Economic warfare

[Ekaton]

I guess that the impact of taking oil and fuel production as early as possible is going to be very significant, but what about manpower and resources? Does taking these early on, like the Donbass, Kursk and Rostov, and holding them throughout the winter, hurt the Soviet economy in a meaningful way?

[Bamilus]

ORIGINAL: Ekaton

I guess that the impact of taking oil and fuel production as early as possible is going to be very significant, but what about manpower and resources? Does taking these early on, like the Donbass, Kursk and Rostov, and holding them throughout the winter, hurt the Soviet economy in a meaningful way?

My understanding is not really, which is historical. Soviet facilities will evacuate automatically on a schedule, but if you take the city before the historic date I think the Soviets will evacuate less or it will evacuate more as damaged (have to go back and look at manual). When you attack larger cities you often will get the notices telling you the manpower has evacuated. That part is somewhat variable, I believe, but usually significant parts evacuate.

So, there's nothing you can do to stop the Soviets from evacuating at least a significant portion of their economy.

Someone with more experience can probably elaborate more.

[GloriousRuse]

So, by the time you land a kill-shot on the soviet economy, you've probably won the game with VPS . If you've done nothing to the economy, you've probably lost without enough VPs. Until that point, what you're doing is damage. It's not insurmountable damage, but it is damage. Lets take, say, Leningrad. A monstrous 40 population! In '42, each of those points is 41x men a piece, for 1,640 men a turn. If you were to hold Leningrad through '42 (with no evacuations, but just for example), that's 85k men who never enter the red army. That's 8x divisions. A smaller 5 point city, barley worth the name, is 1 divisions. A town, maybe just a brigade.

Are any of those going to kill the red army? No, of course not. But you add up 20 odd cities and a few dozen towns...well that's getting on to be a few armies. This is not insignificant.

[Bamilus]

ORIGINAL: GloriousRuse

So, by the time you land a kill-shot on the soviet economy, you've probably won the game with VPS . If you've done nothing to the economy, you've probably lost without enough VPs. Until that point, what you're doing is damage. It's not insurmountable damage, but it is damage. Lets take, say, Leningrad. A monstrous 40 population! In '42, each of those points is 41x men a piece, for 1,640 men a turn. If you were to hold Leningrad through '42 (with no evacuations, but just for example), that's 85k men who never enter the red army. That's 8x divisions. A smaller 5 point city, barley worth the name, is 1 divisions. A town, maybe just a brigade.

Are any of those going to kill the red army? No, of course not. But you add up 20 odd cities and a few dozen towns...well that's getting on to be a few armies. This is not insignificant.

Wouldn't much of the Leningrad manpower evacuate? (28.3.1 in manual).

EDIT: Sorry you mentioned "with no evacuations", but I feel like that's a pretty critical piece. I'm not saying taking cities isn't nothing, but the game is historic and the Germans really lost more than they gained from a net economic impact in USSR and as we know the Soviets were still able to retain a majority of their production. People assumed the day the Germans captured Maikop that they were gifted millions of barrels of oil, and that's not the case at all.

To your point, if you've actually taken enough to seriously damage the Soviet economy to a point that they would be beaten, then you've probably already taken most of the country and VP locations and at that point its moot.

[GloriousRuse]

I don’t know the exact evac numbers; it feels like 1/5-1/3 with some RNG goodness.

Which sounds about right for history. The Soviets evacuated a lot of industry, but they really were losing quite a lot of the static things...by ‘42 they were at producing something like 31% of the previous year’s potatoes, they’d lost 27 million or so cattle, etc.. None of these were fatal, but they definitely had effects.

You’ll be pleased to know the Germans gain some, but not vast amounts, from occupation. The oil isn’t immediate or massive, but it IS useful as the German fuel position begins collapsing in the summer of ‘42. They get some resources. They can use some number of Hiwis to back fill support elements, allowing more efficient application of German manpower. But the dreams of a resource fueled Ostreich will have to wait.

[MechFO]

You get three Oil fields, one in Galicia (Drohobycz), that was heavily expanded during the war and is 4 points, 2 with 1 point each at Narva and Sonda in the North. Repair them ASAP.