ValzRon’s MP Soviet Union Guide

Overview

This is a min-maxing guide as well as a strategy guide for the Soviet Union. It will go into great detail and teach you many things about the game, the USSR in specific.This guide can be helpful for beginners and experts alike!

Introduction / Philosophy

In this guide I will show you how to play the Soviet Union in multiplayer games, particularly for expert Discord/Teamspeak lobbies that have a huge list of rules and are very much oriented to create the most balanced and compelling Hearts of Iron experience. This means that the HOI4 community has created a meta on which they play the game on a high level. This meta evolves and changes every month so you will have to play the game yourself and learn and experience it yourself to keep up to date.

I’m trying to keep this guide as close to the current meta as possible so that you can apply my strategy in these games.

Now what is this guide about? Its going to teach you some basic things about the Soviet Union that can apply regardless of your strategy but specifically I’m going to show you how I play the Soviet Union and why. This guide will teach you how to play with Deep Battle!

• ”The Great Purge” and the “Molotov-Ribbentrop” pact as well as the German Research
  Treaty are mandatory and must be obeyed.
• You can only take countries and territories that are affected by the “Molotov-Ribbentrop” pact.
• There is a fixed amount of Equipment that you can send to China (usually around 40k guns
  and 700 planes).
• All countries trade with you FIRST and buy licenses like Fighter I from you.
• Japan can’t go to war with you, Sweden is usually banned, and raiding convoys in certain vital areas is not allowed on some servers.
• And most importantly, 1944 Air Technology is completely disallowed! This will be later referred
  as the “Fighter II meta”. Some servers that don’t require a very high amount of experience
  and hours don’t have that rule in place, so I will show you how you can apply this strategy on
  the Fighter III meta as well!
• “Air Production” Focus is banned pretty much everywhere.

Note that you are not allowed to attack Iran or Afghanistan in most games now so try to get an Afghanistan player!

In the current patch 1.5 and onwards, the Deep Battle Doctrine was buffed but NKVD nerfed. This is generally bad for the USSR but soft attack on all units especially artillery was nerfed. This means that Germany has a much harder time pushing even infantry compared to 1.3 patch.
This means stacking units in all provinces close to the german border became a more vialble tactic and I abandoned Mass Mobilization in favor of additional supply reduction and better tanks.
Overall its great for the USSR because you can proper stall without going down an overall inferior Doctrine.

However, its still not easy and argueably the hardest country to play alongside Germany. Remember that you face upto 5 Axis nations simultaneously.

The change in Doctrine also means that I’ve done a harder shift towards Tanks and Tank production. Also, since you can’t annex the countries south of you anymore, you should get an Afghanistan player to manage your airforcce but you need to vet him properly. He needs to have a very good understanding of air combat otherwise you will waste your time building up only for Afghanistan to ruin your game.

“Waking the Tiger” has brought us many interesting mechanics like command power, a new traits system, abilities, descisions and an overhauled government. I’m going to show you how this applies to the USSR.

Now there is an important thing you need to know, I don’t play vanilla hoi4 anymore. This guide will be for vanilla but when I play, I play exclusively a mod called “PFW”. Here is a link:

This mod basicly is an enhanced version of vanilla but is especially great for performance.

Political Power and National Focus

It is pretty much common knowledge now that “Collectivist Propaganda” is the only reasonable tree you should go down. The reason is obviously the massive production boost in the form of stability and the 10% Construction. Now you will miss out on having Rokossovsky who is a highest tier advisor like Rommel and you will not get a -50% on one aircraft but it is still absolutely worth it.

You can stay at 100% stability by improving workers conditions and faster the effects of the Purge wear off. Even at war, you can stay at 100% by constantly pushing the stability beyond the max (that works).

“Stalin Constitution” and “Collectivist Propaganda” should always be first because they provide you with a sum of 280 PP to change your Economy to “War Economy” and open the Market to “Free Trade”. After that go for the “Five Year Plan” then finish the “Collectivist Propaganda” tree. You are going to want the 4th research slot as fast as possible so you have to do “Armament Effort” which kind of hurts your civilian economy but is necessary, and after that “Workers Culture”.

From there on your pretty much free to pick the order of the other focuses. However, you should not do “The Great Purge” before June 1938 and you shouldn’t forget to do “Lessons of War” the moment you go to war with any country!

