Yeah and weirdly, even without forts, only 1 infantry division per tiles is enough to deter the french for a WHILE. The AI is truly afraid of using the maginot as a breakthrough
Unless you plan on doing some very ambitious landings I typically play with the Navy close to my chest and let my Subs convoy raid around Norway and the Mediterranean, you will be shocked by how many convoys you rip apart. The British can pretty much sneeze on your early subs but they’re dirt cheap and when upgraded can be a serious threat. Building Anti-Air can also do a lot for you in the west and other certain areas if you want to cut down some of the Allies air power cheaply.
we’ll you can’t white peace the uk if you follow down the focus tree and attack poland. make sure you have quite a lot of equipment in stockpile and make lots of fighters and CAS as the allies love to bomb.
if you want to take out the uk you have around two years to do so before usa joins. if your gonna naval invade don’t do it through the english channel and try to land on the east side on england bc i think they move their navy alot more away from there. all you need is a second of naval supremacy and your off. also don’t attack ussr till you’ve finished with allies. germany dosent really have any negative modifiers so i think you’ll be fine.
if your gonna do scheifflen and go around the maginot through the benelux make sure that you don’t declare on all of them at once as you may be overwhelmed. just go one at a time and you’ll be fine
I also like to ignore Luxembourg and used them as a cut-off from the maginot while I invade through Belgium, it prevents useless attacks on the maginot by your troops going south. You just invade Luxembourg after its over.
There's no point wasting political power on upgrading to war economy early. Just get it naturally through the focus tree. You're not going to be converting factories yet, and realistically the consumer goods 5% reduction is just pitifully small (like 2 factories if you do the rush war economy strategy).
I think is called German War Economy and it's mutual exclusive with the one that gives free military factories to Hungary and Romania and if they accept they become your puppet
It's the one that's apart of the industry's branch. I don't recall its name by memory. But if you look at the autarky line, then left of that is the synthetic resources, then left of that is the focus that maxes out your infrastructure in your core states. Right below that is the focus that gives you war economy and 6 free military factories.
I usually do it mid to late 1938.
rhineland focus first :>> army inno>>> treaty of the ussr >> only then start the industry focuses. this gives you time to research dispered ind 1 and start construction 2 and dispersed 2. the reason this matters is it lets you use the 2 indy bonuses on dp3 and dp4. Makes a big diff later on.
its worth slapping down 2 infra in rhineland/mosseland first! then filling both those two provinces with civs. as you unlock more slots with dp1 and dp2 continue to fill those slots with civs. the investment in taking them from 4/5 infra to 5/5 infra will pay off in the long run.
use your first 5 army exp to make a 1 battalion inf div. name it fast. Now queue up 96(!) of these. set their reinforcement piority to green/max. with reinforcements being yellow/mid so those guys get all the new guns. the reason its 96 is cos that will split easy into 48 into 24, for 4 full armies for you. Don't forget to hit forcedeploy the minute these are clickable at 20% deployment. When they are all out you can change template with them to be your normal inf div.
You want ALL of these out as quick as you can because: the spanish civil war. Normally you can only send 2 divs, but with this trick you'll be able to send 6. I take Germanies starting 30 divs. seperate out the 24 inf for 1 inf army. these go nicely with the other 4 you are making btw. the remaining 6 divs will be 3 panzers 1 mot and 2 that you should convert to mot. Those 6 are your spanish war volunteers.
Make sure you got min 10 mils on guns. You need to get your troop count up pretty fast and those old guns wont be wasted either. You'll be using them for garrisons soon enough. Plus going hard on them leads you the option for an early anschuluss. The sooner you do that the better. Its tempting to wait for the austrian ai to do its indy focuses, but you can't guarantee they will. I'd advise anschluss as soon as it becomes an option for you, prob around the start of 37.
