Bonuses for recon in the game are very very tiny. There are videos about this on various channels (I don't remember if on 71Cloak is on this one)

Term you're looking for is spaghetti code

Yes. I just don't ever use paratroopers so I forgot they existed.

@@71Cloak Understandable. They have some niche uses, especially in "tiny country does world conquest" scenarios

I hate it when you ask for multiple options, and they answer yes. Yes to which question??? 😆 But in this case, it's the first one - so planes needed for one division of that template :) About this next part I'm not fully sure, but I believe one plane can drop multiple divisions, but just not simultaneously. So if you have 20 2-width paratroopers and 1 cargo plane, then it'll drop 1 2-width division at a time, but in fairly rapid succession. (in my experience fast enough on 3 green bars of speed for you as a player to have to pause to keep up giving them orders)

Soft attack is the amount of damage you do to soft targets aka flesh bodies, aka infantry (and horses and bikes, oh and camels too, lol) Tanks are hard (and more-advanced ones are harder than early lights). And motorized is mostly soft but gets 10% hardness as soon as you finish researching mechanized 1. In single-player, you run into really hard tank divisions so rarely that you can basically focus on soft attack alone. Just blow away all the dudes surrounding their tanks, and you'll steam roll them.

yep

Remember that Unyielding Defender is locked behind Inflexible Strategist while Aggressive Assaulter is locked behind Brilliant Strategist; you will basically never have to choose between them. That said, Brilliant Strategist is miles better than Inflexible for attack because it makes your generals roll for attack more often on level up. Breakthrough is nice but it's attack that makes you win battles on the offensive.

Yes, it does :)

@Zoro Asper You're right *and* wrong, simultaneously, haha You have to pick between them when selecting a general/field marshall ;)

@@MrNicoJac I know that but that's why I said that Brilliant Strategist is the best, for attacking. There's no real choice because you want your attacking general to have Brilliant Strategist, so you will never have to choose between the two traits

Battle planning will always be worse than microing, no matter what. You can get full planning bonuses while microing so there is never a benefit to letting the dumb AI handle things.

@@mainman879 can't disagree, although there's something satisfying about just letting the AI do the work and you still win. Easy mode, basically.

Your defense is 2% higher

imo puppets are only good to shorten your frontline if you dont call them into any wars and when you demote them to integrated pupept to steal their factories, but you dont want to deal with the resistance. They are good for stealing navies, but this will be redundant with new peace deals. Soviets are good for puppeting since you can take the focus which gives you 50% of all your puppets' industry which makes you completely unbeatable if you have half of europe puppeted on historical focuses. Annexing is good if you have time to build compliance, which you will if you go for early game wars (like japan and china), if you take cores, or you have done collaboration governments spy missions (having 100% compliance is basically the same as having a core on the province, but having a collaboration government in some random area in africa is better then having 100% compliance because they will give you more factories because they will have generic focus trees, but generally speaking, 100% compliance is better to have in some developed areas like Western Europe, USSR, USA, then having a collab govt on them)

@@lmao6762 okay yeah thanks for the info man I was having this weird problem where I kind of thought we’ll since it spams you with the notification maybe integrates puppets are better than 100 compliance annex but then when I took Spain as Germany it gave half of it to German France and they revolted and and I couldn’t do anything about it and they wouldn’t give me the territory is was very frustrating and I wasn’t really really sure what to do but maybe from now I will just keep everyone annexed and suffer through the pop ups lol appreciate it man

No. For terrains that are the actual province (forest, jungle, mountain etc) defense is a bonus to all combat stats on defense and offense is the same on offense.

Trading back and forth should entirely negate the cost though. If you can trade with someone 1 for 1 you should always go for free trade.