I would say the first 3 are absolute no brainers and should always be the same, which are “War Economy”, “Free Trade” and “Captain of Industry” in that order. With that 280 PP boost and your daily PP you should be able to get all 3 in a very short time and after that get your Popular Figurehead for 15% Stability. For the rest, always use your brain and think, “do I need this right now? Am I going to research Tanks now or Planes?”.

I see a lot of newer players make the mistake of spending PP on stuff they don’t need right at that moment. Don’t get any army advisiors when you won’t see combat before mid 41 for example. Just try to min-max as much as you can since you will need a lot of PP for descisions later.

Also, you may notice that I have Mikhail Tukhachevsky and Alexander Yegorov. I haven’t purged them obviously. Georgy Zhukov has the same effect but can only be assigned as “Mass Assault Expert” if you do “Positive Heroism”. Both cost 250 PP instead of 150 for the normal “Military Theorist” but provide -10% research cost instead of -7% which is worth it in my opinion. Yegorov is a “Army Defence” expert who provides +10% division defense for all your troops, very useful.

Everything else is more or less self-explanatory, MiG for the Fighters is required but OKMO and Tula Arms are my personal choices. Conscription law should be upped because you get 1.5% + 0.5% without changing it but “Total Mobilization” takes away 3% later when you go to war with Germany.

Research

• With tanks, start the BT-7 (Light tank II) before you accept the German tank treaty. Wait with the -100% ahead of time bonus to apply it on the T-34 not the A-32. Don’t forget to research SPA and TD for the T-34. Get a license for the A-32 to get a 70% bonus. Talk to your allies to sell licenses like the medium tank II. Get the first mechanized tech to get a flat hardness buff on your motorized.
• You should start researching Fighter IIs in 1939 and CAS I and II in late 1939 (get the license for all three of them, important!).
• AT and AA is optional. If you use it, get 1939 tech before you start mils construction. You can get improved AT tech ahead of time which is recommended. For me it works well and I’ll show you how later.
• Don’t shy away getting Concentrated Industry and Construction half a year ahead of time.
• Don’t bother getting Radar at all.

Again I want to stress how helpful an Afghanistan player is because he will help you research Air Doctrines and free up a lot of Research for you.

Industry and Trade

Industry is your biggest strength. You start off as a powerful country with much potential and over 5 years of time to become the number 1 economic power in the world. You are the only one on your team who can grow your economy without any hinderances from the start of the game when as soon as you change to “War Economy”.

To boost that growth and maximize it you must follow the steps I pointed out in the “Political Power and National Focuses” section of this guide and cooperate with your allies.
Talk to the UK, USA, Canada and Australia to make them buy your Fighter I license, China to buy your Weapons I license etc.

As long as the UK is stuck on “Civilian Economy” or “Early Mobilization”, its wasteful to trade with them since a good chunk goes into consumer goods. You can always check the trade tab to find out if any friendly player is buying from another nation other than you.

The massive Stability, War Economy combined with War Bonds and Trade will boost your civilian economy so hard that it you are going to end up with 250-300 civs by 1939.

Let’s talk about the construction of civs and how you should do it. First of all, you have to pick a couple of provinces as your dedicated civ construction provinces. You have to factor in pre-existing infrastructure, open slots and proximity to the front to decide which ones are the best.

I have already done that for you in this guide and picked the following provinces: Moscow, Leningrad, Stalingrad, Stalino, Kursk, Kharkov, Cherniv, Orenburg, Ufa and Krasdonar. Cherniv is the closest I was willing to go towards the front, so this one is optional.
Ufa is like Orenburg but needs +1 more infrastructure upgrade than its neighbor.
And when you run out of space in these provinces and you need filler until you get the next “Concentrated Industry” go for the infrastructure 6 provinces like Saratov, Kazan, Sverdlovsk, Chelyabinsk and the provinces affected by the “Infrastructure Effort” if it happens to boost a province above the average 4-5 infrastructure (provinces affected are random).

Now you should upgrade the infrastructure in some of the provinces mentioned above. To find out which ones to upgrade and when the upgraded infrastructure pays off, a friend of mine created an Excel sheet that lays out the math. Don’t pay attention to the total days of construction since your construction technology will change over time, all that matters is the difference in days. Also if an extra level of infrastructure saves me 1-2 days I won’t bother.

This chart is going to assume that you don’t build civs above “Concentrated Industry III” (1939) because you won’t build civs past that point even if you get the next level of Industry. For mils, its impossible to create a scenario as the Soviet Union where upgraded infrastructure returns its cost if you only plan on building mils in that province.