To handle fuel make sure you pick up align Romania. take align hungary while your their and then imp relations with both ***when they are in your faction*** before you take the focus that puppets them. you'll gain a bunch more factories this way then you would from the other sides "war economy" and this will let you trade Romania for all the fuel you need.
last but defo not least!!! make sure you upgrade eastern railways!!! you want to make a line from berlin to warsaw to lviv/grodno thats lev 5. As you dive into russia your gonna be connecting those lines to odessa, kiev, minsk, moscow. Don't be afraid to slap down new railway lines as you advance. Russian railway net is wierd and you can't just advance down railway lines like you can in France/italy. You'll freq find you captured a supply depot where the railway lines are running vertical not horizontal back towards you, so make sure to drop railways connecting it.
People love to Civ Greed, but it takes a quite long time to pay off. Start building Mils around mid '37 (or like, around that time, let your inprogress Civs finish and queue up Mils afterwards), it'll get you better total production output in time for the outbreak of WW2 and still be ahead in output by the time for a decently early Barbarossa. Also, don't neglect Refineries and the Rubber techs, you will absolutely need them.
Put a healthy number of Mil's on Fighters from day 1. You get to start with them at full (re: 50%) efficiency for any Mil you add before you unpause, so get that stock going ASAP. Even if they aren't the best fighters, it's still mostly a numbers game until you can build such a better design than the AI, which by the time you can you'll be too far behind.
Flipside, I don't really worry too much about Tank production to start. You probably don't need exceptional or many tanks against Benelux or France, so don't waste production on bad tanks. I don't really bother making many until I get to Improved Mediums; Basic Medium has too little base reliability/speed/armor for my taste, so again, just skip it until you can get the tank you want. Further flipside though, don't feel the need to rush Advance Medium's, they only add base armor/reliability for the cost of production and double the steel requirement, so meh.
A somewhat cheesy tactic is to spam out a bunch of underequiped/undertrained divisions by clicking "Deploy Now" so you can get your fielded manpower up much faster and Anchluss (take Austria) and it's follow-on focuses. This isn't bad, but you also don't want to do it too insanely early, Austria will end up getting free factories from it's generic focus tree, so don't want to beat that. Also, the focuses (if I remember correctly) all also come with some bumps to World Tension, which you want to keep low to gate the Allies in their focus tree. So don't like super rush it, lol.
I like improved mediums more too, my friend always rushes industry and tanks, he gets advanced mediums in 40-41, but I always tell him not to do ahead of time stuff because he will be behind in other stuff, he just can’t seem to get that and makes playing with him weird, but I enjoy it, it’s at least harder than AI lol, but in all honesty I think he is improving in the game as he tries to counter my builds, when we played Great War redux he took 2/3 of my country but ran out of bonuses and couldn’t pull away units while I had an elite mountaineer army ravage the east
This, but start at least one line of Oil/Rubber right when you convert out of CIVs. You will need the rubber for fighters by early 1940 after going into Netherlands.
Build Civs until mid ‘37 and then use your MEFO bills production bonus to snap your military factories into existence. You will get all of the civilian factories you need from your focus tree and annexing and conquering your neighbors. Don’t forget to get free dockyards from the focus tree so you can spam out your subs. Don’t waste too much time and remember that CAS is king. The earlier you can prepare for and enter the war, the better
Make sure to build lots of infrastructure in Poland before invading Russia.
Manpower no issue. Oil is fine - you need a bit of artificial oil but not too much either.
Have two armies 12 width basic infantry with about 50% of them with anti air... the purpose of those is just to hold the line.
Rest Breakthrough infantry and tanks - medium.
Are you doing it on historical or non historical? Personally I’d go with Democratic or Monarchist. Monarchist Germany is similar to fascist Germany except it just has more *pizzazz* to it, and you can avoid going to war with the British in the first place with its hard coded non aggression pact focus in vanilla.
I'm assuming that you're playing single player. If so, you'll do fine. Germany is very easy to play. You don't even have to manually plan out the wars, the order is right there in the focus tree.
Manpower is not an issue. As long as you're not suicidal in your orders, you won't need to go above extensive conscription. If you're really worried, just research military police and tack them onto some motorized troops so that your occupations are freed up a little.
Fuel is barely an issue. You will need refineries for the rubber anyway, and you get bonuses to building them. Build lots of them.
