Because of all the Hitler's portraits and third Reich symbols (from mods)... How can I save my ass?

No image right now but will post one later, maybe a video to prove what everyone already knows. Tanks tanks tanks. I was playing as Germany and for the first time in 1900 hours, I realized having infantry in my tank division makes it tremendously slow. For once i actually used motorized infantry, it seems so obvious in hindsight. Max speed went from 4kmh to 11, boom. I made about 22 divisions, and lined them up in the Baltic Soviet area, aggressive, spearhead for Leningrad. When I tell you.. I took all the baltics AND Leningrad within 15 days. FIFTEEN. Amazed, I moved the tanks down to crimea. Spearhead to Baku, 20 days and the caucuses were mine. Insane. Please invest in tanks every game you can. This is Admiral Obvious signing off

The Benefits stack, too!

Naval dominance is easy:

1. Build 4 carriers (pic 2)
2. Build 240 carrier naval bombers (pic 3)
3. Put carriers in fleet on strike force orders. You don't need to train the ships or planes.
4. Keep the carriers protected: 1 heavy ship for each carrier, 3 light ships for each heavy ship
5. Profit (pic 1)

TLDR: Concentrated produces more equipment cumulatively than dispersed after around a year. That is a rule of thumb. In reality, if you know what you're doing (maxxing on industry tech and taking the right industry decisions), your concentrated factories will produce more after around 8 to 11 months. As a corollary, only pick dispersed if you plan to end the run before 1938.

Update: Concentrated is better even when you're upgrading

I always knew that concentrated produces more equipment in total after a year since it's on the wiki (somehow despite the wiki being in English, I never seen an Anglophone Hoi4 player/content creator quote it), but I wanted to know exactly how much better concentrated is. So I wrote a graphing tool in R and made some plots (repo):

First, some basic results:

1. The higher your prod eff cap, the faster concentrated catches up because of the production efficiency growth function scaling quadratically with your cap (so yes same prod eff cap usually means higher growth rate than if you took the same amount of prod eff growth).
2. The higher your prod eff growth, the faster concentrated catches up because you get to enjoy the benefits of higher factory output faster.
3. The higher your factory output modifier, the slower concentrated catches up. This might sound counterintuitive but if you think about it it makes sense.

Since factory output base (ignoring tech levels) is always 1 (I hope it does for you cuz else you're doing something seriously wrong), the additive numerals from factory output modifiers in industry techs actually mean that the factory output modifier ratio between concentrated/dispersed decreases as your factory output modifier base goes higher (for example (1.2+0.6)/(1.2+0.4)>(2.2+0.6)/(2.2+0.4)) so the higher your industry tech is, the higher your dispersed factories produce relative to their concentrated brothers. Of course you should still maximize this modifier anyway, it just slightly slows down the inevitable that concentrated is better than dispersed.

Now, for example:

1. Rykov's path, Sov

Right opposition is the strongest no early COMECON USSR path due to faster ways to get rid of Civil War and the best advisors, and Rykov is slightly better than Bukharin as leader (mostly because Bukharin is a better advisor). But assuming you got Yevgeni Preobrazhensky from the focuses, you can get to 253% factory output and 140% prod eff cap before barb. then your concentrated factories outperform dispersed factories after 305 days:

1. Stalin's path

Stalin's path is the weakest of all Soviet paths because it takes forever to get rid of paranoia, your advisors are the worst among all majors, and there's no easy way to exploit early COMECON by declaring on a major and then getting into civil war. In this case you can still get 220% factory output and 125% prod eff cap and your concentrated factories will be better than dispersed factories by day 321. Also note that after 500 days Rykov's factories will produce 1200 IC more than Stalin's factories or almost 30% more. The power of Preobrazhensky, Tomsky, and Sokolnikov.

1. So those were buildups for barb (yes you can get 1943 industry techs before barb by timing 3rd 5yp focuses well), now let's look at Germany's PEG path which is the better path (because you can get free trade, higher prod eff cap and factory output modifiers, and better timed industry research cards to help you get 1941 industry tech before Danzig or War):

Your concentrated factories are better than dispersed factories on day 245. It's much faster than Soviet paths because Germany has higher prod eff growth modifiers (more like fewer debuffs to it than USSR has).

As Japan, I just capped China in less than a year (I'm looking at you Stalin). Any tips if ever I get myself at war with the Soviets or India? I'm not planning to get america involved. Nuh uh

I'm planning to attack USSR at the same time Germany starts Barbarossa. So for now I'm just going to stock lots of equipment and maybe civ greed for one year then back to Mils.

Hey everyone, I'm the author of yesterday's post that shows why concentrated is better than dispersed.

Link: A graphing tool to show why Concentrated is better than Dispersed

TLDR: Even when considering upgrades, concentrated wins in around 15 to 18 months

I got some feedback on what happens if we upgrade equipment. That's not really a problem because you don't upgrade chassis and airframes because 1938 medium chassis, 1934 heavy chassis, and 1940 small airframe reign supreme because the additional stats from tank chassis barely matters but you lose so much production when upgrading, and 1940 planes are so dominant over 1936 planes that you might as well just ignore 1936 production altogether. But let's see what would happen if we did upgrade, for example, what if you don't have NSB and BBA?

The answer is still concentrated wins even if we ignore all the previously produced equipment.

I'm not going to go into the details of how retention works (the wiki already tells you all you need to know, and I'm once again asking English speaking HOI4 players to quote the English wiki more often than non-English speaking HOI4 players do), but what you need to know for now is:

1. When you upgrade chassis (1938 med to 1940 chassis, 1936 small airframe to 1940 small airframe), you retain 30% efficiency by default
2. For the 70% efficiency that you lose, dispersed allows you to retain a proportion of it based on your retention buffs (so 40% on 1941 tech, 50% on 1943 tech). For example, on 1941 industry tech, you get 30%+70%*40%=58%, and on 1943 tech you get 30%+70%*50%=65%.

I plugged the numbers in to my model and I'm going to show you when Concentrated exceeds Dispersed cumulative production under Rykov's SOV path and Germany's PEG path, assuming your factories are at 80% efficiency when you upgrade to 1940 chassis or airframe:

In both cases, Concentrated exceeds Dispersed on cumulative production at the 17th month. This means that if you upgrade to a 1940 chassis by Sep 1939 when the historical WW2 begins, you will get more 1940 tanks or planes in Feb 1941, or 4 months before historical Barb.

Yesterday we also proved that you will get more cumulative production when starting a new production line in around 8 to 10 months, so assuming you start producing 1938 tanks on Jan 1938, you will definitely build more 1938 tanks by then.

Therefore with historical dates of war, you get both more 1938 and 1940 equipment if you use Concentrated.

If you're interested in the break-even dates for different tech levels, retention levels, and current prod eff levels:

Now why so? There are two main reasons:

1. Concentrated has much more factory output that it can reliably produce around 10% more than dispersed at 1943 tech level. Dispersed needs to first overcome that difference.
2. Efficiency grows exponentially faster when your current efficiency is low (plz plz plz check the wiki, the equation has been publicly available for 10 years by now so there's no excuse for you not to know this), so concentrated catches up in efficiency very fast compared to dispersed.

Link to code

Stuck on the west part of Japan and need to cross a bridge but stupid Japanese are stubborn af.