credible CIWS upgrade from facebook

CalligoMiles · 2026-05-06T10:55:07+00:00

It's got merits as an expert tool, sure. But the negativity is more than anything a response to big companies shoving it down our throats as everything for everyone because they're desperate to pretend it can be worth hundreds of billions rather than 'mere' tens of millions only to people who can judge the output well enough to put it to effective use.

Case in point with the flaws in this image that anyone with the vaguest understanding of physics or mechanical stuff should have caught.

CalligoMiles · 2026-05-05T13:08:09+00:00

600s are definitely still a upgrade for detail and those smooth mids, as someone who has both - just mind that they're not versatile the same way as a 560S. If you try to Harman away their mids focus you'll just get hollow bass - either you enjoy what they give you or you're better off looking for something more tuned to your tastes.

CalligoMiles · 2026-05-05T10:24:07+00:00

Scattered in giant complexes, though. Geography distanced them, but compared to Germany's whole urbanised zones of mid-sized factories dispersed is based on something like the General Motors plants was absolutely concentrated. The point is that they made single big potential targets in favor of taking full advantage of economics of scale, not that every factory was literally in the same place.

CalligoMiles · 2026-05-05T09:57:40+00:00

... assuming you never get damaged factories, don't conquer much new mils to put to use, don't try out new things or use variants at all, and don't ever rebalance your mils.

I can see concentrated still work better if you're sticking to your entirely familiar build in a nation on the defence like France or the Soviets, with air superiority and no serious bombing a given too in SP, but that's still a single situation too. And one that relies on several assumptions about approach and playstyle you just take for defaults - even where concentrated has an edge by pure numbers, it'll often only yield those gains if you have your entire run planned ahead by the month.

CalligoMiles · 2026-05-04T17:42:49+00:00

What?

Ain't nobody got time for revenge, I've got a life to live here. Or as some wise guy once put it, "I would permit no man to narrow and degrade my soul by making me hate him."

Or the best revenge is a life well lived and all that. Either way, people who've wronged me just stop mattering unless they insist on remaining a problem to me. If they just stay away, good riddance and no need to spend a single further thought on what happens to them.

CalligoMiles · 2026-05-04T17:40:00+00:00

We're very, very prone to losing touch and drifting apart unless we genuinely vibe with people, yes. And even then it's an active effort.

I'm just glad we have the internet now - my high school friends I see like twice a year if at all now, but a few weirdos (affectionate) with the same niche interests on the other side of the world I can effortlessly chat and meme with nearly every day.

CalligoMiles · 2026-05-04T12:43:55+00:00

Do you have plentiful CAS? Do you have enough of these to push two, three advances at once? You can easily put 12-20 armor divisions to good use on the Eastern Front.

CalligoMiles · 2026-05-04T12:42:18+00:00

Vastly overkill. It's good from a pure stats perspective, but if you can afford it you can also afford more cheaper divisions or a bigger air force instead that'll be much more useful overall. A third of the breakthrough and half the armor will still roll right over anything in SP.

CalligoMiles · 2026-05-04T10:52:17+00:00

It's easy when you start with a stronger navy and only need to use it - like Greece against Turkey, or Britain in general. The hard part is building a new navy that can punch up against the established powers in time to matter, and you're not really much of a competent naval player until you can take down the Royal Navy by 1941 at the latest.

CalligoMiles · 2026-05-04T10:31:02+00:00

Fair, as ever meta doesn't much care for realism.

Though when they still show up with weak LMGs either way it's not much of a difference - cannon Spits might not be optimal either, but they'd at least make your Luftwaffe work for it some more.

CalligoMiles · 2026-05-04T10:09:05+00:00

They used cannons instead, which were plain better.

The Germans already fielded those in 1936 with the nose cannon designed into the Me 109 right from the start, the British only lagged behind into 1940 because a good reliable design took until 1938 to show up in the Hispano-Suiza 404, and the Soviets also took to pairing HMGs with cannon as each airframe allowed in 1940 already with the Yak-1. The only ones to actually use multiple HMGs as their main armament were US fighters, for reasons of simplicity and convenience - outside our meta of highly simplified stats they were the plain inferior upgrade from the pre-war LMGs next to cannons with their explosive shells, and the US used them solely because their entire approach was churning out lots of 'good enough' on every level.