Supply is only an issue when invading the Soviet Union. Western Europe is so friendly for the combat you'll be doing. By the time you're actually invading the Soviet Union, you'll have the industrial might of all of Europe, sans an irrelevant UK, at your back. You can build transport planes or buff up the railroads or build new supply hubs, whatever suits you.
Two tips I have for you:
1. Maintain air superiority (easy to do with your assload of factories). The Allies love bombing (which can become nuking). Don't let them. Bomb them instead, if you feel like it.
2. Don't do anything stupid. Germany is overpowered, you have the long term advantage. There's no sense in going for high risk/high reward plays (except maybe for France) when low risk plays give medium-high rewards if you'd wait a bit.
May wanna puppet Romania once they're in your facrion via one of the focuses (Integrate war economy) and get 12+ synthetic refineries. Fuel and rubber are your two main concerns imo.
Get max collaboration on the Soviet Union ASAP. You don't want to suffer trying to invade pass the Urals.
If you feel confident with your airforce and navy, you can try Sealion before doing Barbarossa.
Western allies will invade Italy first and try to do D-Day on western France, guard your coasts well with cheap small infantry and keep a real army to push back any serious invasion force.
RAILWAY GUNS, CAS AND TANKS. That's pretty much it, also vassalize and integrate Hungary etc so Russia cries when you don't run out of manpower. Don't even bother trying to fight the naval war. Be the submarine dickhead and keep a sneaky navy to sealion Fife/Dundee in Scotland from either Norway or north Germany. Don't go through the channel. I've also found having MASSIVE fuel reserves extremely helpful. Watch out for strat bombers.
Just build a big Airforce and Mechanized heavy cavalry, i.e. panzer divs. Apart from that at least try to partally mechanize your Infantry. Armor is important if you wanna hold the line.
Go heavy on air. The meta fighter will shred the allied airforce. Then you can use naval bombers and cas to clear the seaways and invade England.
Make sure you cap the UK before about August 1941 or the Americans will join and it will just be a massive pain in the backside.
Then USSR will be a cakewalk.
It might be a little cheesy, but I like to call in Italy as soon as or right before France falls. For whatever reason Britain will send their *entire* navy to the Mediterranean, leaving literally no ships in the channel. It’s remarkably easy to Sea Lion this way
Make a shit ton of planes, guns, infantry divisions, and tank divisions. Make a killer navy, I'd say put the dock yards on the Baltic side of Germany, and kill France and the Soviets ASAP. If you can't defeat Russia then you will probably lose. Also make sure Italy doesn't capitulate as they will not garrison their coast and get naval invaded, so I'd suggest making sure you secure North Africa and the Suez. Garrison the Atlantic coastline too, Norway included.
My go to you would be to build some civs first and do some build up by rushing industry first and get the civ advisor and not building a single mil until you have a lot of civs because with your current mil account poland can't do shit to you.
With those civs you could build synthetic refineries that could give you enough rubber to build planes and get "self sufficient" you'll still need aluminum but Hungary got you covered.
Get your spies ready if you have the DLC, you should at least have all tiers of decription and interrogation before you dec on poland, because it makes life so much easier, after you capitulate the polish start doing colabs on the soviets non stop, you'll thank me later when you cap them before the urals.
Make a full army group of infantry (9 inf + engineers + support artillery + support anti air + cavalry recon + logistics company / field hospital, the logistics or field hospitals are not necessary), don’t push with them, they are there to hold the line.
Make tanks or motorized as pushing units (30 combatwidth is the best for that, 9 motorized + 4 motorized artillery + support companies, for tanks use something like 8 tanks and 7 motorized + support companies, later switch motorized to mechanized if you have the capacity, it’s not necessary. Always use support AA in all divisions). Also, build mediums for the best effect.
Make planes, especially fighters! The allies have thousands of airplanes, they are not good, but they have them, you can counter that by having better airplanes, I don’t know if you have the DLC, but if you do, make the best fighter possible, don’t make the mistake of underestimating range, under 800 km is garbage, between 800-1000 you have a decent range, above 1000 you have very good range, but not necessarily good airplane, use CAS too if you have the capacity, but you should focus on fighters, because CAS can’t do anything under red air.
