StarDestroyer.Net BBS

This might be a me-too thing, but since you buggers still haven't made up your minds, Brazil all the way baby!

Due to my own personal bias and the fact that Brazil has reached 10 votes, we're going with them. I'm adding in some of the people who asked to be leaders/tech teams and I'll get a few hours of play done in a bit.

Well, here we are at the first installment. There will unfortunately not be all that much gameplay as I’m going to explain some of the game’s concepts first.


Here’s the main single player menu. There’s some online multiplayer crap but I’ve never gotten it to work.


And the first screen, telling us how long the game will last and how to win. Victory points are assigned to certain provinces. A lot of provinces are only worth 1-5 points but you’ll find cities like Berlin that are worth 50 at a time.


Brazil’s military starts off pretty tiny. Some infantry and cavalry divisions backed up by a couple artillery brigades and militia units. There’s also half a dozen flotillas of transports ships, along with some Great War era battleships and light cruisers. I’ll post screenshots of them actually doing stuff later on.


So here’s South America. It will all be teal one day, I swear. This is a decent time to go over the row of icons up at the top.

The first three, starting with the lightning bolt, are energy, metal, and rare materials. Each factory requires 2 units of energy, 1 unit of metal, and .5 rare materials every day. The one after that is oil. Obviously, motorized units require fuel. They can still move without it, but they’ll receive huge combat and movement penalties if they’re out of gas.

Next is supplies. This represents food, clothes, ammunition, etc. It’s built directly from your factories, while the others are provided by your provinces. The next is obviously money. You get money when your factories produce excess consumer goods (which are necessary to keep your citizens happy).
The next 5 are manpower, nukes, dissent, transport capacity, and industrial capacity. The 3 numbers for industrial capacity show how much is wasted, my total IC, and my base number of factories.


This is the intelligence screen. From here you can recruit spies and use those spies to either gather information or be a jerk to other countries and stuff. I honestly don’t use it much except to gauge an enemy’s strength against my own.


Here is the technology screen. I added DEATH as a tech team and switched his name into Portuguese. I’ve assigned his team the task of bringing our military up to Great War levels of technology. Jesus christ. The other team is some kind of airplane company, so it makes perfect sense that I assign them the task of developing new ground doctrines.


This is the production screen. It’s here you allocate your nation’s industrial capacity and have it actually make shit. You can see I’m building an HQ unit. While they’re pretty expensive and take forever to build they increase your units’ combat effectiveness by quite a bit.


Here we have the diplomatic screen! Pretty self explanatory. You conduct diplomacy with these here buttons. It also shows the individuals currently making up your government and that of other nations. Let’s look at our glorious leader…


wat

Well fuck.

Time to get to the fun stuff!


While I’ve been babbling about stupid shit, I also started moving my troops south. You see, the Uruguayans have long annoyed the shit out of me, with their hideous tan nation color clashing with the uncompromising teal that is Brasil. Also, they have 8 IC and I can pretty much steamroll them.


Oh noes! Turns out that your citizenry don’t like it when you decide to invade a small, defenseless country.
Whatever. At midnight on February 26, 1936, the declaration of war is delivered to the Uruguayan embassy. The attack is scheduled to begin at dawn that very same day.


I didn’t really show any of it but I set all my ground units to attack simultaneously just as the sun rises.


The young and talented Rear Admiral Thanas is seen here, having recently received command of the entire Brazilian navy. His objective is to shell the city of Montevideo nonstop for a month or until hostilities cease, in support of the ground operations there. Hopefully for both sides the war will be swift.


The attack begins at 1000 hours. That red bar at the top is supposed to represent the balance of power in a given battle. Except that the fight is so heavily skewed in my favor the defender’s green bar barely registers. By clicking on it, I can get additional details about what’s going—

I have no idea what the fuck.


The battle lasts mere hours, with the last pockets of resistance cleared up 7 hours after the initial combat. By March 1, Brazilian army units have a strong presence throughout Uruguay and it is officially annexed into the nation of Brazil.


In the future I’ll focus more on the gameplay, but I felt it necessary to explain a bit about how the game since it’s possible some of you have never played it.
For reference purposes, I’m going to post the current victory point statuses for the three main alliances. This obviously won’t change much until the actual war breaks out.



Any questions or feedback are certainly welcomed. As this is the first LP I’ve done I know it’s very rough around the edges so please offer some constructive criticism.

