Playthrough - Manchukuo

My bad for trusting a skim-read of Wikipedia.

No, the English one. Let's just say I'm a fast reader, but sufficiently fast that I generally have to read things twice to get details like dates right.

I did something similar to Mongolia once.

I'm not actually sure if either of these questions were even addressed to me

If someone else's discussion happened to be coming off one of my posts and they were participating in a conversation I'm not part of, quite possibly not.

Mind you, with only three new posts since I last checked in, you have a point.

DAY TWENTY-SIX

Holy hell, what has happened to my borders?


Fig. 91 Not the worst bordergore I've had by a long shot, but nonetheless bad.

Germany's insisted that I stick to the east of Afghanistan and its longitudes, wanting the bit of Russia with all the cities to themselves. Despite agreeing to that I have no intentions of sticking to it, and I can easily come up with an excuse to drift west of the agreed line.

Urumchi is a little too heavily defended and I haven't the time to move more stuff up there. The only stack I have in the area is nearly dead so really, the obvious solution is just staring me in the face.


Fig. 92 Desperate times, etc. Except they're not that desperate, I just want to drop another nuke.

Also, after doing some light force redistribution, I have decided:
For the first time all game, I have too many units.
I had to actually split up a few inefficient doomstacks. I don't even remember the last game I played where I could construct doomstacks. Russia is doomed. And this is why I have no intention of sticking to my side of the Great Divide.

My nuclear bomb arrived as planned.


Fig. 93 I was having trouble coming up with a witty name, and I wanted to just build another nuke already. Feel free to speculate on the nature of the colloquialism in question.

Come daychange, I've lost a lot of money and also caught a spy. I'm going to plant another counterespionage agent in Hsinking, because just one doesn't seem to be enough. Whoever's spying on me seems to realise that Hsinking is still my de facto capital and between it and Beijing, I'm more concerned about it. I'm going to have to sell a bunch of stuff before I can afford it, but I'm also going to plant espionage in Argentina and Brazil, but not Australia because they seem to be trustworthy and anyway I can't afford to pay that many spies.
I also received a strange intelligence report of Germany, and it took a while for me to work out that this was thanks to Germany having captured the province adjacent to Moscow that my spy was in. It also seems I have a bunch of counterespionage dotted through my captured territory that's remnants of all the military sabotage and intelligence I planted in China and then forgot to dismiss, explaining why I haven't as much money as I usually do despite being the third largest economy on the map.
I'm fairly sure it's Argentina who's sending spies at me, but... come to think of it, why do I trust Australia? It's often the person you least expect, after all. I'm going to plant a spy in Canberra after all.

Apparently Xinjiang and Russia are at war too, which is the first I've heard of that. It makes no difference, as long as I get Urumchi, seeing as that's the last capital I can expect to capture for a while.

I've been in a melee on the border of Xinjiang and gave in to using nukes as the answer to everything.


Fig. 94 Sometimes the nuclear option really is the answer. Was it this time? Probably not.

The anti-tank is being slaughtered, but that was only bait anyway, to make sure they're all diverging on the same point and will get stricken by the bomber.


Fig. 96 The anti-tank died well before I arrived anyway

I was targeting the interceptor, which since disappeared (where to I'm not sure), but that's fine, it's a nuclear weapon, all that matters is that it's in the vicinity of all those tanks and armoured cars and tank destroyers I want to get rid of before my tank and armoured car arrive.


Fig. 96 The name of my third bomb.

I cleaned out the interceptor, too. Nice. I also lost a province, but that's easily fixed.
The armoured car miraculously survived the strike with full hitpoints, but that's fine; it's outnumbered, even if it gets the defense bonus.

In light of my earlier speculations that I have too many units, I've decided to open up yet another front and declare war on Tibet (making the Indochinese and Bhutanese borders the only ones I'll have that I'm not at war with). This will get me the last of the Qing territory I need, a nice shiny pile of victory points, and open up a few new people to attack.


Fig. 97 I also have all these forces on my coast I'm not going to need if Australia's joining the coalition.

Interestingly, Germany doesn't seem to have gotten his head around the idea of churning out nuclear weapons. He's building his second right now and I've gotten three strikes in already, have a fourth underway, and am developing another lab so I can build nukes in tandem. This can't be blamed on Axis doctrine making this harder, because he has an unholy number of units of other types.

*cough*quote stacks*cough*

Oh good grief. I'm curious to know exactly how that would be more effective than splitting it in half, even, and sending it in from two directions.
What sort of anti-air does it have? Yes, I can see that (equally ridiculous) plane stack, but that can presumably be dispatched separately.

Fair enough. I admit to having done this with every tactical bomber I possessed once, but I didn't stack them, because I wanted to have a huge cloud of them blotting out Chengdu.

DAY TWENTY-SEVEN

I have four battleships in the game and none are doing anything particularly important, so I'm going to try dealing with that naval doomstack Japan has that's been annoying me all game.


Fig. 98 Only four of the things in that stack are capable of bombarding me in return, and one's coming from an entirely different direction, so I might actually be able to kill it this time.

My map as a whole now looks like this:


Fig. 99 Has Manchukuo ever gotten to this stage in a HWW? I hardly think I'm the first to do this, but all the same.

I now have a nice buffer around my core provinces, making them truly safe from surprise attacks for the first time all game. I've also captured Urumchi and the stack there is sufficiently powerful that I'm not unlikely to hold it.
The only thing still in the east would appear to be this.


Fig. 100 Holy hell, I've actually taken 100 screenshots for this playthrough and we're still not close to winning.

It's not moving, but waiting, so presumably it's not a convoy at all but a ship. That's not a problem. Kiamusze is nearby and I can quickly produce a naval bomber to dispatch it (only to discover it's an OP stack with all four ship types in it that needs desperate attention from every naval unit I own). A true convoy would be more worrying, as an actual threat to my holding the provinces I'm capturing here or (even worse) moving onto the mainland just as all my eastern troops are going west where they'll be needed, but would also presumably be embarking or disembarking, not sitting there doing nothing where my subs can nab it.

I seem to have military sabotage happening now in Hsinking, with whoever's sending the spies now knowing I have a secret lab there. I'm catching spies, yes, but not until after they've done the damage. Not that this is a problem, what with Kweichang and its lab up and running. There is anti-air, but no espionage, no infrastructure to the closest airstrip, nothing. It's also pretty out of the way and one more city out of more than fifty in my possession, so the chances of anyone thinking to look here for a secret lab are remote. I've taken obscurity and turned it into a weapon.

Still waiting on reports back from Argentina, Australia and Brazil. If it's Australia spying on me I ought to be worried, as Kweichang is quite close to Indochina.

In other news, I just dropped my fourth nuke.


Fig. 101 I'm not even close to running out of random pop-cultural references to name things after.

I have finally gotten to the stage where random AIs are declaring war on me. I'm at war with Bhutan and I definitely wasn't responsible for that. I've heard they have a pretty fierce army for a tiny country, so I'm going to have to watch it.

Lord Gribeau is a character from Maskerade (Discworld book 18). He is in fact Greebo, a cat belonging to one of the main characters who got turned into a human in a previous book and can now change back and forth at will, and at one point they need him to pass as a posh friend of one of the other main characters.