heliodorus04
Posts: 1647
Joined: 11/1/2008
From: Nashville TN
Status: offline
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Against the AI, if you want to do the right hook on Leningrad, you ALWAYS can.
If you use HQ Build-up against the AI to make pockets and penetrations, you'll net 3.5 million prisoners by Spring.
You can destroy more industry than they can recover.
You have to give yourself certain handicaps, and not play on Normal difficulty.
The one thing you can't help from doing against the AI is displace airfields that are always too close to the front. If there's one thing I would recommend fixing in the AI, it's this issue. Even in displacing airfields, if you decide you want to use a motorized HQ's units to displace (rather than an infantry division) you're artificially increasing your useable fuel supply in an impactful way. Humans would never allow you this free fuel source.
Playing my first game on 1.08 vs. the AI on Hard, I'm finding it to do a much better job at defending Moscow and Leningrad, and a worse job of defending Rostov and the south. I'm thinking that I want to give it Attack +1 for my next go.
If you're playing Germany and your goal is a 1941 win, you can, and it encourages you to do things that the 1941 AI especially isn't ideally equipped to handle (HQ Build up is the primary tool of abuse).
The game is systematically biased in favor of offense (and that's meant non-judgmentally) and the 1941 campaign for a Soviet AI is entirely defensive. Further, the Soviet side in WitE has to wait for certain conditions to exist before it can expect to be successful on offense (such as adequate reserves of armaments). The AI isn't capable of evaluating the industrial abstracts the way a human can, and it will go on offense when it is a sub-optimal choice.
My house rules for German vs. Soviet AI play are:
Shoot for a 1942 win, or a longer game.
Always play on Hard (or more). Giving the Soviet a bonus in Transport and Logistics (higher than others) produces great results in terms of AI agility.
Don't use HQ build-up at all in the first 17 turns.
Taking industry from the AI compounds its lack of agility. If you want it to challenge you, don't handicap its industry like you would a human. Don't take factories if you can help it. The AI is very good about evacuating industry if you give it one turn. It doesn't garrison at all well its cities. Stop short of taking cities with high industry, like Kiev, Z-town, D-town and the Donets basin cities (Tula, too).
Do not use the "Right Hook around Lake Ilmen" maneuver versus the AI to cut off Tikhvin. A human would never allow that. The AI often does (especially if you use HQ Build Up). But the AI defends Leningrad directly about as well as most humans will. Thus making it GREAT deliberate attack practice for human play.
Always play Random Weather. (Now try your 30-hex penetrations away from your infantry...)
Working within these house rules, I have hours and hours of enjoyable, realistic (historically speaking) play as the Axis.
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Fall 2021-Playing: Stalingrad'42 (GMT); Advanced Squad Leader,
Reading: Masters of the Air (GREAT BOOK!)
Rulebooks: ASL (always ASL), Middle-Earth Strategy Battle Game
Painting: WHFB Lizardmen leaders
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playing against the AI is a joke - 
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