White Sun: A Hearts of Iron Chinese AAR

[Thirdfain]

Scottish Ninja: Glad you like it! I'll point out that I actually haven't named any of my units- the only names I've changed are those of my corps and armies.
Ma Deuce: Wait a little; you'll see how the Japansese handle my Manchurian Campaign. It's actually pretty cool. I'll point out that I have garrisoned my coast, btw.
LaserRifleofDoom: Bah! I wouldn't consider it copying! Write an AAR, they are very fun
Losonti Tokash: Marvelous. Bive it a shot, I think Mexico *could* be a regional power, with sufficient IC building. Maybe 4 years of IC and then a Central American campaign? There's a lot of IC to be had in the minors there...
InnocentBystander: One day, I will try that. I've had some good experiences with minors like Australia and Poland...

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The July Campaign
July, 1937

July 11: Erenhot falls to Falkenhausen's advancing Seven Dragons AG. Morale is high, and as soon as the area is secured, Falkenhausen orders an immediate attack on Xilinhot, hoping to catch the exhausted enemy before reinforcements can arrive.


Victory is assured!



Balls.

The Japanese infrastructure is impressive- The Japanese mobile army, a large formation of mounted troops equipped with armoured vehicles, stops the Nationalist advance cold. The cause is immediately obvious- Chinese organization, never high in the first place, was too depleted in the previous assault. Moreover, Falkenhausen's HQ had not arrived yet. Time will be needed to get the peasants into fighting trim!

July 14: The Center Front AG takes Changde, brushing aside small counter-attacks and ambushes thanks to their battle-hardened nature. Chiang decides to prepare a massive offensive to break the Japanese frontier armies once and for all. HQs are delivered to all the Army Groups, finally giving the Chinese leadership the support they need to successfully fight.

July 16: Rejuvenated and resupplied, the National Army hits the Japanese fortifications in waves.



July 21: Falkenhausen's Seven Dragons join the offensive. The enemy, beset upon on every front and from all sides, breaks and runs. Most of the troops are Japanese- Manchurians have only just started to join the front lines.



July 23: Sensing blood, the usually conservative Pang orders an attack on weak Japanese positions in Jinxi. The enemy routes promptly.



The July Offensive ends with a stunning success. The enemy lines are broken, and the first major Chinese units have entered Manchuria. Liberated peasants in Jinxi hold an entirely spontaneous liberation celebration, aided by the crack Chinese Nationalist All-Bayonet Cheerleading Morale Squads!

Continued attacks, aimed at exploiting the damaged enemy morale, start to meet defeat. After almost three weeks of heavy fighting, the Chinese armies need time to rest and re-organize.

September 8: After failures in Changde on the 4th and in Ulan Hot that day, the attacks are called off.



All good things must end, but no balls here! The Chinese people realize that perhaps there is something to the rank bullshit Chiang and his cronies have been spewing.

Poor suckers.

Japanese infrastructure and will to fight remain respectable. The enemy prepares for the next Nationalist onslaught:

[Chris OFarrell]

Quickly! Bring up Mao's armies as the elite shock troops to wear down the Japanese will to fight, while your glorious armies rest and reorganize! It's your only hope!

[Brain_Caster]

Am I right to assume that "Elite Shock Troops" is Chinese for "cannon fodder"?

[Adrian Laguna]

Hey Thridfain, are you in a formal alliance with the other Chinese? Like, in the diplomacy screen you show as allied? Because if you are you can probably militarily control them since you have IC superiority.

[fgalkin]

Hey Thridfain, are you in a formal alliance with the other Chinese? Like, in the diplomacy screen you show as allied? Because if you are you can probably militarily control them since you have IC superiority.

Yes, yes, and yes.
click me

Have a very nice day.
-fgalkin

[InnocentBystander]

You don't need more IC to control another. I played a game as belgium, where my objective was to hold off Germany, I took control of the UK and France, and managed to win after 2 years holding the line.