Edit: Also, while at the moment I'm pretty much trying to get Brazil up and running quickly, later I will start taking input on what sort of government we should have, which alliance we should join up with, etc.

I'm puzzled that the game setup listed Vargas as a left-wing radical, when in reality he was quite right wing. Other than that, the representation of the country for a game scenario looks quite good.

Yeah. For a game that does 150 different playable sides, Hearts of Iron does a reasonable job being historical.

How about an invasion of Paraguay? It seems like the next logical step.

I'm going to see if I can get Armageddon and Doomsday from my HoI Anthology to work with my copy of HoI2 (that I purchased much earlier). I don't know what they did to HoI2 they slapped onto the Anthology because they game slows to a halt after a couple of minutes. I've brought it up at their forums but got no help whatsoever. So I am stuck (though it isn't bad) with Victoria and EU3 (As Portugal, I've acquired over 400 provinces).

PeZook wrote:

Thanas wrote:USSR, Germany, Japan etc. have all been done to death.

With Poland you get easily sandwiched between Germany, Hungary and the USSR. NOT fun. Besides it would be a tad too unrealistic to have Poland prevail in that struggle.


So my vote goes to Brazil.

Feh, Poland is quite easy, to be honest.

The challenge lays in eventually invading the USSR and winning, not in defeating Germany

You have never played with Poland against a human-controlled germany, have you? Trust me, you are pretty much screwed against a human-controlled germany. That's what happened to me.


EDIT:

Yay, I got the navy. Thank you.

And now I am going to shoot myself in the foot....and suggest you focus on ic-upgrades and infantry until you get to around 45-50 IC. If well played, the brazillian navy can take care of the other SA navies on its own.

Thanas wrote:Feh, Poland is quite easy, to be honest.

The challenge lays in eventually invading the USSR and winning, not in defeating Germany

You have never played with Poland against a human-controlled germany, have you? Trust me, you are pretty much screwed against a human-controlled germany. That's what happened to me. [/quote]

It'd actually be pretty cool if I could do this LP with another player, but there's two main problems. First off is that I've never gotten the multiplayer aspect to work, and second is that it'd be difficult to make steady progress if we have a different schedule.

EDIT:

Yay, I got the navy. Thank you.

And now I am going to shoot myself in the foot....and suggest you focus on ic-upgrades and infantry until you get to around 45-50 IC. If well played, the brazillian navy can take care of the other SA navies on its own.

You're welcome.

Honestly I hardly ever even use navies except for when a Great Nation is involved, since they're the only ones that can afford a good one in the first place. I'm gonna have to get started on one, though, since my plan is to eventually invade the United States.

Anyway, should have an update for you guys in a couple hours.

Drop all that newly acquired IC into Consumer goods in order to pacify the peons and get them happy again. Brazil has lots of pretty ladies, let's give them swimwear to make them and the men happy.

Thanas wrote:You have never played with Poland against a human-controlled germany, have you? Trust me, you are pretty much screwed against a human-controlled germany. That's what happened to me.

Yes, against a human-controlled Germany you are completely screwed.

But you're not doing this in multiplayer, now are ya?

Well, this is a moot point now that the fools chose Brazil.

What is the eventual goal, though? Destruction of the US? If yes, then you won't need a navy. Just smash north through Mexico

So I guess you're going to err... liberate Paraguay next?

PeZook wrote: What is the eventual goal, though? Destruction of the US? If yes, then you won't need a navy. Just smash north through Mexico

Yeah. The US Navy's carrier stacks of doom can be avoided if you steamroller all the less important rubbish countries.

Well well well. It’s a day late and a dollar short, but here’s part 2.

When I ended the last update, Uruguay had recently been annexed and there was a large number of citizens angry with my unprovoked aggression against said country.

They have been ruthlessly oppressed.


Here’s our current IC, and the factors affecting it at the moment. Due to the fact that our head of state is an idiot, we suffer a large penalty, in addition to that caused by partisans.


We tried sending a spy to Argentina, but they found him out and were somewhat pissed at us for even trying. Clearly they just don’t understand how politics work!


Because I’m an idiot, I initially assigned a team to research a technology that had a historical date of a later year. So I change it to a tech that will increase my IC.


Here we see a vague representation of our brave men out protecting innocent Uruguayan citizens from terrorist activities. Captured terrorist intel indicates that they may be receiving training and equipment from Paraguayan secret police. The President is very disturbed by this, and orders troops to close the border between Paraguay and Brazil as a preventative measure.

