Overview
This guide entails the general strategy of the Soviet Union in multiplayer using the Deep Battle doctrine path of Mass-Assault. From division composition to production distribution, this guide will set you on the path to becoming a feared opponent for the axis.
The Strategic role of the Soviet Union
In your typical vanilla multiplayer game WITH RULES (no cancer) where there is restriction on when you are allowed to go to war and which countries you are allowed to declare on (molotov claims), the USSR is meant to be the final check on German Military power in 1941. The USSR will bear the brunt of German, Romanian, and Hungarian forces buying time for the allies to perform a successful D-Day invasion to liberate France and such diverting the attention of Germany off the front allowing you to achieve a decisive operational victory.
In this guide, it is assumed that war with the Soviet Union cannot be done until 1941 and that Japan will stay out until 1943 (or will never join at all). On the eve of war you should have at LEAST 10,000 Light Fighters (Teched to 1944 with the DoD DLC) along with a small force of perhaps 2,000 or 3,000 Close Air Support. The Mass Assault doctrine will be used on the left branch to create very durable infantry of 50 width that will eventually become 40.8 width upon completion of the proper doctrine research.
The Soviet Union should be on Free-Trade up until the point of war-declaration where convoy efficiency will be drastically reduced due to enemy naval action. The United States should build 40-60 dockyards and import all its needed resources from the Soviets to provide a much needed boost to your industry in the initial years of buildup. The Soviets should trade as much as possible with the United-Kingdom to enable it to build up a respectable air-force to whittle down the Luftwaffe as much as possible before Barbarossa starts.
Operational Goals
In a multiplayer game, Germany will make breakthroughs in the Eastern Front through concentration of its armor on a schwerpunkt (focal point) to create encirclements that will take huge chunks out of your army and disorganize the remaining troops.
With the Mass Assault doctrine, the Soviet Union can stall out an offensive long enough for your own armor to counterattack at any breakthrough point nullifying or even encircling enemy thrusts. When the front line stabilizes we will be using our medium tanks HEAVY TANKS to create multiple breakthroughs and pour heavy infantry behind their front line.
AIR PARITY is the goal for the USSR. However, Air Superiority is very achievable through effective coordination with the allies. We will be building and using Anti-Air within our divisions to nullify any advantage that the axis may gain in the air war and in the process shoot down a lot of CAS.
Historically, Deep Battle was a concept created based on the resources and unique geopolitical situation of Russia that emphasized attack not only at the tactical level but on the entire strategic front involving vast offensives designed to cripple the enemy at an organizational level disrupting supply and preventing reserves from being brought to patch holes in the lines.
Engineers are key inclusions to the infantry as they drastically increase the defense and soft attack to hopefully destroy all the infrastructure in the battles that they fight forcing the German Player to deal with horrendous supply and attrition or sacrifice new industry for construction repair.
Buildup Strategy
At game start, select all your aircraft and disband the wings to allow for easier future organization. Put 15 factories onto your I-16s and 5 factories on artillery (trust me you will be making an infantry heavy mass assault template not 14/4s). Place 3-4 factories on support equipment and motorized and place the rest on infantry equipment. Keep at least one factory on light tanks for reinforcements and disband one or two of the starting tank divisions so you have a sizeable stockpile. You not be using light tanks anyway by the time the war starts as you will probably want to lend-lease them to a player China.
Concentrated Industry is an absolute MUST. We will be producing equipment for a very long time and our upgrades will be relatively few and far between. Even just a tiny increase in factory output will pay off in the long run as we gain more and more factories from our construction when at war.
To begin, we will want to take the Stalin Constitution as our first focus for the +160 political power and switch our economy law to partial mobilization as soon as possible. We build infrastructure to level 10 in Moscow, Stalino, Stalingrad and other high factory space, high initial infrastructure provinces. Preferably in the Urals or far from the German-Soviet lines as possible. You will want to build civilian factories and infrastructure UNTIL THE MOLOTOV RIBBENTROP PACT IS SIGNED when you will convert to mostly military factory construction with a few civ factories and infrastructure sprinkled here and there to enable you to continue trading with the allies.
Depending on how many free slots you have in a province, you will either upgrade ONE or TWO levels of infrastructure. This is calculated to be the most efficient return rate for the amount of construction you put into each factory vs the cost of building the infrastructure. At the start of the game the provinces that have 6 – 8 free slots will get TWO extra infrastructure and the ones that have 4 free slots will get ONE extra infrastructure. Don’t bother upgrading infrastructure on anything with less free slots. Build this infrastructure only when you are going to build factories there right afterwards.