This section should clear up the myth that more infrastructure is needed in these provinces.

You start of with infrastructure just a little bit because “Civilian Economy” is going to slow civ construction for 90 days. As you can see, the numbers are a little off because I’m only getting 5 factories from trade where as you should get about 12. So you should be able to build with close to 30 factories right from the beginning.

This will be your queue until 1939 but you can always add provinces like the ones I mentioned above to never stop building civs. Don’t build anything else! Especially no airports, naval bases, dockyards or forts. Just focus on civs until early/mid 1939.

When 1939 comes and you finished “Concentrated Industry III” queue up civs only in the high value provinces that have 7 infrastructure and above and the ones that you upgraded. After that go FULLY on mils until January 1941.

Also keep in mind that infrastructure now affects how much resources you can gain from a province! So its worth to build up Azerbaidshan or other provinces that give Oil and Aluminum.
When the Allies ask for more of it, use your descisions and build up infrastructure fully to get all the resources.

Your trade should get higher and higher over the years and outnumber the imports. Around 1940-1941 you should get between 70-90 factories just from trade alone if you stay on “Free Trade” which I would recommend. However if you get raided too hard or the Allies just aren’t buying for some reason, you should go down to “Export Focus”.

This current patch has boosted the USSR’s civilian factory count and equipment output hard by introducing Stability, so use it!

Production

Like Germany we are going to focus on fighters, guns and tanks.
We want to stockpile a huge amount of guns to train our infantry in early 1940. Guns are your most important resource but make sure you don’t overproduce.

Make sure cancel the rest, you won’t need it. The fighters are all for China. That’s all what you are going to be stuck with for the next couple years until 1939.

When you get to 1939 and new mils get in, you should get 30 factories on infantry equipment and then focus heavily on fighters. You have to find a balance where you focus on fighters first but not only and put some production on tanks and other equipment. The way I do it is by putting 60% of the factories I get on fighters as they come in, 30% on tanks and 10% on artillery/at/aa and other stuff. Then I gradually shift towards 80% on tanks when I hit about 90 factories on fighters (100 is where I usually stop). This is really a practice thing that you will learn by playing the same nation over and over again.

In mid 1941 you can get 8-10k planes that way, which you will need. Additionally ask the Allies to give you a constant flow of aircraft through Murmansk or Norway.

Lend-Lease

In some games its ok to lend-lease Ethiopia but almost nobody does it nowadays. And I can’t really comment on that anymore since I play with a mod that requires no XP to change Templates.

The reason you should send support equipment monthly alongside is a glitch that is currently in the game which stops giving you XP if you don’t lend-lease constantly.

In the current meta its not allowed to send tanks, that’s why you have to go with the second-best option. AI Spain will use your aircraft recklessly and gain you lots of air XP which we will need later on. You can also get Aces by using air volunteers.

Since strategic bombers are banned on most servers, players can’t use them, but AI can. That’s why you should send the bombers too. Don’t send any of your “Fighter I”’s, only the crappy “Interwar Fighters”.

In early 1938 Japan will declare war on China and your lend-lease will be a deciding factor in their survival. But don’t get your hopes up China will lose that war almost every time. To ensure that, the rules on most servers allow you to send around 40k guns and 1k planes or less (again read the Rules!).

Always check the rules first! Sometimes you can only send 700 planes or no bombers at all. Generally, I would recommend that you send your tactical bombers because they are good in the early game. Volunteers usually not allowed outside of Spain.

In return, you will slow Japan down for the Allies and get tons of army XP and air XP. You can send less guns to China if you don’t trust him, so check what he is doing and if he understands how to play the game.

Templates and Variants

Pretty simple right? Its because this strategy relies so much on defense, HP and recovery rate and filling as many of these divisions into all your provinces as possible. It’s very cheap and fits more men than regular 20 width division. This is your bread and butter. Use this division everywhere you need them (port guards, reserves, etc.). Don’t bother giving it Artillery or Support, you will drown in replenishment costs.

Now you need some elites. Some divisions that can, under the right circumstances, get something done. This division will cover important cities, crossings and the entire Stalinline. This is your heart. Your valued troops that you need to take care of but don’t be afraid to lose them, its part of the job.

These guys can trade well with Infantry and can dig in and defend against aircraft aswell.

These divisions have to defend some of the most important and vulnerable places. They can punch through a Panzer IV if you tech the AT gun well and keep the division width low for more piercing.