While this minor crisis has been developing, the world at large grows tense. Italy conquers the African nature of Ethiopia, drawing much condemnation for its use of nerve agents.


An extremely right-wing faction of the Spanish military attempts to stage a coup of their rightful government. Germany and Italy send aid to the right-wind, Nationalist faction, while the Soviet Union does the same for the Republicans. President Vargas sends his good wishes to the Republicans.


While the border guards stationed at the Paraguay-Brazil border are busy celebrating New Year’s Eve, Paraguayan military units sneak across the border in the middle of the night and make a cowardly assault on a school just as the students are leaving for home. After destroying the school and killing thousands of children, they retreat into their own country.

In a stirring radio address, Vargas vows that this act of war shall not go unanswered. Indeed, Brazilian troops strike back into Paraguay as he speaks.



Much like the war with Uruguay the year before, it is swift and results in few casualties and little collateral damage. The government is stunned, however, when the United States ambassador, in an act of betrayal, informs the foreign ministry that the USA has withdrawn from the non-aggression pact the two nations signed only months ago. While Brazil is too weak to answer this grievous insult, it is an act that will be remembered for years to come.

As of January 23rd, 1937, the map of South America is represented thusly:

Losonti Tokash wrote:
You're welcome.

Honestly I hardly ever even use navies except for when a Great Nation is involved, since they're the only ones that can afford a good one in the first place. I'm gonna have to get started on one, though, since my plan is to eventually invade the United States.

Well, if you do, I'd suggest to definitely improve the fire control on the BBs, since it is my experience that if you build those in SAGs, carriers go BOOM.

48 km range FTW.

Oh, and since you are a medium nation at best, you have to use cruizerg tactics against the US if you want to win.

Even with all of the I.C. in Latin America, wouldn't Brazil still have much less industry than America? In my opinion, it would be best to wait until American enters the war, at which point Brazil should try to join the Axis.

Mongoose wrote:Even with all of the I.C. in Latin America, wouldn't Brazil still have much less industry than America? In my opinion, it would be best to wait until American enters the war, at which point Brazil should try to join the Axis.

At which point America's IC will pretty much double. There's obviously no easy way to do this.

Besides, if IC was all that mattered, there wouldn't be AARs where someone conquers the world with Switzerland or Tibet.

You should have gone with Libya, Godsdammit!

I propose we invade the northern countries next, up to and including Venezuela. Then we see where we stand (probably on the heaps of bones of our former neighbours).

Venezuela is a good target because of its oil. However, I strongly suggest you make it a puppet instead of outright annexing it. That way you'll get 100% of its oil rather than 20%. Having oil is very valuable even if you don't have much in the way of mechanized, aerial, or naval forces. You can always sell it to the AI for goodies.

I pretty much always advocate puppetry. Not only do you get far more resources from your faithful minions than trying to squeeze them as oppressed subjects, they'll get their full manpower, meaning they'll build loads of chaff for you to secure invaded provinces with, hold defensive lines as you advance, and help with encirclements.

That's one of the reasons Japan can be a very easy game, if you push for total invasion of China and make a puppet regime you get a true beast of a minion that'll spam you enough troops to dominate most of asia.

Yeah, but Argentina and Venezuela are probably the only ones worth puppeting. The rest don't have enough resources or IC to be worth anything on their own.

That bright orange to our North is unsightly, marring our continent with a more brilliant colour than our own, and distracts from the beautiful colours of the future Peoples' Republic of Brazil of the United States of South America.

What was your first slider move?

Edit - and if you want help getting multiplayer to work, I can help.

So far my 2 slider moves have been toward interventionism.

Losonti Tokash wrote:

Mongoose wrote:Even with all of the I.C. in Latin America, wouldn't Brazil still have much less industry than America? In my opinion, it would be best to wait until American enters the war, at which point Brazil should try to join the Axis.

At which point America's IC will pretty much double. There's obviously no easy way to do this.

Besides, if IC was all that mattered, there wouldn't be AARs where someone conquers the world with Switzerland or Tibet.

Does America's I.C. double when it enters World War II, or just when it enters any war? I've never played as America, though I have seen their I.C. go up like crazy during a short period of time. If they're going to get a huge boast going into any war, it seems to me like it would be best to hit them while a lot of their army and navy is busy over seas. If they only get that bonus during World War II, then I could see why we might want to deal with them earlier.