NatChi in DoomsDay - Anyone tried this?

[noobermenschen]

I was looking for a challenge in DD and boy I found one. Nationalist China starts the DoomsDay scenario with 10 effective IC, 20% dissent (25% once you trade out your suck ministers for good ones), obsolete units at half strength and Commies all over the board.

Oh yeah, and all your trading partners are a**holes.

Played the first month and managed to:

1) Take advantage of a hiccup in the diplomacy menu (gained 4000 energy and metal from puppets on 3 Oct) to set up some hideously expensive trades for supplies.

2) Get all my territory connected so all my units are supplied from the capitol.

3) Cut off and destroy four or five ChiCom divisions.

4) Established a more or less continuous front after trading several provinces with ChiComs.

5) Throw ALL production into consumer goods and get my dissent down to 18%

It looks like I have a big numerical advantage for the moment, but the Commies have IC available for production so that could change. I can go another month or so before I have to cancel my horrible trades and start producing my own supplies and reinforcing my units, by which time I should be under 12% dissent. Soviets haven't declared war on me yet, should I expect that soon?

Best case if I can take out ChiComs, stay out of Ivan's way and get some research done (I'm also way behind on techs and don't make enough money to pay for my research) is to be at about 50 effective IC, so nothing but Milishy and maybe a couple of HQs for the time being, that of course is after I get my current divisions up to strength. Any other tips from others who have played this one?

 

[JRHINDO]

Here is another tip: Pray Uncle Joe is busy in Europe and Korea!

The Soviets usualy dow NatChi and get ComChi in their alliance around 1947 (or earlier if unlucky). They proceed to give manchuria to the Reds and then helpthem with heavy units from Korea.

A real advice would be to use all the useless, no ressource, no ic provs in central china as traps. ie: you let Red divs take a long strip of useless lands, then you encircle and destroy them. The only problem is to be sure you have enough units to cover large areas and not get overwhelmed yourself!

Good luck!

 

[unmerged(49948)]

aahh I've wanted to do this campaign so bad. I can never pull this one off, its difficult at first. I have a quick question about it actually, I don't mean to hijack the thread. At the beginning Nat China has the big IC penalty to start off the game, how do you get this to go down? Are there events? Is it just over time? I can never get past that IC hit in the beginning of that campaign...

 

[noobermenschen]

aahh I've wanted to do this campaign so bad. I can never pull this one off, its difficult at first. I have a quick question about it actually, I don't mean to hijack the thread. At the beginning Nat China has the big IC penalty to start off the game, how do you get this to go down? Are there events? Is it just over time? I can never get past that IC hit in the beginning of that campaign...

No hijack, it's very much on topic. The IC penalty is to represent a more realistic picture of NatChi's true industrial potential, and to demonstrate what a mess the country was in. it's also part of the challenge.

It actually works much better than simply whacking the amount of IC in Chinese provinces, as it represents the pitiful state of the economy, and how you could improve it greatly by putting a few improvements in (better ministers, improving your factories, getting rid of dissent). I don't think this penalty goes away, the best you can get short term is -70% by researching the next two machine tools techs. Your ministers will boost that to -55% if you swap out the Intel guy for the resource industrialist. That of course is all predicate on getting that dissent down, a chore in itself (if I ever needed an epic song event it's now ) which will take many months as all your divisions are terribly understrength as well.

And thank you for the advice JRHINDO. Kobayashi Maru anyone?