For Spain, you can really use whatever you want. It probably won’t matter anyway. I usually send 40 width mountaineers with all support equipment I have. The way I do it is by pumping out a lot of standard divisions with no equipment to raise my special forces cap.

Two Medium II SPAA’s with a level 5 gun should give you over 100 air attack and the tank destroyers are good if Germany brings Panthers and it gives you more hard attack. Also you could do 4 SPAA’s so, thats just a personal choice. The motorized is necessary to get over 30 organization, otherwise without Mobile Warfare your tanks don’t last long in battle and you will sustain higher amounts of losses.

Other than that, I don’t do anything else like motorized, mechanized or paratroopers because they don’t provide anything useful for me.

If you still have army XP, it’s always good to go for extra reliability, don’t worry if you can’t get level 5 on that. Engine won’t do much since the entire division needs tanks with the same speed. Upgrading armor is useless because, even if Germany brings “Panzer IV”’s with max gun, they will pierce you, so armor is an all or nothing deal (in most cases nothing).

So its just gun gun gun all the way, for the tank destroyers and SPAA’s too of course!

Engine has top priority, then reliability, then range and in some cases gun is good too.

Here you don’t want speed but bombing capability.

With these divisions and variants you should be good to go!

The Purge

“The Great Purge” is National Focus that you have to pick in order to avoid a Civil War. You should wait with that focus until June/July 1938 to delay the Land Doctrine research penalty. Here is a rundown of the decisions.

Don’t forget to do “Lessons of War” when you go to war with Finland and “War Bonds”. They will provide you with some addtional civs for 180 days.

Road to War (Phase 1)

Specifically, how you should proceed after the “Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact”. You should start justifying on Finland. Don’t justify on Karjala because they might give you that, instead go for Salla. Then continue with Romania, Lithuania, Estonia and Latvia.
You shouldn’t do all of them at the same time since the PP cost goes up for every simultaneous justification. So just wait until you get the event to integrate them.

To fight Finland, you can grind combat width 10 Infantry against him to get traits or just finish him asap. It’s up to you. I play on a mod that prevents Generals/Marshals from gaining XP so its useless to grind. But if you do grind, use Zhukov and divisions with 3 tank battalions and 2 motorized battalions to make it count as a tank division to grind out “Panzer Expert”.

Use Tukhachevsky as your Field Marshal and grind some Generals to get the traits you want.

The current patch allows you to get some basic traits and then use CP to decide what you want.
Here is a Screenshot from the wiki of how you can get some of the basic traits.

While you do all of that you should have endless amounts of your Infantry template queued up for recruitment and deploy them. Also, have at least 5 tank divisions queued to keep an eye out for when you can deploy them.

There is a minor glitch that you could use to your advantage where you copy your tank template and disable all their tank reinforcements. Then you get them out without any tanks and train them to level 3 without losing any tanks from training. As soon as you need them, just convert the division back into the exact copy WITH tanks enabled, they won’t lose XP from that.

Deploy your entire Airforce in wings of 100, normal operations and only one mission (like air superiority).
Build up airports! Preferably behind the Stalinline. But if that falls, its hard to find more airports so build up backup airports far behind the Stalinline! Don’t build forts! EVER.
The new Fort Buster ability will crack any fort and give a buff even when the fort is completly destroyed.

Okay let’s go to the final stages before the war. You should get all your Infantry out, guard your ports and have them roughly laid out at the front. Position your tanks near Kiev and Minsk so you can both strike in Ukraine and Poland.

As you can see, I showed you a general idea where you can retreat to and where you should have entrenched Reserves waiting (especially Stalinline). Your Infantry should be doing a multilayered defense. That means the first line should be backed by a second and third line and then loosely placed behind that.

How you structure your army I can’t really teach you. Find what works for you. Since the current patch capped the Field Marshal, you have to use Generals under a Fiell Marshal who controlls 5 armies. The way I do it is, letting my main Marshal (Tukhachevsky) control my best 5 Generals who controll the 40 widths, Tankbusters and Tanks. All the other 20 width troops are controlled by secondary Infantry leaders who are controlled by lower tier Field Marshals that you can promote.
Then I use colors to make it more distinguishable for me.
The main trick I and most players use, is putting all your Generals on guard mode so they can hold 72 Divisions. Make them guard a province far far away and disable ALL the orders in garrison mode. That way they will only stand around and can be manually controlled. This obviously means you will have to manually distribute and manage EVERYTHING, but you’ll have to learn that eventually if you want to play HOI4 well.

