How to use Lend Lease effectively?

[Ryan]

Seems like it is easy to send your Ally the wrong supplies. I can see their strength capped at 80%. How do I know if they need artillery, infantry equipment, medical or jeeps?

If I send them 500 tanks, will they field those our will that just get wasted? What if I send them 5000 artillery?

Seems like this very important game mechanic is all guesswork and not very useful.

[Ryan]

No one knows?

[4 Sale 2]

Nope.

[Sohei]

You can see from the diplomacy screen how many planes and convoys they have. If they lack an air force giving them some of your old planes will be far better than nothing. If you hover over their armies in the field and see they all have low supplies then they could probably use some basic stuff like support equipment, old weapons, and trucks. Giving tanks is often not worth it as the AI may or may not bother to actually use them. Still, if you have a ton of light tanks you are not using you can try giving 500 or so to each ally that could use them and one of them might actually make use of them.

[dr0r]

You can send some volunteers and snoop around, tried that?

[Ryan]

How would one snoop around with volunteers? Thanks for the replies.

[jeger]

Originally posted by Ryan:

Seems like it is easy to send your Ally the wrong supplies. I can see their strength capped at 80%. How do I know if they need artillery, infantry equipment, medical or jeeps?

If I send them 500 tanks, will they field those our will that just get wasted? What if I send them 5000 artillery?

Seems like this very important game mechanic is all guesswork and not very useful.

They'll field it. Honestly though, I only really use it if I want to annex a puppet.

One thing I've seen with HOI IV (I can't necessarily speak for other Paradox games because I never really bothered to learn to play any of the others) is that mechanics like sending expeditionary forces and sending a lend lease are much more useful when it's a player sending it to a player.
I played a game as the Soviet union and what I needed were trucks and arms to get a military up (I delete a lot of starting divisions for the equipment because early Soviet union is garbage, but not aids like early US), and the US was able to send me them. In another game as the Soviets my puppets would send me garbage like 35 pieces of artillery as if I didn't have enough already and as if it would help in any significant way.

[DMKI]

Old thread, but still.

If you plant spy, you can see what they have in their stockpiles. Don't send them items they don't have positions for in their stockpiles. I.e. if you don't see that they have "Tanks: 0", don't send them tanks. It just means they have no templates to use them.

They may benefit from your convoys and transport planes. Send them infantry weapons only if it falls below 3-5K, otherwise there is a risk that enemy will capture that. Fuel and convoys are on Civilian tab in intel ledger. Transport planes and equipment - in army.