[The Yosemite Bear]

Am I right to assume that "Elite Shock Troops" is Chinese for "cannon fodder"?

no in this case it's keep your friends close keep your enemies in the fire where they will be depleted and un able to fight you.

[Stormbringer]

Thirdfain, I just started reading this the other day. Keep up the good work, it's quite amusing.

[The Yosemite Bear]

the part the pisses me off is that my copy of HoI keeps crashing!!!!

ok, uninstalled it, descruffed the disk, reinstlled it, and DLing the latest patches again....

hopefully this works.

Don't want this to be another Alpha Centauri where I have a great game I just can't play because the disk is played out.

[Adrian Laguna]

You don't need more IC to control another. I played a game as Belgium, where my objective was to hold off Germany, I took control of the UK and France, and managed to win after 2 years holding the line.

Must be a Doomsday thing, part of the reason I didn't continue updating my Italy AAR was that my ally Germany suddenly went retarded and I couldn't MC them. Still trying to event my way out of that.

[Losonti Tokash]

Losonti Tokash: Marvelous. Bive it a shot, I think Mexico *could* be a regional power, with sufficient IC building. Maybe 4 years of IC and then a Central American campaign? There's a lot of IC to be had in the minors there...

The only trouble I have is stopping those filthy americanos from declaring war on me. Since they're guaranteeing the independence of every single country in the western hemisphere, they like to swarm over the border by the time I get to El Salvador.

They've even done this when I was a member of the Allies, and they completely destroyed Canada and drove the British and French into the sea before turning their attention to me. Obviously I didn't see how the rest of the war went afterwards.

I'll have to figure out a way to get them to not kick my ass in the middle of my campaign. A military alliance, perhaps?

[InnocentBystander]

Losonti Tokash: Marvelous. Bive it a shot, I think Mexico *could* be a regional power, with sufficient IC building. Maybe 4 years of IC and then a Central American campaign? There's a lot of IC to be had in the minors there...

The only trouble I have is stopping those filthy americanos from declaring war on me. Since they're guaranteeing the independence of every single country in the western hemisphere, they like to swarm over the border by the time I get to El Salvador.

They've even done this when I was a member of the Allies, and they completely destroyed Canada and drove the British and French into the sea before turning their attention to me. Obviously I didn't see how the rest of the war went afterwards.

I'll have to figure out a way to get them to not kick my ass in the middle of my campaign. A military alliance, perhaps?

You'll just have to make some allies and charge into texas, I don't see any way around it

[Stormbringer]

Oh, for those discussing modding the game:

1) How do I lower the prior to historical year penalty? I get that it's there for a mix of historical accuracy and to prevent people from getting too good, too quick. But having an excellent tech team and plenty of resources only to have it drag on forever just because of the year is rather irritating.

2) Is there a way to edit the names assigned to classes of ships or aircraft or vehicles? So instead of it being a "Intercontinental Strategic Bomber" it would be a "B-52" (at least for Americans)?

3) Is there a way to add and delete the names for units? Because I'd like to delete some names and add some others to the ship lists. Simple things mostly like removing names that would occur in the time line.

[Scottish Ninja]

If you've got the game editor (I don't know if the original version came with it; Doomsday does), then you can change the class names under "Models" from the main screen; otherwise, I don't know.

[Adrian Laguna]

Most HoI modding is done by changing things in the db folder inside your main game folder. You'll probably want to make a back-up if you're overwriting something or changing files, though in the case of misc.txt or revolts.txt usually downloading the latest patch again tends to fix it.

1) How do I lower the prior to historical year penalty?

Open misc.txt inside the db folder, research is the very last section. You might want to just halve it. Though I'd recommend that you leave it unchanged. You are giving yourself an advantage over the AI by changing it, I assure you that you have more than enough advantages already.

2) Is there a way to edit the names assigned to classes of ships or aircraft or vehicles? So instead of it being a "Intercontinental Strategic Bomber" it would be a "B-52" (at least for Americans)?

I looked, I couldn't find anything.