Many Germany players break through the Baltics to encircle your army in Latvia so check the rules if you can build a port there like I did.

Put more divisions in cities and on important points that can be attacked from multiple directions. You can also put loose divisions into marches and forests as backup.

Use the Tankbusters in cities and important breakthrough spots for german tanks.
GUARD YOUR PORTS. All of them. In Leningrad and Sevastopol guard next to the port aswell.
Sometimes you’ll have to guard your border to Norway, don’t forget that.

Now you wait for Germany to attack you. Many servers have set 22nd of June 1941 as the earliest date for Operation Barbarossa. The more time you get, the better!

Operation Barbarossa (Phase 2)

In 1942 you will be able to get Engineers 3 and support weapons 4 which improves your defence even further!

Use your entrenchment bonus, its very useful. Understand that no matter how much defense your division has, it can only block a certain amount of attacks even if your defense is higher! That means that defense becomes useless if you have more than the enemies attack but nevertheless you should strive for the highest value possible to improve your chances in combat.

Keep an eye out for their tanks, good Axis players will come with both Spanish and German tanks. Romania will push you with high tier Infantry and AT guns over the various rivers and good planning bonus.

Your primary job in the early stages of the war, don’t get spearheaded too often! Hold the lines and just micro. Your tanks should be played defensively to aid troops that are about to be encircled. Your first line will fill all the gaps that the German tanks will tear into your lines while the second and third line should be manually moved so that they stay in place and don’t lose their entrenchment bonus. If the German tanks get greedy and push too hard, punish them. Your very very deep defence will allow you time to manage but you have to get involved for this to work. You want him to push organicly so that the resistance gets higher and higher by your clustered units along the border.

Don’t be afraid to retreat from a combat, keep an eye out to your flanks. If you see an encirclement forming, pull out. Use strategic redeployment when out of combat. Use reserves from your back lines to pin the enemy or hold a chokepoint. Don’t forget to zoom out every once in a while.

Avoid fighting in open plains, use forest, marches, hills and rivers to your advantage!
Especially the Pinsk marshes can be a ♥♥♥♥♥ to take for the germans. Fight tooth and nail to hold them since they link their Ukraine offensive with the polish.

Most importantly, focus your entire air force onto ONE air zone to contest at least one. If you split your air force, they will get slaughtered because the game takes superior numbers into consideration in dogfights.

Your strength is less attrition, so don’t upgrade or repair Infrastructure, let the Germans suffer!
Your doctrine gives you an insane amount of reinforce rate, so you can quickly recover from a combat if you are not constantly hounded by tanks.

If you must retreat from the eastern Poland air zone, do it! It’s hard to contest that air zone, so have a retreat plan to get everything out of that zones reach. You want to avoid fighting under enemy air superiority as much as possible, although that’s unavoidable.

Turning the Tide (Phase 3)

During that time, you will get some advantages that you didn’t have in the previous stages of the war because the enemy is going to be spread thin. Most Germany players attack with around 100 divisions and sometimes without artillery. That means they will have a hard time filling all their gaps and leave you a lot of space to punish his mistakes.
In the south you have the Romanians, who don’t have tanks normally.

That is going to be the moment where you strike back. Take whatever tanks you still have left and go into the offensive.

When D-Day happens, the attention is on the allies. In many cases the German tanks will be gone from the frontline or poorly managed and the tight grip on the air zones will be loosened so that you could even get air superiority in some cases. Use your tanks to systematically open dangerous situations that require the Axis attention.

As you can see, there are no ports in that area. Your tanks should be able to push though the Romanians if you focus your air on Ukraine. Use your Battleships to give you shore bombardment too.

If the Allies have successfully landed, try to retake as much territory as possible and rebuild your economy with a focus on tanks.
Try to be an annoyance to the Axis, do planned pushes with your General and make the German front thinner and thinner. In that stage of the war you can recover very fast while Germany can’t dedicate more Infantry to your front.

Your research slots should have given you everything in artillery by now so that you get strong on the offensive.

When Japan joins the war, don’t bother. Keep him from snaking but don’t put up a front.

Final words

I hope I could teach you guys something in this Guide! I had fun writing it, but it took me a long time because I had to play the game a lot and adjust to the changing meta.

This strategy is generally seen as the norm right now but everyone plays a little bit diffrenly.

I wanted to make a Guide that can help players overcome the fear of playing the USSR, which is by far my favorite country to play as.

Anyway, thanks for reading everyone and if you enjoyed this guide hit the like button!