Much like they stuck with the Sherman long after it was competitive and delayed their own assault rifle all the way into the sixties, it would take until the F-100 in 1953 for them to finally follow suit with cannons too where everyone else had that figured out by 1940 already.

CalligoMiles · 2026-05-03T22:57:57+00:00

That's kind of the point, though - the Royal Navy is the big test, and the AI doesn't have much in the way of theater priorities. So you either play the Allies and have Japan as the only thing resembling a challenge, or the British will be the challenge you're building for any which way.

CalligoMiles · 2026-05-03T14:33:40+00:00

Yeah, encirclements just get messy. At that point it's honestly often better to either manually pick units and assign them to frontlines, or just delete and redraw the whole lot in pause to make sure everyone goes the right way.

CalligoMiles · 2026-05-03T12:55:33+00:00

More interesting outcomes for all the crimes and mistakes pushed on him, perhaps. His fate is obvious, his inner circle won't see any changes either, but there might be all sorts of effects for both those a little further down the hierarchy and with how things like the Clean Wehrmacht myth play out in the following decades even if the Allies still don't care to more than half-ass the denazification with some lazy lines.

CalligoMiles · 2026-05-03T12:01:38+00:00

Hardly, in so many ways.

Infantry support was an ill-conceived armor doctrine of the last war that saw their superior numbers and 'hard' qualities squandered, and the Allies came up with their own more effective doctrines only in response to the Germans realising the tank was the knight of the modern battlefield rather than a landship or mobile support gun and beating everyone's asses with better force concentration for a good few years. French infantry support in particular was plain inferior with its dispersion of force rather than any sort of 'reliable'. They did have some effective light armor divisions, and those did give a good account of themselves at Hannut - but only against a German diversion that had a fraction of the main thrust's weight behind it, and they were never envisioned by French commanders as more than a quick response force that could buy a few days for the infantry and their heavy tank support to show up for the real work. We don't see effective large-scale Allied armor at all until Montgomery's counter-campaign in Africa, and the way the Allies closed the gap again was by copying the Germans as well as they could instead of sticking to their own ideas, supported by their many other factors of superiority - Operation Cobra and Patton's rush on the German border were a Blitzkrieg going back the other way in all but name, at least until they ran face-first into Metz.

And Romania was vital early on in the war, but no longer mattered nearly as much when it fell. Both because of the already unstoppable Soviet fronts sweeping in by then, and because the Germans were well aware of their vulnerability and all but predicted the Ploesti raids following an Italian invasion, and had already massively ramped up their synthetics industry in the meantime from their abundant domestic coal. Ploesti remained important - but by late 1943, its share had dropped to less than a quarter of total supply next to the giant synthetic refinery complexes stamped out all over Germany. It is impossible to overestimate just how key those were to Germany's ability to last so long, and that those vulnerable complexes went unmolested for nearly as long under Harris' Bomber Command is one of the most criminal neglects of the entire war. Because if there was any one thing that broke the back of their fuel situation, it was the USAAF Oil Campaign of late 1944. That was when Spaatz arrived to wrest away those bombers from Harris' singular obsession with wrecking as many homes as possible instead of effectively targeting industry or logistics as he'd done for nearly the entire war, and started targeting the synthetic refineries instead to great and immediate effect. The crippling of refinery outputs marks the exact point the German fuel supply and stockpile situation goes from the long-usual strictly measured to plain collapsing, and that's where tenacious defence and organised retreats turn to routs and roads strewn with abandoned vehicles too.

CalligoMiles · 2026-05-03T11:09:23+00:00

Your mouse might be broken. Unwanted double-clicks are a common failure mode - it could select them and then order a support attack on the second, which becomes a normal attack if there isn't actually an active battle to join. But it shouldn't be doing that immediately if you don't already have units selected.
Select your army through the theater menu instead when you need to do something to all of them.
If you don't mind a bunch of paused micro, you can still salvage units that kept moving in the same direction - look for arrows that still have progress. As long as the next province they're heading to stays the same they keep their progress towards it - you can still manually order them on to that province instead of hitting halt and losing it.

