Japanese Leadership and Industry

     When starting out a game, I frequently spend hours reorganizing armies, setting up research and prioritizing my industry before the game even really gets going.  Let’s start with leadership and research.

Leadership

     The Japanese have 22.38 leadership points to start with, which is fair for a major nation.  Generally I put it all into technology development.  Diplomats are useless; I’m just going to conquer everyone anyway.  Intelligence is usually not detailed or accurate enough to be particularly helpful, although I do usually invest later on when I have extra leadership points.  Officer recruitment is necessary, of course, but inefficient until you’re fully mobilized.

     The Japanese start out with a pretty good level of technological advancement.  They already have many helpful infantry techs researched, including motorized, mountain, and engineer troops.  Air and naval techs are also pretty high, as are many of the doctrines.  I’m going to put 2 points into each of infantry, light armor, destroyer, battleship, and aircraft carrier techs.  I’m also putting 1 point into bombers, for 4 engine aircraft development (transport aircraft are a must for me) and 1 point into small fighters (for basic fuel tank).  I’ve got 2 points in theory – naval and automotive.  For doctrines I have three points in land (spearhead doctrine, assault concentration, and the very useful operational level organization), one point in naval doctrine, and two points in air (fighter doctrine for now).  I’m also researching agriculture and industrial production.  Generally speaking, here are my research priorities, from highest to lowest:

1.       Industry, agriculture, leadership, resources, computing

2.       Infantry, light armor, medium armor, artillery, destroyer, battleship (until around 1943), aircraft carriers (until around 1943), single-engine aircraft, supply

3.       Tactical bombers,  transport aircraft, naval theory, infantry theory, aeronautics theory, artillery theory, anti-tank weapons, anti-aircraft weapons, light cruisers, engineer weapons, heavy armor, radar, rocket/jet

4.       Cavalry small arms, militia, encryption/decryption, strategic bomber

5.       Submarines, heavy cruisers, battle cruisers, atomic weapons, other cavalry techs, rocket artillery, super heavy armor, armored car, strategic rockets

               

     Usually I get into the 4^th tier techs fairly late in the game, and the 5^th tier techs not at all.  I usually don’t research techs which are 2 or more years ahead, for efficiency reasons, but in this play-through I may try ignoring those little angry red arrows, especially if I start hitting the fourth tier.

Industry

     The Japanese have a base of 94 industrial capacity (IC) in hard mode.  Combined with a war economy and starting techs, that starts my IC at 119.  Unfortunately, we also start out running a sizable deficit in both metals and rare materials, and not a lot of extra cash.  With many countries I start out by building more IC, but in this case that’s usually not a good idea.  I’m going to finish up the half-built destroyer, and spend the remaining IC on 3 imperial guard brigades and 12 reserve artillery brigades.