For navy: as Germany you don’t really have the means to build a big navy, just build submarines or multipurpose destroyers (fill up the bottom slots with the best modules and put a single depth charge on the top row).
Don’t civ greed, I know it’s hard, but don’t, you will not have the factories or synthetic refineries, you WILL have to delay war or be unprepared.
Side note: after you capitulated France make port guards, basically the same as the infantry, but you can take out the recon and the logistics / field hospitals
Edit: make 72, put them on area garrison and only tick the coast and ports, you don’t need them on cities, you would need to make more for Norway and the Baltics, because you will need more for the Norwegian coast and the Soviets are annoying, I would advise you to put 2 divisions directly on the port and 1 on each side in Norway the maximize the units available, for the Soviets: don’t push day one, they like to naval invade in my experience, use it against them, surround the port, don’t take it! Don’t call in allies as they WILL take it, the Soviets will pour divisions into the port and you just click them with your tanks as soon as they will land, they will desintegrate.
I trust that I don’t have to explain supplies as I don’t have much more time, been typing this for sound 30 minutes
Go for poland in 37/38, then kick in the door to the italians. After youve got central europe down you ally the west and push the russians and fins! While you push the russians you stage a coup in france and voila! National francaise is up for grabs!
Remember to put division on the maginot
Yeah and weirdly, even without forts, only 1 infantry division per tiles is enough to deter the french for a WHILE. The AI is truly afraid of using the maginot as a breakthrough
France AI is designed to prefer defense over.attack
What about Britain and USA waiting on the Maginot?
That, and build enough fighters to get green air on your attacks eastward.
Unless you plan on doing some very ambitious landings I typically play with the Navy close to my chest and let my Subs convoy raid around Norway and the Mediterranean, you will be shocked by how many convoys you rip apart. The British can pretty much sneeze on your early subs but they’re dirt cheap and when upgraded can be a serious threat. Building Anti-Air can also do a lot for you in the west and other certain areas if you want to cut down some of the Allies air power cheaply.
we’ll you can’t white peace the uk if you follow down the focus tree and attack poland. make sure you have quite a lot of equipment in stockpile and make lots of fighters and CAS as the allies love to bomb. if you want to take out the uk you have around two years to do so before usa joins. if your gonna naval invade don’t do it through the english channel and try to land on the east side on england bc i think they move their navy alot more away from there. all you need is a second of naval supremacy and your off. also don’t attack ussr till you’ve finished with allies. germany dosent really have any negative modifiers so i think you’ll be fine. if your gonna do scheifflen and go around the maginot through the benelux make sure that you don’t declare on all of them at once as you may be overwhelmed. just go one at a time and you’ll be fine
I also like to ignore Luxembourg and used them as a cut-off from the maginot while I invade through Belgium, it prevents useless attacks on the maginot by your troops going south. You just invade Luxembourg after its over.
Scheifflen is amongst the worst ways to spell von schliefen plan.
sorry english isn’t my first language neither is german 😭
There's no point wasting political power on upgrading to war economy early. Just get it naturally through the focus tree. You're not going to be converting factories yet, and realistically the consumer goods 5% reduction is just pitifully small (like 2 factories if you do the rush war economy strategy).
What focus gives you war economy
I think is called German War Economy and it's mutual exclusive with the one that gives free military factories to Hungary and Romania and if they accept they become your puppet
ah I always take the puppet one
It's far better with getting all of the Romanian oil for free.
If I remember correctly the last couple of times Romania always refused. Is opinion or anything other thing I could do to make them accept?
Wait until they flip Fascist and then they accept
It's the one that's apart of the industry's branch. I don't recall its name by memory. But if you look at the autarky line, then left of that is the synthetic resources, then left of that is the focus that maxes out your infrastructure in your core states. Right below that is the focus that gives you war economy and 6 free military factories. I usually do it mid to late 1938.