3) Is there a way to add and delete the names for units? Because I'd like to delete some names and add some others to the ship lists. Simple things mostly like removing names that would occur in the time line.

If you mean the specific unit names you can go to the "unitnames.csv" in the db folder. You'll notice that there's several unit names for every type of unit for every country. It's a loooong list and a pain in the ass to modify.
If you mean the army/corps names, then those are easier, since they are divided among "armynames.csv", "navynames.csv", and "airnames.csv" .

[Stormbringer]

1) How do I lower the prior to historical year penalty?

Open misc.txt inside the db folder, research is the very last section. You might want to just halve it. Though I'd recommend that you leave it unchanged. You are giving yourself an advantage over the AI by changing it, I assure you that you have more than enough advantages already.

So the AI doesn't benefit too? That's a shame.

2) Is there a way to edit the names assigned to classes of ships or aircraft or vehicles? So instead of it being a "Intercontinental Strategic Bomber" it would be a "B-52" (at least for Americans)?

I looked, I couldn't find anything.

Darn, I was hoping that it would be easier to change. But I guess not.

3) Is there a way to add and delete the names for units? Because I'd like to delete some names and add some others to the ship lists. Simple things mostly like removing names that would occur in the time line.

If you mean the specific unit names you can go to the "unitnames.csv" in the db folder. You'll notice that there's several unit names for every type of unit for every country. It's a loooong list and a pain in the ass to modify.
If you mean the army/corps names, then those are easier, since they are divided among "armynames.csv", "navynames.csv", and "airnames.csv" .

I was looking at the names for individual units. Specifically I was debating removing some ships names, like Kennedy or Forrestal or Eisenhower. It always irked me to have them come up when the circumstances don't fit. A minor thing but it sounds like it's an easy fix, if I've got a bit of patience.

[Adrian Laguna]

1) How do I lower the prior to historical year penalty?

Open misc.txt inside the db folder, research is the very last section. You might want to just halve it. Though I'd recommend that you leave it unchanged. You are giving yourself an advantage over the AI by changing it, I assure you that you have more than enough advantages already.

So the AI doesn't benefit too? That's a shame.

The AI is mediocre in its research efforts as is, it gets worse the smaller a country is. They will also generally not research technology beyond their current year unless they run out of anything else to research. Probably the best example of this latter thing is the Grand Battle Doctrine path. A few powers can start researching the 1942 sub-doctrines right away, many only need to research a couple of early stuff before the '42 techs are available. Any power worth something can potentially start researching a very valuable '42 tech no later than 1938, and as early as the first game year. The AI will likely never research this tech unless it is at least 1941, penalty or no penalty. The human player can, and indeed even with the penalty I've seen people advocating that one research Grand Battle Plan's sub-doctrines as early as possible.

[The Yosemite Bear]

Purhaps I shall buy HOI II and start a Johnny Turk ARR

[Stormbringer]

The AI is mediocre in its research efforts as is, it gets worse the smaller a country is. They will also generally not research technology beyond their current year unless they run out of anything else to research. Probably the best example of this latter thing is the Grand Battle Doctrine path. A few powers can start researching the 1942 sub-doctrines right away, many only need to research a couple of early stuff before the '42 techs are available. Any power worth something can potentially start researching a very valuable '42 tech no later than 1938, and as early as the first game year. The AI will likely never research this tech unless it is at least 1941, penalty or no penalty. The human player can, and indeed even with the penalty I've seen people advocating that one research Grand Battle Plan's sub-doctrines as early as possible.

That makes a lot more sense now. I only recently got DD and hadn't really noticed those trends as I'm only on a second play through. But now that I look at it, it does make a fair amount of sense.

Purhaps I shall buy HOI II and start a Johnny Turk ARR

Get Doomsday. It's actually a stand alone with the new Armageddon expansion pack being built off it.

[Darth Mordius]

Any more progress? Can't wait for Manchuria to be freed from the Japanese boot and return to the Chinese boo... er, be gloriously liberated from the tyrants grip