purchasing units

[FrankHunter]

Perhaps Frank can chime in here for clarification. Does not the entire force structure drop a level when national morale drops?

Close, its "exhaustion" that causes that now.  Armies reach breaking points where their quality begins to fall.

Exhaustion also affects National Morale.

[SiTheSly]

ORIGINAL: FrankHunter
Right, you need to open the rail route to Istanbul. 

When I first started playing I always tried to knock Serbia out of the war in order to open the rail link but now I don't bother. You can open the link by taking the two hexes of rough terrian in east Serbia. In a worse case scenario you can always assault these hexes from Austria and Bulgaria and open it up in one turn but usually you can get one of the hexes with a sneaky cav unit and a threatening position elsewhere in the west of Serbia. Once you have one hex the AI seems to do a good job of blocking a connection to Bulgaria but its still worth a Bulgarian offensive to get it. Once Bulgaria is on your side central Serbia falls quite easily and has a food and RM resource. The port of Scrutaria (sp) is tougher since its surrounded by low supply hexes meaning your readiness is often very low and an assault costly. Also the Brits have a habit of turning up with one of their large corps. In this case I've found a massive arty barrage from the north for two turns and a SM with fresh troops for the assault works best. Turkey also has an excess of two RMs per turn which can be transfered to Germany.

Without these resources I find playing the CP very difficult.

[SMK-at-work]

IIRC lower replacement quality was discussed in the beta, but not implemented as it was a bit too difficult.
 
As manpower runs down your whole army can be "exhausted" - check your national morale screen - the sliding bar shows what stage you're at - green is fine, yellow is exhausted 1, red is exhausted 2 IIRC - small countries like Serbia & Belgium can get exhausted pretty quickly

[SiTheSly]

I always thought it was strange that using replacements doesn't lower the readiness of a unit.
 
After giving it some thought I realized if it did the whole game balance would go out the window since France would collapse striaght away. Being able to rebuild units in line gives it that meat grinder feel which I particularly like. Also since each turn is two months I envisage it as being a steady replacement rate not a massive 20k all arriving at once.
 
I don't think I would change anything except the transfers to Russia through the Black Sea. I just played a TE game with a house rule of no transfers from the BE to Russia. It plays a lot better since the Russian front goes dead when all the Russian offensive points are used up and Russia can only really afford to buy one per turn and keep its decent units up to strength.