Chapter I
1st - 31st January 1938
Opposed to vanilla or other mods, usual BlackICE game typically begins with a lot of decisions and events, perhaps the most important one is in game difficulty setting (decision in the middle) - we will be playing on normal Hearts of Iron difficulty and on normal BlackICE, which gives player some small penalties of which, the most important one is -10% IC efficiency for production.
The event to the right allows us to choose how we will approach recruitment - for the most time the middle option is the right choice.
One of the most important decisions every year is national and espionage focus. Espionage focus allows us to focus our spies into more specific areas of interest like lowering neutrality, tech espionage efficiency increase etc. - we will be using tech espionage for the whole duration of the campaign as it gives us +2% IC efficiency for production. As for national focus - we will be using different ones every year depending on our focus, for the first year, 1936, we will be using Plan Z in order to build our submarine navy which we will use to starve UK when we enter the war. (for those who live in BlackICE part of the forums - yes, my buildup will be inspired by oumajgads guide, but I definitely won't copy all of the stuff he has done).
BlackICE also allows you to set individual difficulty for all the major nations and also for some minors like Canada, Australia. You can notice that Soviet AI will have 30% more IC efficiency than Germany and they are even buffed with hard and soft attack. On the other hand they will be drowning in resources so if we get our hands on enough money we will have no problems to stockpile our resources on 99,999 before war.
All allied nations also received similar bonuses like Japan, SU and Italy, however China AI did not receive any as Japan sometimes tends to fare badly in China if the Chinese AI have also bonuses.
During 1st day we've changed our laws and switched some ministers, Goebbels became foreign minister - small daily dissent change and increased research efficiency are good bonuses compared to minor decrease in ruling support decrease, which is compensated by our new minister of security, Rudolf Diels, he provides us with bonuses in 4 different areas, all of them pretty good, extra money are always welcome and increased espionage is also welcome. The most important ones are ruling party support and counterespionage - ruling party support is important in BlackICE and other countries often send their own spies to support hostile parties. The most important change was Hjalmar Schacht becoming armament minister and head of intelligence, pretty competent man, as he will provide us 10% IC efficiency for production, effectively removing penalty from BlackICE difficulty setting.
Fritz Bayerlein and von Blomberg are usual nobrainers in vanilla and in almost every mod, giving us increased supply throughput and lowered supply consumption. Last change in cabinet was Ulrich Grauert becoming chief of the air force for bonuses in air organization and in air intercept efficiency.
Ministers weren't only things changed - we've changed also couple of laws, in most cases we've lowered our grip on the country - from totalitarian system we went to repression and we've also restricted the amount of propaganda in the press which gave us another 8% IC efficiency. Usual switch from consumer product orientation to mixed industry also happened. Last change was adapting minimal training in order to increase amount of submarines we can produce during upcoming year, submarine crews will gain enough experience by raiding convoys when the war inevitably starts.
In the east Japan annexed their puppet state of Manchukuo, which will give them more control over the region as well as some more IC - I usually see Japanese AI doing better in China when Manchukuo is annexed. In Germany we've started improving our rail network system which allowed us to push our IC efficiency even higher. Increase in our rail network was preceded by intensive research and it's implementation will cost us some IC and supplies for about half of a year, but it's worth it. Similar research can also be done for roads, seaports and airfields. All of them also provide decision to further improve them and to provide strategic effect.
BlackICE introdouces scripted invasions which are meant to provide bigger challenge to the player - of course we will be playing with scripted invasions (player is not given option of scripted invasions and he must undertake all of them manually). The other event is government secretary focus - we've sent him to nationalize private sector, secretly hoping for a failure as it will improve peoples opinion of the government and in the end we could use IC on something more useful than consumer goods - this is also what happened and freed IC worth of one submarine flotilla.
On 3rd January, after initial setup has been done, and all flags for BlackICE game engine were set, the game finally begun. First thing we did was spam of the trades to get some money we can use for purchases of rare materials we desperately need and other very interesting things like new strategic resources. Apart from supplies we are also selling fuel, with all those money we could import much more crude oil and we still have plenty of time to refine new fuel for our stockpile before war begins.
So far we won't be importing anything, first we will improve our relations with USA and Soviet Union in order to get discounts and then we will start importing rare materials and crude oil en mass. Smaller purchases of metal will also be likely as we will use a lot of metal for our strategic resources and strategic effects purchases.
BlackICE also provides lot of historical events like formation of unique Wehrmacht and SS units, for Wehrmacht we've chosen to build our divisions by ourselves and we were rewarded by +15% more IC. For SS we went with ahistorical full divisions as I don't have patience to deal with changes and reorganizations upgrade events do.
Our internal spies are mostly busy with catching enemy spies (3 pips) and bu increasing NSDAP support (1 pip). We've also sent spies into Austria to increase local support of NSDAP which is common move in order to make Anschluss happen earlier. We're also increasing threat of the Soviet Union to make the World believe we're acting only in our defense and to attract more countries into Axis. The rest of foreign spies have been sent to Italy and Turkey to undertake covert ops which will lower neutrality of those countries. Why we're doing that in Italy is obvious - earlier Italy gets into Axis, earlier we get Pact of Steel strategic effect. Turkey posses chromite, valuable strategic resource which will allow us to boost our IC efficiency even further by another 5%.
This is our leadership allocation and research priorities. We're investing some leadership in keeping Turkey close to our faction as they're often influenced by other factions and sometimes they're even aligning to a faction by themselves in order to stay neutral. Some leadership is of course invested in spy recruitment to cover loses and rest of leadership is invested mostly in project that will bolster our nation, like increased education investment, broadcasting, monumental architecture and to keep our military techs up to date with other World powers. This year we won't be using any leadership on officer recruitment and any spare LS will be used to increase number of spies we will keep in reserve. Minimal training severely harms our ability to recruit officers as it gives whopping -50% penalty and we're suffering another -50% penalty due to keeping our battle commanders in charge (more on that later).
During middle of January we've started working on our giant infrastructure project which will provide us another strategic effect and giving us 2% increase in our IC efficiency. There are 5 of giant infrastructure project which first of them you can build once you've selected long term economic boost at the beginning of the year and once you've accumulated sufficient amount of materials. To build another ones you have to research another level of Giant infrastructure projects techs.
I apologize there is no screen of production screen - I swear I did it, but I've probably pressed different hotkey. What's important in BlackICE - start adding things into the queue on 3rd January as it takes 2 days to properly set up the game and if you added something into the queue during the first 2 days may (and will) have incorrect build time and IC cost (much higher).
On 3rd January we've added total of 10 IC into the queue. All of them in provinces with heavy industrial capacity, heavy IC behaves exactly like TRP mod - it increases amount of base IC in that province by 25% per level so a province with 10 IC and 1 heavy IC behaves like a province with 12.5 base IC. We've also added 18 coastal submarines and 96 submarines into the build queue. The coastal subs will be constructed faster than normal ones and will provide us some practicals which will reduce cost and buildtime of normal sumbarines. Last thing we've did in the build queue was canceling construction of one heavy cruiser and 3 destroyers which were there at the start of the game and we've put all planes under construction into the end of the queue.
During January all units were redeployed into Berlin for OOB reorganization and some, mostly flavor units were deleted and provided us a bit of manpower.
