Tom_ wrote: Tue Jun 21, 2022 7:58 pm
AlbertN thank you for your response - I was looking for guides or examples, not answers or a golden bible.
Learning in isolation only goes so far, both in games and real life.
Further to that what's the point of a forum if not to share experience and combine it with your own?
Anyway I digress and thanks again for sharing your points of view.
Yeah, wasn't trying to avoid giving you suggestions, though maybe it seemed like that.
From my experience, in 1941 it's generally not good to build anything, as all your producible units cost a lot more admin points, and you're short on basically all equipment all the time, so you may as well just fill out the units which you are reinforced with automatically.
The exceptions for 1941 are Cavalry corps and guards rifle corps, which you would want to build as many as you can ASAP (and the game gives you AP to do it, so...), and the ski battalions, which you can build 102 in 1941, and 30 in 1942, you definitely want all 100 for the 1941 winter campaign. I also like to build the engineer sapper regiments and engineer sapper brigades because they have a large build limit in 1941 and lower in subsequent years. (And for my own sanity, I would rather have 1 engineer sapper brigade per army than 6 engineer sapper battalions).
In 1942, I basically like to build everything you have equipment for. I build some extra rifle divisions or brigades, but you have more manpower than you can really use in combat units (while staying under your front command limits), so I just build everything that you can field equipment for. In particular:
The army artillery regiment (36x ML-20s) and Cannon regiments (48x A-19s) are particularly good IMO
I found that in 1942 you have a lot of howitzers (122 mm) available, so the howitzer brigade is a good way to make use of them
The guards heavy tank regiments are the only unit you will build until 1945 that make use of heavy tanks, so you may as well build all of the heavy tank regiments.
In 1943, things change for you because your manpower modifier halves from 1942 - 1943 (and halves again in 1944 I think?), so it's best to start trimming down on support units. Not right away, but over time, I generally delete all the engineer sapper battalions, all the artillery regiments except the army artillery rgts and cannon rgts, as well as the anti-tank regiments. The separate tank battalions/rgts/brigades get trimmed as well. The gear is used to build more artillery brigades, tank corps, etc.
Generally, in 1943 you want to delete all the smallest support units you have and replace them with the largest support units you can build that use that equipment.
And, just see what units you find useful to build.
The only units in particular I found notably good were the ski units as described above, and B-4 203 mms tend to be about 2x as effective on a per-element basis than ML-20s (and I hope the Br-5 is similarly effective, though I haven't tried it yet).