or at least our involvement in it), I went ahead and chose the strategy decisions to Invest in Education, Public Health, and Public Security. They each only cost 1 silver a day, which I can easily afford, and will probably give only good results. I may have to wait 1000 days to see the results (at which time the opportunity will presumably come up again), but hey!

(These strategies are introduced by the "AAR" mod by the way, not in vanilla DHFull.)

[JasonPratt]

AUGUST 1, 1914
--------------

Here's where we are at the start of the month with less than half a month to go before the historical WW1.




I've scrolled the map down a bit to show that Persia now has some divisions near our border along the Caucases; also (can't be seen) near our border on the other side of the Caspian Sea which we can't possibly do anything about, but I'm not too worried about Persia invading. We're on relatively good terms with them, and I know an event is coming up soon which will help that. Incidentally, despite having built no less than 14 airports before gamestart, Turkey does not even have Powered Flight Concept researched, much less Unarmed Recon (as I learned half a month ago when negotiating a supply trade with them). So they couldn't possibly have any airplanes yet. Weird.

Afghanistan has even more divisions (generally militia, I think) along our border, but I just can't care about that right now. If we get through this crisis and Europe settles down (and I research "strategic movement" finally) we may try to do something about them and Mongolia and whoever else is on our southern border acting unstably. If the Afghans manage to try something we may be screwed, but they probably won't be able to.

In the main theater, as you can see most of our troops have finished marching into place, though several nearby stacks still need throughout the month and into September to finish moving. It certainly helps that, thanks to practically no dissent, our Transport Capacity has jumped to 306 (as a factor of our effective IC), less of which we're using than before because a lot of corps are finished moving!

Also worth noting, the various production bonuses we picked up for choosing ministers and a few other things, now juice our IC beyond 100%! -- to 184 out of 175!! We can't actually produce things faster, but we can spread it out more.

Oddly, and a bit unsettlingly, Austria-Hungary is posting a lot of divisions on our border, even though Germany seems to have packed theirs up for who knows where (probably France?) I'm less worried about them, since they're almost as rubbish as we are, but still.

The redness of the "manpower" figure only means we're drawing it off faster than we're replacing it, which duh of course we are, we're reinforcing all the western divisions that need it (at about 30% speed). That's only {checking} 1.45 manpower a day. The computer says we need a little over 305 manpower to finish topping off all our divisions. Out of 18-thousand-plus. No worries there.

Forging onward!

[JasonPratt]

SEPT 1, 1914
------------

Who deserves a Nobel Peace Prize? Tsar Iason Yvenivich!

Continental War has not broken out. In fact, as far as I can tell no war anywhere has broken out yet! -- not even the Chinese or Mexican Civil Wars!




The German border remains quiet, though the Hunny border still shows a lot of unsettling divisions. I don't think Austria has even tried to take Serbia yet! My wife's dad, the almighty combat wizard and mountain-slayer King Nicholas of Montenegro, can thank me for that, yo! (Or maybe not since he's likely to get bored now; but he can just spend peaceful days sitting on his front porch talking to the neighbors, too, and inviting them to his grill.)

There still isn't quite enough activity this early in the game for most nations to have significant extra money sitting around and/or a serious need for supplies -- ironically, our best large-batch customer so far has been the Aussy-Huns! -- but I've got several ongoing trade agreements getting 3x (or on average actually much better) return on my supplies in silver, even though that's necessarily slow going, and I've earned enough to invest in national research once already though I haven't seen the results yet and won't for a few more weeks.

[JasonPratt]

SEPT 15, 1914
-------------

On Sept 3, our Cav divisions started to complete their upgrading, woo!

Amusingly, Germany failed in a smear campaign against our government on Sept 7. This just happened to be the same day I assigned our Baltic sub group on a sneak exercise down the coast to see if I could get a better idea what was going on in the relevant Germy territories.

While finally getting around to assigning the brigades (no hurry so far, because no war so far!), I discovered that despite not having the tech for it Russia does in fact have Art-2 brigades. But I still have to finish researching Art-2 and then Art-3 before I can do better than that. Well, don't look a gift cannon in the mouth, I guess... ;)

Since a lot of my Cavs are finishing upgrading this month, freeing up tons of Industrial Capacity, I've chosen the infantry divisions in Warsaw to start training for our first Mtn-3 Corps. This will take 225 days (though training them to Cav-3 would take 255, so...)

Relatedly, since Cav-3 is my all-around best option right now for brigades, I decided to set up 10 running Cav-3 brigade lines, which will pump out 10 such brigades at a time in slightly faster runs each time. As our research progresses this could and probably will change; but not likely any time soon.

