puppet for factories and resources?

[00yiggdrasill00]

ive always been of the opinion you puppet for manpower and take for factories and resources...but in my recent netherlands game i was getting heaps of factories from my colonies and i got the resources so cheap. is it just better to puppet nowadays?

[|H|H| Fr3ddi3]

Annex most, Puppet something unimportant and then Annex later is often the best of both worlds.

The advantages of puppets is obviously the manpower gain.
But you can also keep them neutral in wars not started on them, allowing you to not worry about them being invaded / allow them to act as a buffer state OR as a constant threat that needs to guarded by your enemy thus tying down their forces somewhere not important (Ethiopia in Africa prime example for the Allies here). You can also get entire navies via Puppet then Annex later.

If they have a resource you desperately need, Providing you have a land trade route with the Puppet, and you are willing to offset their autonemy gain every so often, then sure puppeting might very well be the way to go.

However, there are downsides you need to consider.

Obviously you don't get all their factories, dockyards and you get none of their resources for free.

But you also cannot stop them from trading their resources to your enemies if they are not land locked or have a neutral state/s bordering them which have a naval trade route. (think Hungarian Aluminium passing through neutral Yugoslavia into the hands of the Allies for example).

And if you only have a trade with your puppet via a sea ... they can be raided, so effectively in fact that you might not see any of that resource / you just lose convoys. (Think Germany at war with the UK trading for rubber with the DEI. The RN is gonna sink everything you trade for, while the UK is able to trade freely for that rubber).

So yeah, think of those downsides first, if they don't apply and you don't care for the factories, then the extra divisions / manpower you get later, or the buffer state you can set up, or navy you can get, is probably more worth your time. But it's a country by country basis.

[00yiggdrasill00]

well this is what brought is up in the first place, i think i was getting more factories from my puppet then if i took it. when i take it i without a core i only get half the factory slots to my understanding, but by building military factories in a well controlled puppet i seemed to be able to use their core for the extra build slots and get overall more factories because a puppet gives factories to the master. am i really missing something? im also not sure on the resources, i looked at it as 1 factory was getting me so much and i have played a multiplayer game where that was taking import away from my friend who was also trading with them, so it seemed a net increase when my own exports should i control it were taken into account.

thoughts?

[Ryan]

I think you are on to something here and more testing is needed. I once saw someone as the UK release all their territories as Puppets at the start of the game. All those Puppets built a bunch of factories via the Generic Focus Tree. Those factories were used by the UK because of their Puppet status which ended up being a very large number.

[00yiggdrasill00]

yeah i played as the netherlands and i had so many factories. personally i would still rip the resources out even with the loss because then you get civi factories by trade and can close the economy if it really needs it while making it harder for the puppet to break free.

[|H|H| Fr3ddi3]

There possibly is something in this, but it's gonna need a lot of trial and error i feel.

I think it's gonna depend on how much you leave a puppet with / give them in the first place, you gotta leave them enough to build something with in a timely manner and hope it's something you want and that it's not an airbase or a radar ect, or hope they take the focuses which give them free factories.

Sadly neither of which you have any control over, I have left some puppet alone and realised they've never taken mil factory 2 or 3 for some reason. And then there's the construction tech which they might not go for either. So they can be building things 50% slower than you just with missing tech alone

At that point you have to figure out if you could have built more factories yourself with that lost industry ... remembering again that you will have the construction tech, the best trade / ecconemy laws and can have unique bonuses applied to your country which boost your construction higher still.

It's all well and good a puppet having double the building slots, but it's not worth much if they can't build quickly enough / require you to build for them.

But I agree, there may be something in this.