The following list after the page break is the current National Focus path that I am using for the Soviet Union with Joseph Stalin as the leader. While the all important Desperate Measures focus is chosen immediately after the start of Operation Barbarossa, it is because significant battlefield preparations have been ongoing for some time and other focuses were required to be done in a certain order to hit historical dates as closely as possible. The following list is a work in progress as this game is ever evolving however, it has successfully gotten me the beginning of the war with Germany.
Hears of Iron IV
I have been doing a lot of games as the Soviet Union, attempting to mirror real life events and timings as closely as the game will allow. Not all of time though, playing as Trotsky or one of the other principals to overthrow Stalin in time to still have to deal with Operation Barbarossa certainly spices things up. The most recent build I am working on refining has the ultimatums for Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania by August 1939, and the Winter War by November 1939.
However several recent games have resulted in Finland ceding territory and no actual combat resulting in a White Peace having occurred. Throw in the claims on Bessarabia in May 1940 and Operation Countenance by September 1941. Fighting a war with Iran with or without the aid of the British while at the same time holding back the Germans is quite a challenge to gear up for, considering all of the hideous debuffs the USSR starts the game out with.
Overall I been having a lot of fun with the game and once I hone my focus, research, construction and templates I will posts those lists here for anyone that may want to try them out.
Twitch Livestream
2020
Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!!
To all please have a happy and safe holiday season :)
2019 was kind of an odd-ball year for me. As with 2018, most of my focus was with trying to build my Twitch channel. That had the unfortunate side effect of reducing my time available for this blog and in particular after-action reports.
And I made a colossal error in deleting my entire library of YouTube videos. This was not an accidental click of a button, but an intentional act in admittedly a poor reaction to YouTube's new terms of service and the legal threat posed by radical new implementation of COPPA (Children's Online Privacy Protection Act), a law passed in 1998 that is now the bane of anyone wishing to be a YouTube "influencer".
In reality I overreacted to the perceived threat of facing fines as the vast majority of my content was wargaming related. This is why a lot of content (in particular the Video label) is now missing from this blog. I reverted all of those posts to draft so as not to make the blog look abandoned.
Which in practice it has been abandoned in the past two years. I aim to correct that in 2020 by attempting to strike a balance between my Twitch live streaming, my YouTube uploads, and my after-action reports or other wargame related content here.
Merry Christmas and Happy New Year everyone!!