I also need to put out an engineer brigade for every Army HQ, so I set that up, too (though we already have some assigned and some generals get the Engineer ability already.)

Beyond that, I figure some Hero Projects (a few decades early) are in order; thus I put production to work on the three counties nearest to Moscow to the east (north or south) which have no factories but at least 30% infrastructure (so factories can already be built there), slating them to build up their infrastructure to 100% and ten factories in a row (3 at a time one per county).

All that... well, it eats up the IC which would go toward my battleships, but we shouldn't be building those now anyway. It also eats up all my IC going to reinforcements, but if war is declared we'll probably get instant reinforcements anyway. It also eats up quite a bit of my IC going to upgrades, so I'm now running only 60% speed (which as far as I can tell translates into upgrading only 60% of my currently assigned 19 divisions and brigades at a time.) But as my various Cavalries finish up (I'm also upgrading my two experimental tac-bomber groups near Turkey because why not, pfft), their IC will free up. And once the engineer brigades finish later this year, so will theirs. But we clearly still need more factories, and without being able to pay for instant 60 day factories until the world economy gets booming better (for some reason this game doesn't simulate the stock crash or anything like that) I'm stuck building them 400 days at a time though more quickly as they go. I'd like to get to the point where I'm finishing 12 factories a year or once a month on average (at least), but I'm a lonnngg way away from that yet.

Oh, and on Sept 13 Mexico (despite its serious partisan problems) did eliminate the Zapatista faction; so apparently the Mexican Civil war is going on already. Maybe I should have realized that simply from the existence of the Villaistas and Zapatistas at all.

But still no World War as of Sept 15, yet. Crossing fingers...

[JasonPratt]

OCT 1, 1914
-----------

Still no war, woo! The only big news for this update is that we finished our first research into research speed, which along with investing in national research has increased our overall research speed by 3.515%. We also invested almost 130 silver into trying to positively influence the US, since we could really use some trade with them and so far they aren't willing; the result was hardly much but that's better than nothing. If I had a lot more money every month (already) I'd do the same for Norway, Sweden, Germany, and Austria-Hungary, most of whom (except Germany) I have a much better chance of positively influencing, and all of whom might be military opponents someday.

[JasonPratt]

JAN 1, 1915
-----------

Except in Mexico, peace still reigns throughout the world. The Republic of China even seems to be working along a path that will avoid civil war there for a while. We're up to date now on researching research speed, and with our occasional national investments we should be currently researching at 9.823% above nominal speed. The next research speed tech unlocks in 1928 but I'm going ahead and slating research for it already so we can be as ahead of that curve as possible (which will help us be ahead of some other curves, though the national research grants I'll be launching each month will help a lot more.)

Though I could be saving up money to pop out random factories somewhere every 60 days, I've decided research speed is somewhat more important; but meanwhile as our Cavs get up to date, and the Engineering brigades were completed for the Army HQs (on Christmas Day, btw), I've been able to repurpose ICs to more Hero Projects north, south, and east of Moscow; we now have a total of six counties which should have 10 factories each well before the mid-20s.

I kind of doubt I'll be able to do better than that on factory and infrastructure planning for a while, because I do need to keep some ICs free to upgrade batches of infantry once the cavs are completed. That's probably going to take a long time, but since we're at peace it isn't a huge problem. (Though I should look into putting some freed-up ICs into fortresses on my defensive lines, just in case, since we get a 25% bonus to making them.)

Hopefully we've passed the triggers for a world war, and have entered a new era of growth and peace for the whole world. Somewhat idealistically (and capitalistically) we've even started selling military blueprints to Norway, Sweden, and Persia, though not to any other potential hostiles on our borders. Even Serbia has apparently made its peace with Hungary, and is beginning to prosper with the technology we've sold them. For many nations we have even effectively donated Early Construction Tech so that they can start building factories twice as quickly, though by the nature of the case we couldn't possibly see returns on that for a decade or more.

Aside from a trivial number of malcontents in Finland and a few Polish and ex-Romanian territories (not even enough to affect our IC score), our nation is at 0 dissent. Considering that Russia, as the largest nation on Earth, also holds more VPs than anyone, we're even effectively "winning" the game just by being at peace!

I doubt I'll need to update again for a year; may 1915 be the start of one hundred years of prosperity for all the Russian people and for everyone in the world!

[Martok]

Wow!  The czars may be about to usher in a new era of human history!  Who knew?  :D 

[JasonPratt]

About halfway through 1915, nothing shooty yet.