Soviet Union Black ICE Help

[StalledData]

Hi, so a friend of mine and I decided to play the Soviet Union together in Black ICE for the first time. We've both played the Soviets in singleplayer but in previous versions of the game where unique units automatically spawned in. Both of us have never gone past 1943 out of frustration but are determined to try to finish a full game. Since the beggining of the game we've been building up industry and infantry units only, by the time the germans invade we plan to have about 125 non-reserve infantry divisions along with another 55 reserve infantry units from the beginning of the game. When all of them are complete we should have an estimated 350-400 days of time were we can still be making units before the war begins, what should we focus on building? I've begun to build up some forts & pill boxes in lenningrad and stalingrad from the little amounts of ic we have left along with bits of infrastructure along the volga river. We have in total 500 available IC in march of 1939 but about 150 has to be used at all times for consumer and supplies while upgrades can wait occasionally. Another issue we face is we have around 36% officers from all the officer purge events, its a pain in the ass to get it back up again.

Any tips would be appreciated, especially for what to build and tactics we could use to beat the germans. At this point we've only been producing infantry that doesn't require any fuel but is still about 25% better than the original standard soviet infantry and a few planes here and there for military.

[JimmyJoysword]

I'm not sure there's much advice to give that would be game-changing, other than make sure your AT scores are up to snuff on every unit since German tank tech starts high and tends to stay high the whole way through. AA can be a decent source of this since AT-specific tech seems to lag behind. Trying to out-tank them would require a full investment and might reduce your unit count some just to merely become 'par' with them, so the mostly infantry idea might not be too bad... though you're obviously going to have trouble true-killing units through encirclement as a result. Full infantry is a very defensive-oriented sort of army, good for survival, but less so on the attack.

You'll probably also struggle to keep up with them in air tech, and attempting it is an even more expensive prospect than with tanks, but as long as you're extremely careful where you're engaging (away from enemy airfields), you can potentially get some use out of basic CAS and tacticals in supporting ground combat without having anything resembling air superiority. Come to think of it, I can't remember if you can demolish your own airfields. That would be a spunky thing to do before war breaks out, to deny them places to station their planes after they invade. Of course that cuts both ways if you start pushing back, heh.

Forts I think are best used sort of 'all or none', if you can spare enough time and IC to get a lot of them out across your entire chosen front/backup front (or at least key locations needing defense along a good-terrain line) and intend to hold those locations, do it, but otherwise you might want to use all that IC on more units or more industry. They're only really cost-effective if they weather a lot of attacks but aren't so strong that the AI refuses to attack them (like the maginot line!). You might need to build a lot of industry if you want to outpace the Germans, since they can have quite a lot at their disposal, and I am not sure at what point you'd start having resource troubles keeping things running, if at all.

You should have more than enough manpower to crank out units nonstop, but do priotitize getting/keeping officers at 100% as soon as possible. Tweak your tech queue to make leadership room if need be; there's not much else to be done about it. On the bright side, if you're focusing purely infantry tech you'll probably eventually hit severe ahead-of-time penalties, so you should have some wiggle room. Keep an eye on your recruitment and training policies too.

Like in history, you're probably gonna get rolled for a while because you won't be fully prepared and will only stabilize as you build and tech up during the war itself, with all the production benefits being at war brings. Don't expect to beat them out of the gates and try not to lose any units to encirclement/overrunning. This is, of course, assuming you're trying to hold the border at all, haha.

However... my experience with current BlackICE is that, at base settings, it is heavily slanted in favor of Germany. Compared to everyone, they have a nearly insurmountable lead in tech, troop quality, resources, and even have enough manpower to endlessly wage their wars. Going head to head against them will be an uphill battle no matter what you do, and you can't rely on bleeding them out like a Soviet/Allied player normally could. You simply have to be very good at the nitty-gritty of combat, and unafraid to tap into some cheesy tactics if need be. I'm not at that point myself, so I can't give any advice there. HoI3 combat, including in BlackICE, tends to require copious amounts of encirclements to bring down enemy unit counts and stop even-sided wars from becoming very slow and drawn-out.

Also, be careful that they're not cheating. Every time I've played a game they had two mutually-exclusive techs (auftragstaktik and befehlstaktik I believe it was) researching at the same time, and that bugged it out and let them research one of them far past the limit -- which ended up making their units virtually indestructable. I couldn't find any info about that anywhere online so it might have just been unique to my games, but it's something to be aware of if the German units seem to be abnormally powerful.

