Hi,
in my opinion playing without production would remove a lot of fun from the game. Especially in random maps as your forces are very limited at the start of new game. Planning your army structure and managing production is very important and later when your offensive is successful it will be a very rewarding feeling.
As for production hints:
1) Don't forget about air forces. Fighters are a priority as you really need air superiority to cover your troops from lethal bombers. Make some bombers too to kill enemy heavy equipment (dive bombers) or infantry (level bombers).
2) Make a plan. Decide where you want to be on defense and where your offensive actions will take place. Take terrain in consideration too as tanks in huge forests will not be as effective as in open areas. Produce different types of SFTs for defensive and offensive units. Infantry is better at defense, tanks are good for offense. Reinforce infantry defending positions with AT guns if necessary.
3) Use artillery for defensive formations to weaken enemy units closing to your positions. They wont be able to attack if you kill their readiness with art barrage.
4) Use mobile artillery units for offensive formations to shell those dug-in defenders before you run them over with your tanks. Remember that those are very vulnerable to air attacks so keep them under fighter cover all the time.
5) Always defend your front mech units against air attack. Preferably with fighters but also with AA guns.
6) Attach some engineers to your advancing formations to build roads, fortifications or airbases where needed.
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7) Keep your units between 50 and 100 stack points otherwise you will face more casualties due to overstacking. Max stack for defense is 100, max stack size for attack is number of hexes from which you attack times 50 (but no less than 100). You can see stack points of a unit in its statistics. Don't worry if you exceed this limit a bit but don't exceed it too much.
8) Upgrade your economy especially at the beginning of the game. It is very efficient to upgrade oil and raw to level 2. It is much less efficient to upgrade those to level 3 so focus on level 2 first. It will boost your production capacity a lot, and will give your mech army and air force very needed fuel. Build some factories once your raw production gets higher.
9) Make some political points as those are needed for economy improvements at the start of the game and for research later on.
10) Switch units production from cities to factories as soon as you can so that cities can make political points, supply, or raw/oil instead of army. You always have to produce infantry in cities but tanks, armor cars, aircraft and guns can be made in factories. Each factory gives you production output equal to one city.
Those came out of top of my head. You should be quite ok if you manage to follow those basic rules. At least against AI. The rest is in your hands. I wish you a ton of successful offensives.