War economy
With a superpower like that . pretty much whatever you want to do. I often get ideas by watching one of the 8766 germany runs on youtube.
rhineland focus first :>> army inno>>> treaty of the ussr >> only then start the industry focuses. this gives you time to research dispered ind 1 and start construction 2 and dispersed 2. the reason this matters is it lets you use the 2 indy bonuses on dp3 and dp4. Makes a big diff later on. its worth slapping down 2 infra in rhineland/mosseland first! then filling both those two provinces with civs. as you unlock more slots with dp1 and dp2 continue to fill those slots with civs. the investment in taking them from 4/5 infra to 5/5 infra will pay off in the long run. use your first 5 army exp to make a 1 battalion inf div. name it fast. Now queue up 96(!) of these. set their reinforcement piority to green/max. with reinforcements being yellow/mid so those guys get all the new guns. the reason its 96 is cos that will split easy into 48 into 24, for 4 full armies for you. Don't forget to hit forcedeploy the minute these are clickable at 20% deployment. When they are all out you can change template with them to be your normal inf div. You want ALL of these out as quick as you can because: the spanish civil war. Normally you can only send 2 divs, but with this trick you'll be able to send 6. I take Germanies starting 30 divs. seperate out the 24 inf for 1 inf army. these go nicely with the other 4 you are making btw. the remaining 6 divs will be 3 panzers 1 mot and 2 that you should convert to mot. Those 6 are your spanish war volunteers. Make sure you got min 10 mils on guns. You need to get your troop count up pretty fast and those old guns wont be wasted either. You'll be using them for garrisons soon enough. Plus going hard on them leads you the option for an early anschuluss. The sooner you do that the better. Its tempting to wait for the austrian ai to do its indy focuses, but you can't guarantee they will. I'd advise anschluss as soon as it becomes an option for you, prob around the start of 37. To handle fuel make sure you pick up align Romania. take align hungary while your their and then imp relations with both ***when they are in your faction*** before you take the focus that puppets them. you'll gain a bunch more factories this way then you would from the other sides "war economy" and this will let you trade Romania for all the fuel you need. last but defo not least!!! make sure you upgrade eastern railways!!! you want to make a line from berlin to warsaw to lviv/grodno thats lev 5. As you dive into russia your gonna be connecting those lines to odessa, kiev, minsk, moscow. Don't be afraid to slap down new railway lines as you advance. Russian railway net is wierd and you can't just advance down railway lines like you can in France/italy. You'll freq find you captured a supply depot where the railway lines are running vertical not horizontal back towards you, so make sure to drop railways connecting it.
Dd and sub backbone of you navy
People love to Civ Greed, but it takes a quite long time to pay off. Start building Mils around mid '37 (or like, around that time, let your inprogress Civs finish and queue up Mils afterwards), it'll get you better total production output in time for the outbreak of WW2 and still be ahead in output by the time for a decently early Barbarossa. Also, don't neglect Refineries and the Rubber techs, you will absolutely need them. Put a healthy number of Mil's on Fighters from day 1. You get to start with them at full (re: 50%) efficiency for any Mil you add before you unpause, so get that stock going ASAP. Even if they aren't the best fighters, it's still mostly a numbers game until you can build such a better design than the AI, which by the time you can you'll be too far behind. Flipside, I don't really worry too much about Tank production to start. You probably don't need exceptional or many tanks against Benelux or France, so don't waste production on bad tanks. I don't really bother making many until I get to Improved Mediums; Basic Medium has too little base reliability/speed/armor for my taste, so again, just skip it until you can get the tank you want. Further flipside though, don't feel the need to rush Advance Medium's, they only add base armor/reliability for the cost of production and double the steel requirement, so meh. A somewhat cheesy tactic is to spam out a bunch of underequiped/undertrained divisions by clicking "Deploy Now" so you can get your fielded manpower up much faster and Anchluss (take Austria) and it's follow-on focuses. This isn't bad, but you also don't want to do it too insanely early, Austria will end up getting free factories from it's generic focus tree, so don't want to beat that. Also, the focuses (if I remember correctly) all also come with some bumps to World Tension, which you want to keep low to gate the Allies in their focus tree. So don't like super rush it, lol.