That's about all I've got. I hope some of it is helpful in some way. I've had lots of discarded games because of how ludicrously powerful Germany seems to be. I'm not really convinced they're beatable in normal play, but I'm hardly an expert on the matter.

[StalledData]

Originally posted by McJesus:

I'm not sure there's much advice to give that would be game-changing, other than make sure your AT scores are up to snuff on every unit since German tank tech starts high and tends to stay high the whole way through. AA can be a decent source of this since AT-specific tech seems to lag behind. Trying to out-tank them would require a full investment and might reduce your unit count some just to merely become 'par' with them, so the mostly infantry idea might not be too bad... though you're obviously going to have trouble true-killing units through encirclement as a result. Full infantry is a very defensive-oriented sort of army, good for survival, but less so on the attack.

You'll probably also struggle to keep up with them in air tech, and attempting it is an even more expensive prospect than with tanks, but as long as you're extremely careful where you're engaging (away from enemy airfields), you can potentially get some use out of basic CAS and tacticals in supporting ground combat without having anything resembling air superiority. Come to think of it, I can't remember if you can demolish your own airfields. That would be a spunky thing to do before war breaks out, to deny them places to station their planes after they invade. Of course that cuts both ways if you start pushing back, heh.

Forts I think are best used sort of 'all or none', if you can spare enough time and IC to get a lot of them out across your entire chosen front/backup front (or at least key locations needing defense along a good-terrain line) and intend to hold those locations, do it, but otherwise you might want to use all that IC on more units or more industry. They're only really cost-effective if they weather a lot of attacks but aren't so strong that the AI refuses to attack them (like the maginot line!). You might need to build a lot of industry if you want to outpace the Germans, since they can have quite a lot at their disposal, and I am not sure at what point you'd start having resource troubles keeping things running, if at all.

You should have more than enough manpower to crank out units nonstop, but do priotitize getting/keeping officers at 100% as soon as possible. Tweak your tech queue to make leadership room if need be; there's not much else to be done about it. On the bright side, if you're focusing purely infantry tech you'll probably eventually hit severe ahead-of-time penalties, so you should have some wiggle room. Keep an eye on your recruitment and training policies too.

Like in history, you're probably gonna get rolled for a while because you won't be fully prepared and will only stabilize as you build and tech up during the war itself, with all the production benefits being at war brings. Don't expect to beat them out of the gates and try not to lose any units to encirclement/overrunning. This is, of course, assuming you're trying to hold the border at all, haha.

However... my experience with current BlackICE is that, at base settings, it is heavily slanted in favor of Germany. Compared to everyone, they have a nearly insurmountable lead in tech, troop quality, resources, and even have enough manpower to endlessly wage their wars. Going head to head against them will be an uphill battle no matter what you do, and you can't rely on bleeding them out like a Soviet/Allied player normally could. You simply have to be very good at the nitty-gritty of combat, and unafraid to tap into some cheesy tactics if need be. I'm not at that point myself, so I can't give any advice there. HoI3 combat, including in BlackICE, tends to require copious amounts of encirclements to bring down enemy unit counts and stop even-sided wars from becoming very slow and drawn-out.

Also, be careful that they're not cheating. Every time I've played a game they had two mutually-exclusive techs (auftragstaktik and befehlstaktik I believe it was) researching at the same time, and that bugged it out and let them research one of them far past the limit -- which ended up making their units virtually indestructable. I couldn't find any info about that anywhere online so it might have just been unique to my games, but it's something to be aware of if the German units seem to be abnormally powerful.

That's about all I've got. I hope some of it is helpful in some way. I've had lots of discarded games because of how ludicrously powerful Germany seems to be. I'm not really convinced they're beatable in normal play, but I'm hardly an expert on the matter.

Thank you for the advice, I've seen many timelapses and examples of players beating the germans in Black ICE but I'm not sure if they cheat or are just insanely good at the game. Also I don't understand if this is a newer feature in Black ICE but its 1941 and the war just begun, because of officer purges we only have 40% officers. The officer purge events in total have killed over 200000 officers from our army, and we're at a point where we have over 25 leadership strictly on recruiting officers

[Walta Gaming]

Spaming inf divisions can really drain officers out so you may want to build armour divisions or aircraft later on so you can more leadership availible. Inf divisions also take a lot of officers to continue to run so save the tanks for attacks.