We will be going down the Positive Heroism branch for the excellent research bonuses it gives along with the manpower and advisors. Kalinin will provide all the national unity you need and even if Moscow falls, it will still take a vast amount of territory to have you capitulate. Proceed all the the way down to the extra research slot and then go for the industrial and military factory focuses.
By the time the military factory focus finishes you should already have finished research of Towed Anti-Air and you can put the four factories you gain directly into producing them.
Before the Spanish Civil War starts select 5 of your light tank divisions and set up a battle plan along Poland to build the bonus up to 50%. It will carry over when your volunteers arrive in Spain surprisingly enough. Lend lease the 540 outdated I-15 fighters that you disbanded at the start of the game along with 3000 infantry equipment to gain valuable air-experience and army-experience. Once you get about 330+ air experience make sure to upgrade the engine of your I-16 to level 5 and afterwards the range and reliability. We will be getting more experience when we lend-lease to the Chinese when their war starts around 1938.
We will continue building military factories after 1939 (along with ONLY 1 infrastructure because efficiency gain falls off after you get war economy) with a few sprinkles of civilian factories up until Barbarossa. Try to build all your civilian factories on the provinces with 100% infrastructure as they will benefit the most from it. When you are looking for places to build your military factories, you should only build one additional level of infrastructure if the province is not a Dense Urban region as the mobilization laws that you get will eventually outweigh the additional time needed to build infrastructure.
At this point you should have researched Heavy Tank II from the Tank-Treaty with Germany. (Upgrade it to 100% reliability and as much gun upgrade as you can muster without using all your experience, you will need the reliability for the horrible supply and attrition that you will take) We will put 15 factories on producing these new tanks and increase our motorized production to 5 factories. Once the Great Purge is complete, taking the “Aviation Cult” focus is advised to enable ourselves to research Fighter II (or Fighter III depending on how coordinated the allies are) with the Fighter design company and the air experience from the Sino-Japanese war to create a powerful engine +5 variant. Set an additional 15 factories for building your fighters once the research is complete and then add 15 factories to your heavy tank production. At this point you should have 30 factories producing Heavy Tank IIs and 30 producing Light Fighter II/III.
Once the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact is signed, justify on the claims for Latvia and Estonia and send the ultimatum. You will be able to annex them both. Once you annex both of them, justify on Latvia and Romania for those provinces and take them as well. We will be going to war with Finland to enable us to select the “Lessons of War” focus which will remove the Great Purge Malus and enable us to research Heavy Tank IIIs. At this point you should start researching Close Air Support up to the 1940 version and set up a line of 15 for your IL-2 Sturmoviks. Consider also researching mechanized with the licensing bonus from an allied player such as Canada and Heavy SPGs / Heavy SPAA to put in your beefy 40 width breakthrough divisions. Otherwise just keep making 6 / 4 Heavy tanks or 5 / 5 Heavy tanks if you value the organization bonus. Use the factories you gain to also put another line or two into infantry equipment, you will want to have a large amount of it when the war starts so that you can sustain losses and produce new divisions.
You should have your 5th research slot by now and it would be smart to go on the “aircraft production” continuous focus and bring up the factories on Fighters to 75 or even 100 depending on the amount of aircraft that Germany/Hungary has.
Once the war starts, save political power to go to Total Mobilization and Export Focus if the allies can’t keep trade routes open. You should already have all your army staff for the Armor Expert, Concealment Expert, and Organization Expert. The Ground Support Expert is also a good choice. Build only military factories far from the front lines and don’t waste time building infrastructure. Try to build on the 5 infrastructure provinces but at this point it won’t matter that much so any will do.
Offense and Defense in Depth
Operational Concentration
Often, when fighting another Great Power, there will come a time where the initial combat has petered out and each army is roughly equal to the other in strength along the entire front. This is characterized by a slowing (or complete cessation) of large scale offensive attacks, and makes advancing along the entire front impossible.
In this situation it is more effective to switch large scale offensives to more localized, limited objectives. This is characterized by the relocation and re-positioning of your mobile forces and reserves consisting of numerous armored and motorized divisions.
Such smaller scale operations allow you to keep inflicting casualties on the enemy, while also forcing them to potentially strip other portions of their line to deal with the sudden onslaught. The danger, of course, is that your weakened lines could in turn be attacked. A situation such as this generally ends when one army is exhausted, and incapable of retaining parity. Then general offensives can again be launched.