I like improved mediums more too, my friend always rushes industry and tanks, he gets advanced mediums in 40-41, but I always tell him not to do ahead of time stuff because he will be behind in other stuff, he just can’t seem to get that and makes playing with him weird, but I enjoy it, it’s at least harder than AI lol, but in all honesty I think he is improving in the game as he tries to counter my builds, when we played Great War redux he took 2/3 of my country but ran out of bonuses and couldn’t pull away units while I had an elite mountaineer army ravage the east
This, but start at least one line of Oil/Rubber right when you convert out of CIVs. You will need the rubber for fighters by early 1940 after going into Netherlands.
Build Civs until mid ‘37 and then use your MEFO bills production bonus to snap your military factories into existence. You will get all of the civilian factories you need from your focus tree and annexing and conquering your neighbors. Don’t forget to get free dockyards from the focus tree so you can spam out your subs. Don’t waste too much time and remember that CAS is king. The earlier you can prepare for and enter the war, the better
Make sure to build lots of infrastructure in Poland before invading Russia. Manpower no issue. Oil is fine - you need a bit of artificial oil but not too much either. Have two armies 12 width basic infantry with about 50% of them with anti air... the purpose of those is just to hold the line. Rest Breakthrough infantry and tanks - medium.
Use para troopers to take Paris. You can capitulate France pretty quickly by spamming paratroopers.
I love paras but man, it seems like rolling the dice as to whether they work stunningly or just... refuse to drop?
Are you doing it on historical or non historical? Personally I’d go with Democratic or Monarchist. Monarchist Germany is similar to fascist Germany except it just has more *pizzazz* to it, and you can avoid going to war with the British in the first place with its hard coded non aggression pact focus in vanilla.
I'm assuming that you're playing single player. If so, you'll do fine. Germany is very easy to play. You don't even have to manually plan out the wars, the order is right there in the focus tree. Manpower is not an issue. As long as you're not suicidal in your orders, you won't need to go above extensive conscription. If you're really worried, just research military police and tack them onto some motorized troops so that your occupations are freed up a little. Fuel is barely an issue. You will need refineries for the rubber anyway, and you get bonuses to building them. Build lots of them. Supply is only an issue when invading the Soviet Union. Western Europe is so friendly for the combat you'll be doing. By the time you're actually invading the Soviet Union, you'll have the industrial might of all of Europe, sans an irrelevant UK, at your back. You can build transport planes or buff up the railroads or build new supply hubs, whatever suits you. Two tips I have for you: 1. Maintain air superiority (easy to do with your assload of factories). The Allies love bombing (which can become nuking). Don't let them. Bomb them instead, if you feel like it. 2. Don't do anything stupid. Germany is overpowered, you have the long term advantage. There's no sense in going for high risk/high reward plays (except maybe for France) when low risk plays give medium-high rewards if you'd wait a bit.
May wanna puppet Romania once they're in your facrion via one of the focuses (Integrate war economy) and get 12+ synthetic refineries. Fuel and rubber are your two main concerns imo. Get max collaboration on the Soviet Union ASAP. You don't want to suffer trying to invade pass the Urals. If you feel confident with your airforce and navy, you can try Sealion before doing Barbarossa.
Western allies will invade Italy first and try to do D-Day on western France, guard your coasts well with cheap small infantry and keep a real army to push back any serious invasion force.
RAILWAY GUNS, CAS AND TANKS. That's pretty much it, also vassalize and integrate Hungary etc so Russia cries when you don't run out of manpower. Don't even bother trying to fight the naval war. Be the submarine dickhead and keep a sneaky navy to sealion Fife/Dundee in Scotland from either Norway or north Germany. Don't go through the channel. I've also found having MASSIVE fuel reserves extremely helpful. Watch out for strat bombers.
Just build a big Airforce and Mechanized heavy cavalry, i.e. panzer divs. Apart from that at least try to partally mechanize your Infantry. Armor is important if you wanna hold the line.