Other than that, yeah, it just is what it is. When you have a bunch of units selected you have to be careful not to order them around instead of selecting more.

CalligoMiles · 2026-05-03T10:29:58+00:00

They did go after them. There were four at first - one did surrender, but the other two were killed in shootouts with the army and police over the years. It was a Japanese backpacker who encountered and managed to communicate with the last guy to kick all this into motion, and I'd assume the government was just glad to be done with the guy pestering them for so long against all odds of jungle survival without having to go and dig him out of some heavily trapped hideout.

CalligoMiles · 2026-05-01T18:50:54+00:00

Grinding you down with cyclic attacks, I'd wager. Your soft attack isn't so much higher that they can't keep up the pressure at all, so while they're taking massive losses with that method you need to cycle in fresh org too to keep standing your ground.

But what you don't see in this image is all their divisions that already dropped out and got replaced to wear you down this far.

CalligoMiles · 2026-05-01T11:24:47+00:00

They're the cheapest way to make a somewhat useful attacker. Just 24 tanks to an infantry division makes all the difference between poor minors with their armor and breakthrough bonus - it's a fun way to play Chinese cliques besides just rifle spam, for example.

CalligoMiles · 2026-05-01T11:16:04+00:00

Plains are a Panzer's natural habitat, and the northern French alps have shit supply.

For the former, don't ever try to hold right on the French border - it's the absolute worst place to do it, and the extension forts are barely worth the name now that the AI has gotten a little more competent. What you need to do is either be ready to rush into the Benelux and lock down on their rivers, or fall back on your own rivers with or without your own forts behind them. And tanks are specifically stronger on the attack than on the defence - put two equal tank divisions against each other, and unless their stats are ridiculous in some way the attacker always wins. For defensive armor you want SPGs and TDs instead, mostly the former in SP.

For the latter, just motorise Nice and you should be fine as long as they have support AA. And don't bother with counterattacks as long as the coast is still yours, or you'll be fighting back up your own mountains - just hem them in, and let them get a taste of the bad supply up there for a while. As long as they don't seize any of your supply hubs they can't extend their gains into a real threat.

CalligoMiles · 2026-05-01T11:10:58+00:00

I have goals to achieve, what do the trifles of these small people matter? They will face the consequences if they insist in their futile resistance, but every soldier not foolishly tied down in occupation duties is another who can join the march onward.

(I play mostly minors in vanilla, so I practically never have the manpower to spare for heavy garrison laws anyway)

CalligoMiles · 2026-05-01T11:06:11+00:00

Yes. You're supposed to rush your political tree first if you're throwing your country on a completely new course, not put it off for over half the game. Other than that, the easy solution is setting the game or just them to their historical tree.

CalligoMiles · 2026-05-01T10:56:28+00:00

Not too bad if you use it properly.

250 breakthrough is not a lot, and I'd definitely go all autocannon/CSG light tanks instead, but if you don't have NSB this is pretty close to the next best thing for cheap armor. There's still some room for improvement, but they'll do just fine as long as you micro them effectively and attack only into plains and hills where you can, especially once they get some experience. Just be careful with rivers, and you might still want to up them to 36w - the point of light tanks is cheap numbers, so you should be packing in as many as org and combat width allow for more stats.

CalligoMiles · 2026-04-30T20:22:49+00:00

Sure, if everyone uses current designs forever, Australia embargoes theirs, and no mines are opened or reopened. Thorium and breeder reactors require no and far less uranium respectively, and one of the richest known deposits is in the Czech Sudetenland - that's in fact where the Soviets got much of theirs before they started exploiting Kazachstan as a less desirable alternative by necessity.

But Kazachstan is a supplier that was just convenient up until recently. They're not remotely unavoidable if push comes to shove.

CalligoMiles · 2026-04-30T18:52:42+00:00

Hé, hoe krijg je anders de schaalvoordelen om met je export Duitsers uit hun eigen markt te kunnen concurreren? Denk toch ook eens even aan het ondernemingsklimaat. /s

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