W/I: Eisenreich

Saphroneth

Banned
That's the one dissapointing thing of history, the Heer was never as impressively equipped as their conquests made them out to be. From what I've read they went into Russia with 700,000 horses and were not far removed from the German army of WWI.
Well, yeah. Turns out that when rebuilding an economy, air force and army from very little indeed in six years you have to take some shortcuts.
It's amazing they got as far as they did.
 
Germany does nothing to expand it's navy from 1936 - 1941 (except for the construction of transport ships, technological research for the navy also takes a backseat to army and air force research)
Probably a good idea for the early bit of the war (although I'd note that you have also included not building U-boats!). The major effect of this is that the UK isn't going to be nearly as worried about Germany until after ~Munich, at which point rearmament will kick off but later and less effectively than OTL.

The German army is smaller for a while as a strong panzer strike force is built up and eventually all foot infantry units will be replaced by machanised and especially motorised units (since the industrial resources spent on the navy are freed for other uses).
Make that a **LOT** smaller - very roughly that leaves you with the OTL Panzer forces and nothing else, since none of the other units had very much by way of motorised transport (I've seen accounts of a British officer captured in 1940 who recognised British Army brand marks on German army horses - they'd been sold off as obsolete by the British before the war). Not expanding the navy helps a bit, but the Germans never really put all that much effort into it so there isn't a huge amount to divert.

Everything remains the same diplomatically and militarily up until the conquest of Poland (except that Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia and Greece are much more keenly courted, bringing them into the Axis before the Italians can cause a mess in Europe)
"More keenly courted" and "bringing them into the Axis" don't follow from one another. A lot of those countries naturally looked to the French rather than the Germans for assistance/alliances - to get them into the Axis, you need to conquer France first. Once you start that, the Italians start making a mess of things!

Denmark and Norway are invaded in winter 1939. The Invasion force of Norway all land at Oslo, behind a shield of German air power and then march up the coast conquering the country by May 1940.
Pretty much not possible without a navy - you can take Oslo with air support (well, in summer anyway - much harder in winter given the quality of 1939 aircraft!). As you go further north, however, the logistics become pretty much impossible without going by sea. The available airfields are also pretty limited, and in OTL the Luftwaffe had pretty much no effective anti-shipping capability at this point. Worse, Narvik (the real objective of the campaign) is in the very far north and will be the last bit captured. Even if they do get it, the railway will be comprehensively demolished and they won't be able to use it to get the Swedish iron ore out.

The west falls as usual plus Spain and Portugal join the Axis and the Germans take Gibraltar. This will lead to much of Africa falling to the Italians, Spaniards, Portuguese and Vichy french)
But why? In France, the Panzers were backed up by very large numbers of leg infantry using horse-drawn logistics. With them gone, the Panzers are very likely to advance too far and get cut off (which came close to happening in OTL and the Germans knew it - hence the panic at Arras). Spain are pretty unlikely to join the Axis in any timeline because of the damage from their civil war (OTL was a pretty astonishing series of victories for the Germans - TTL is actually slower and less impressive even if France still falls because of the extended fighting in Norway), and Portugal are vastly less likely to do so.

The Germans swiftly invade Russia, managing to take Leningrad and thus shortening German lines enough to allow for the fall of Moscow by Christmas 1941.
The wheels are really starting to fall off here - how are they going to win the early battles along the frontiers with a much smaller force? You can't have all that much stronger a Panzer force with the resources you've freed up, and that means the Germans are now vastly outnumbered by the Soviets rather than having rough parity.

German forces seize Stalingrad in the summer of 1942 and will accept a Soviet surrender in 1942.
Highly unlikely - they were catastrophically overextended as it was, and having to use units of very dubious reliability to hold the frontlines. Here, they'll have two men on a motorbike to cover tens of miles of Soviet front line. If the Panzers do manage to take Stalingrad, it'll be because they've left nothing at all on their flanks making an earlier encirclement almost a certainty. The Soviets are also highly unlikely to surrender, or even accept a Brest-Litovsk style peace - to do so would be catastrophic for Stalin's cult of personality, and they've been transferring as much as they could behind the Urals for years. The Germans need to take deep beyond the Urals for this to work, and that simply isn't possible for them.

All German research now switches from tactical and land based research and production to naval and strategic air force research and production that will see massive bombing campaigns begin against the UK in 1943 as well as the first German large scale u-boat attacks.
Problem is, they're starting from a ~1936 (the POD) baseline, while their opponents aren't. That means the massive bombing campaign will be using aircraft like the He-111 or maybe the Dornier 19 for a night campaign, against a 1943 RAF with extensive GCI systems and Spitfire XIV/Mosquitoes. It'll be a massacre.
Same thing with the U-Boats - you're basically trying to start fighting the Battle of the Atlantic with Type I U-boats, against what will probably be 1943 level defences since the British won't have stopped working on their navy.

In 1943 Germany brings Iran, Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and Saudi Arabia into the Axis while Germany, Italy and Bulgaria help Greece conquer Turkey.
How? You might get Iraq, maybe, but the revolt is more likely to fail. Everything else is pretty much fantasy.

Operation Sealion commences in 1945 as the German Navy manages to annhilate the Royal Navy prior to German landings across the Pas de Calais and seize London.
Nope.

Can I add one extra thing for your timeline? In 1945, Bomber Command drops the first Tube Alloys device on Berlin. Subsequent drops on Munich, Nuremberg and Hamburg lead to a coup against the Nazi party and a German unconditional surrender...
 
Beating the AI in that game is like beating a kindergarten kid in an armwrestling match. Not particularly difficult or satisfying, and you feel embarassed afterwards. I once played Canada and beat the Germans pretty much all by myself, and while that is a little more plausible than Sealion, it was still not very much so.

My experience, the AI will either be very clever, or completely retarded. Rarely any middle room, that being said I love it.
 

Saphroneth

Banned
Well that's the thing, I was wondering how I could beat my games of HOI into some sort of plausible real world scenario.
Basically the problem is that the abstraction layers mean that what works best in HOI is not actually what works best in the real world and that you can do better in HOI than you ever can in the real world.
As an example - if you're playing HOI and you send a single division of motorized units out to "flip control" of three provinces, you can then use a frontal attack tp force the surrender of fifty divisions of troops "trapped" in an area the size of Wales with nothing actually between them and friendly lines - and the moment you do then the entire five hundred thousand men just vaporize. You can clear the area in four days, counting the time for the motorized unit to move.

When the actual German Army did that, it was the Battle of Kiev and it took over a month and a half.
 
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