If pressure is continually applied to them, however, they are never given the chance and an offensive can break through enemy lines into the enemy’s unprotected rear areas. This opens up the possibility of encircling enemy formations, and often causes opponents to abandon good defensive ground (either because of terrain, forts, or them being dug in) to escape the encirclement.
However, be careful of overextending your mobile armored forces in risky thrusts as this opens the possibility of being encircled yourself in a “backhand blow” counterattack like the one performed in and around Kharkov in 1943.
Defense in Depth
The goal of defending in depth is not to grind down your opponent on the front-line in one massive rolling battle, but to slow and degrade his combat forces as they advance, while trying to preserve the economic heart of your nation.
To do this, it is necessary to form secondary fallback lines across defensible terrain such as the Dnieper River or even several provinces from the initial front line to contain initial breaches of the front.
The very nature of Russian geography will ensure that most large sweeping advances will be made in the relatively flat plains of Ukraine, the perfect environment for tanks. Romanian marines will be among the first to attack across the river-line opening the way for German panzers. Because of this the Soviet player should place small groups of five or so Heavy Tank divisions along strategic points of the front. This will enable him to react much more quickly and not have to deal with the strategic redeployment organization penalty.
маскировка
Deception contributed to major Soviet victories including the Battle of Stalingrad, the Battle of Kursk, and Operation Bagration (in Belarus): in these cases, surprise was achieved despite very large concentrations of force, both in attack and in defense. In Hearts of Iron IV deception will have to be limited by the division Icon and 3D model display, hovering over the icon will unfortunately show the division composition, however if the German player is not looking closely enough you can engage in clever deception.
This template of one Heavy and four motorized will suffice as a decoy. An example of deception in game would be to deploy these false Heavy tank divisions to confuse the enemy into believing your strike is occurring elsewhere by keeping your real divisions behind your lines until it is the right moment to strike.
Fake divisions in a fake battle plan above.
Our real objective is to take out Romania.
We will order a general offensive to paralyze the enemy lines. Casualties are not a concern for the Soviets.
While the Germans eye the army in the north, they will be destroyed in their neglect of the south.
Army Composition
Your army will be composed out of one type of infantry. We are going to take advantage of Mass Assault’s superb -0.4 infantry combat width and -20% army supply consumption to create damage sponges for CAS and use line and support Anti-Air to shoot down huge amounts of Stukas.
The template is composed of 23 Infantry battalions, 1 Line Artillery battalion, and 1 Line Anti-Air battalion to round off our template to 40.8 combat width once we research Vast Offensives. We will include Engineers, Support Artillery, and Support Anti-Air to increase our defensive ability. Recon companies are a VERY good choice for addition if you want to increase the chance for your general to pick a better tactic. We will be promoting Ivan Konev (Level 5 tank commander) to Field Marshall as we will have to sack Tuchakevsky to keep Rokkosovskey.
This template will be our standard heavy tank division of 5 Motorized battalions, and 5 Heavy tank II battalions. You may want to change it to a 6 / 4 setup if you believe the German Armor to be particularly potent, however you will need more tanks to deploy a division. These offer superior armor and breakthrough to medium tanks and will allow us to be on an equal footing with even Medium Tank IIIs. You can create an additional template with mechanized instead of motorized to create a stronger defensive tank divisions. The ones pictured here are suited only for immediate counter-offensive against enemy tanks.
This will be our decisive counter towards enemy 40 width armor and is well suited to punching holes through infantry front lines. It will consist of 2 Heavy SPG battalions, 9 Mechanized battalions, and 8 Heavy tank battalions.
Armor Variants:
Our Heavies should always prioritize reliability and gun performance in that order. This will allow us to fight in areas of horrific infrastructure without losing hundreds of tanks to the attrition (we will suffer 0% attrition). We will however, still lose infantry equipment and motorized to attrition.
Our SPGs are similar in this regard, we only want to boost our soft attack to more epic proportions.
We will upgrade to Heavy Tank IIIs once the front has stabilized.
Here we can see the positive results of producing Heavies over Mediums.
Great Purge Choices
This is very simple:
1st event get rid of Khrushchev who provides a useless bonus of communism support increase.
2nd event get rid of Tuchakevsky. We will promote Ivan Konev to be a level 4 Field Marshall in his place.
3rd event get rid of of the Navy and the Air force. The Air Support and Recovery Rate are far more important than some trivial weather and capital ship bonuses.