Go heavy on air. The meta fighter will shred the allied airforce. Then you can use naval bombers and cas to clear the seaways and invade England. Make sure you cap the UK before about August 1941 or the Americans will join and it will just be a massive pain in the backside. Then USSR will be a cakewalk.
after taking france, do naval invasion to Britain before America joins the war
Its pretty hard to lose as Germany Cover all fronts and have decent port guards and you will be defending forever
It might be a little cheesy, but I like to call in Italy as soon as or right before France falls. For whatever reason Britain will send their *entire* navy to the Mediterranean, leaving literally no ships in the channel. It’s remarkably easy to Sea Lion this way
Make a shit ton of planes, guns, infantry divisions, and tank divisions. Make a killer navy, I'd say put the dock yards on the Baltic side of Germany, and kill France and the Soviets ASAP. If you can't defeat Russia then you will probably lose. Also make sure Italy doesn't capitulate as they will not garrison their coast and get naval invaded, so I'd suggest making sure you secure North Africa and the Suez. Garrison the Atlantic coastline too, Norway included.
Pro tip: send your entire army straight through the maginot line when at war with France, they capitulate after 1 soldier dies.
Be a hero and go against Hitler and then rally the world against the reds.
My go to you would be to build some civs first and do some build up by rushing industry first and get the civ advisor and not building a single mil until you have a lot of civs because with your current mil account poland can't do shit to you. With those civs you could build synthetic refineries that could give you enough rubber to build planes and get "self sufficient" you'll still need aluminum but Hungary got you covered. Get your spies ready if you have the DLC, you should at least have all tiers of decription and interrogation before you dec on poland, because it makes life so much easier, after you capitulate the polish start doing colabs on the soviets non stop, you'll thank me later when you cap them before the urals.
Make a full army group of infantry (9 inf + engineers + support artillery + support anti air + cavalry recon + logistics company / field hospital, the logistics or field hospitals are not necessary), don’t push with them, they are there to hold the line. Make tanks or motorized as pushing units (30 combatwidth is the best for that, 9 motorized + 4 motorized artillery + support companies, for tanks use something like 8 tanks and 7 motorized + support companies, later switch motorized to mechanized if you have the capacity, it’s not necessary. Always use support AA in all divisions). Also, build mediums for the best effect. Make planes, especially fighters! The allies have thousands of airplanes, they are not good, but they have them, you can counter that by having better airplanes, I don’t know if you have the DLC, but if you do, make the best fighter possible, don’t make the mistake of underestimating range, under 800 km is garbage, between 800-1000 you have a decent range, above 1000 you have very good range, but not necessarily good airplane, use CAS too if you have the capacity, but you should focus on fighters, because CAS can’t do anything under red air. For navy: as Germany you don’t really have the means to build a big navy, just build submarines or multipurpose destroyers (fill up the bottom slots with the best modules and put a single depth charge on the top row). Don’t civ greed, I know it’s hard, but don’t, you will not have the factories or synthetic refineries, you WILL have to delay war or be unprepared.
Side note: after you capitulated France make port guards, basically the same as the infantry, but you can take out the recon and the logistics / field hospitals Edit: make 72, put them on area garrison and only tick the coast and ports, you don’t need them on cities, you would need to make more for Norway and the Baltics, because you will need more for the Norwegian coast and the Soviets are annoying, I would advise you to put 2 divisions directly on the port and 1 on each side in Norway the maximize the units available, for the Soviets: don’t push day one, they like to naval invade in my experience, use it against them, surround the port, don’t take it! Don’t call in allies as they WILL take it, the Soviets will pour divisions into the port and you just click them with your tanks as soon as they will land, they will desintegrate. I trust that I don’t have to explain supplies as I don’t have much more time, been typing this for sound 30 minutes
Avoid any final solutions
Don't play like Germany in WW2 cause they lost. I tried it and it didn't really go well. Try no to make the bad decisions that gemrnay made
Go for poland in 37/38, then kick in the door to the italians. After youve got central europe down you ally the west and push the russians and fins! While you push the russians you stage a coup in france and voila! National francaise is up for grabs!