Playthrough - Manchukuo

Given that the only other active player anywhere near Manchukuo is allied with me, what else was I meant to do? Pick a fight with an AI? That's no fun.

You're going to like Day Eleven.

I've already said too much.

I'm now speculating with great curiosity the reactions of anyone who happened to be in the room with you at the time.

DAY EIGHT
For today's post, if you're not already in the habit of clicking the thumbnails to view the full image, you'll really want to do so. The odd aspect ratios of a couple of them make it impossible to see the good bits otherwise.

Well, there's no kill like overkill, and flying bombs were getting us nowhere. The high command was going to resort to rockets eventually.


Fig. 15 Satisfying parabola.

Because you know what? I lied about giving up the attack on Mongolia. Only a wuss couldn't do both.


Fig. 16 Maybe I should stop watching the trajectory of the rocket and actually do something useful.

We also sent an artillery regiment over to a province our scouts are reasonably certain have an army lurking within, and Hulunbuir is producing another and upgrading its ordnance foundry.


Fig. 17 The Rocket of Damocles

I then spent three minutes watching the rocket after all. Having a strange attention span will do that to you.

It didn't make much difference to the hitpoints. That was disappointing. Maybe I should check the air defense on that stack before throwing more rockets at it (and yes, I'm building more).
Strangely it's the infantry, which despite outnumbering the tank five to one has taken more damage, that has better air defense. The tank's is awful and it's still mostly fine. I'll cancel that artillery and build anti-tank instead.

Thus everything was business as usual, apart from pouring some resources into jacking up food production (the very thing the financial department was selling off last week to pay for the goods it is now selling off to pay for this) and upgrading the Hsinking-Hulunbuir road to railway.
All this left the state with no way to fund research of any kind, particularly not the level 3 rockets they were looking at. That's the economy for you.

Meanwhile the government has started contemplating an attack on Russian territories, in specific the possibility of launching rockets or sending bombers at cities from one of Russia's own airstrips. The latter would be a stupid idea if not really close to our border, but it would be awesome to open the attack with a rocket strike deep within their own heartlands. They'll never suspect that.

On a different note, our diplomats thought better of one of their earlier decisions.


Fig. 18 I don't like giving up, but there's a time and place.

Given that he's probably going to win eventually I don't expect a positive answer, and am fully prepared to go to war with Russia while still fighting Mongolia, but I don't think I'd survive very long if I tried that. Still, anything's better than being locked in stalemate until Germany's empire shows up on my back door.

Let's see. My five units versus Russia's 191? Yeah, I can totally do it. This attack is going to be awesome.

...Mongolia accepted. Deep down I was hoping they wouldn't. They won't accept without getting provinces back, which is fair enough. (We managed to hold onto Matad, and even as of Day Eleven Mongolia either hasn't noticed or is wisely choosing not to make an issue of it.)
The spy in Altai was dismissed, who now we are at peace is a waste of money, but the Hsinking counterespionage is staying put.

Actually, you know what? Russia's an AI, it'll keep. Japan, now, is currently being shredded by AI Nationalist China, and their mainland troops are pathetic, so let's backstab them instead while there's still some of them left to backstab. (Also known as Heroically Kicking The Loser While They Are Down And Taking All The Credit*, but I'd rather fight Japan than China as I'm not privy to the latter's troop placement.)

Let's start moving troops right now, and build an airstrip next to the border for those rockets, and get some infrastructure up between it and my secret labs, and research naval bombers and submarines to deal with those ships on Japan's coast. I have some ground to make up after that utter waste of a week.


Fig. 19 Note how I'm avoiding Seishin. They didn't make it onto the screenshot, but there's two cruisers and three battleships right off its coast and if I move in while they're still there I'm just going to get bombarded out of it again. I've already lost quite enough troops, thank you.

Manchukuan troops will sit in those cities for a day or so while waiting for later departures and those with long-distance journeys to catch up, and then HQ will declare war. Boom! Instant load of victory points. Best of all, Japan's unlikely to notice before the point where retaliation is going to have exactly that outcome anyway.



Fig. 20 Bonus image: an axis coalition that actually contains two out of three of the actual axis powers. Thought I'd record this occasion just for the rarity value. Also of note is the other coalition, which contains France, Britain and Soviet Russia. Too bad they called it 'BRICCS' and not 'Allied Powers'.

*I can't take the credit for this phrase - I found it on the Uncyclopedia entry for WWII, but it was too good not to use.

"Heroically Kicking The Loser While They Are Down And Taking All The Credit".
Betrayal is my modus operandi. If I can find a worthy ally I'll stick with them for the entire game, but a) that's pragmatism, not honour and b) I have yet to find anyone worthy of a long-time alliance, including myself if I were to be honest, in this particular game.

Germany isn't too incompetent in this game, actually.
Granted, this is in the context of Japan, the Soviets, and similar countries.

Brazil, Argentina and Peru are all active. They seem to have cleaned up most of the scrappy AIs. Absolutely nothing else has happened on that part of the map at all. Bleedin' disgusting.

I sort of am; this is by far the highest inactivity rate of any HWW I've been in, for this stage of the game at least (I've had one where for the last few days only Turkey and my own coalition were active, but that was because said coalition controlled an insane amount of territory). One can't complain when this is allowing one to survive as Manchukuo, though.

Attached image of the insane amounts of land for the curious.

...and now you point it out I can't think how I failed to notice, given how many times I went through the stats of those things. My remaining stockpile of them is currently going towards morale-damaging projects.