@@ruukinen It's not 1 to 1, you do lose civs when trading back because the country receiving trade still pays consumer goods on that trade and the country buying resources has already paid for consumer goods. This is less of an issue as you lower your %CG so most players won't give tradebacks unless the person requesting it is on partial mob or better. Free trade is very worthwhile early because you have generally low resource consumption and the research/construction boni are most impactful early (+15% research speed is more impactful when you have 0% base, less impactful as you get research/constr speed tech). The impact of free trade is a hard thing to test. For one, you have to turn off AI so it doesn't cancel the trades and you have to effectively micro multiple countries. Then you have to consider which countries you're testing with and whether they both benefit. A few examples of the complexity: Germany only needs rubber, likely from Siam and that's probably an AI that won't tradeback; Italy needs steel but Germany can't import anything worthwhile from Italy. Italy needs oil to train its fleet, but Romania gets fucked by King Carol so it's not efficient to trade with them. UK only starts to need aluminum imports in mid 38 while US needs rubber from day 1, but US also has a high %CG so UK is better off buying Al from Dominions or France. France runs out of non-mainland build slots so it's questionably worthwhile giving them factories, but they could use those factories to convert civs->mils. Allies can buy from Soviets and make them more powerful later, but that doesn't benefit the Allies until Barbarossa begins - trading with Canada while it has Great Depression will result in fewer total factories than buying from Soviets, but Canada's production makes an immediate impact at Alamein. Raj buying from Britain helps the Allies early, but it also puts more convoys at risk when Raj has the option to import from Soviets/SAf overland. Add all those country specific factors and then consider the relative benefit of %research/constr and you see why it's hard/impossible to devise an objective test. I think the most important benefit of tradebacks is abstract - team morale and building communication. Does it hurt Germany to give civs to Italy when he could just keep them? Yes, but Italy is going to be much more cooperative if he sees that Germany is a team player. It's also important to learn players' identities via voice chat and early tradebacks give a reason for minors to talk.

@@28lobster28 I mean you lose most of the benefit of being on some more restrictive trade policy early as well since you wont be making use of all of your resources anyway.

@Cam Juric You're overthinking it. 1. If you're going for an early war, you need output instead of research. So, depending on whom you're playing as and what you're making and what resources you have, if you wouldn't need to import a lot, then free trade is probably better. But with an early war, the difference is probably minimal anyways. 2. If you're going for a later war, then all of the benefits of free trade will snowball (more research and more construction), whereas the downsides won't matter as much (I try to hold off making the 1936 versions of things, so it's pointless to have many military factories early on, which means I don't need many resources anyway). 3. At certain points, I don't need all my civs anyway. Like, a strong Germany that's still building up to an offensive can temporarily boost the Italian economy. But once you're Barbarossa'ing, you'll need all those civs to build new airbase and railways and do repairs. When naval invading, for instance, it's best if you can build a lot of level 1 harbors right away (especially when going for non-European places). So it's not an either-or thing, like your comment suggests, but a timing thing too. Now, there's a ton of mix-maxing to do here, but essentially this game is about diminishing returns. I overanalyzed everything too, trying to get it perfect. But the difference between 90% and 100% is a lot more costly and yet much less important than going from 60% to 90%. So don't over-worry about it ;) Hope this all helps :)

big thing you're missing out on is that you're assuming you dont need to trade, Germany needs tungsten, aluminium and Chromium for whatever strat they're going to be wanting to do, they'll always be trading for those resources, those countries will need resources as well in exchange, German steel being necessary for all the axis minors. Most likely as Germany you'll want to go export focus by the time you start getting a few hundred mils but you're allies will always need more resources than limited will give

Its not extra, its a change of dice from a 4 sided to a 6 sided. Changing the EV of each roll from 2.5 [(1+4)/2] to 3.5 [(1+6)/2). There is no change for strength.

@@71Cloak Yes, that seems to be the case. I got confused with the comment saying "extra dice" because to me it seems to imply it's adding those dice to the existing ones but that was just some bad word choice by the devs

Yes and no. It depends.

In general they are worth

just make tank that have more than 400/450 breakthrough and soft attack and aim for encirclements. ai just cannot stand up to it

@@lmao6762 AI can't stand up to anything remotely competent. If you're minmaxxing, do it the MP way.

Minmaxing the MP way against the AI is dumb. The AI doesn't play MP meta, but the MP way is a reaction to the MP meta. So you'd be designing against something you'll never run into. Which is dumb.

@@lmao6762 I wanna learn the combat mechanics so i can do challenging runs and stuff like that

@@MrNicoJac You'd be designing against something better which you won't ever run into until you play MP. MP is where the meta is decided. Kinda goes with the whole "you fight like you train" mentality. If you only ever minmax against AI, you'll only ever be better than AI, not a high bar. Shoot higher.

CAS has always ignored armor.

@@sld1776 o h

Maybe I wasn't quite clear about this. Under defense is each attack has a 10% chance of hitting and if it hits then damge roll occurs. Attacks over defense have a 40% chance of hitting and if it hits then damage roll occurs. Otherwise yes it is quite binary.

I talked about hardness when I talked about soft attack and hard attack.