So, my HoI Anthology pack showed up last night, so I installed the whole thing and started playing. I started off with the base HoI2, and decided to try out Russia. Probably a bad choice, as the shear amount of land I controlled was staggering. And my research teams are terrible. And while I had the largest army in the world, it was almost all Infantry'18. I build a few factories, another 30ish modern divisions, and started researching industrial/infantry upgrades. Around 1938 the NAP I had with Finland ran out, so I invaded. Within a few days I had Poland, Germany, Turkey, Romania and Hungary declare war on me. Even with my 20 Infantry'39 divisions, I only managed to take 1 province (attacking in November may not have been a wise choice). I ended up giving up and going to bed, as there was no way that I'd be able to hold off all those armies. And even by late 1938, I still had 100+ divisions needing upgrading, and I had been devoting between 60 and 100 IC to upgrades the entire game.
So, next game is going to be trying out someone a bit smaller. I think I was overwhelmed by the size of my land, and definitely made a pretty poor choice in attacking Finland. Spain looks like it could be fun for the next round.
Quick question, does it matter where I build Factories? And does building Infrastructure help make troop movements faster? I was building long strips of Infra across Russia thinking it would help me march troops from one side to the other quickly, but it seemed to take forever for my Infantry to get anywhere.
The shear amount of resources I had was pretty sexy though, I'm definitely going to give Russia a try again once I have some more experience with this game.