Good grief. What to say about that!!?!?!!?
First: Achievement completed! The Revolution Triumphant!
Second, omg. OMG!!!! That was one of the craziest games I've ever had.
Germany declared war not long after the image above. I held my ground for a fair while but they soon broke through right in the north near Danzig. After that, just a small narrow finger of my forces was standing, next to where my fort lines were in eastern Poland, with the Germanys going behind. Tried to scramble them to a fall back position but was soon getting pushed back along the northern half of then line and was losing divisions hand over fist. I still had a fair stockpile of guns so I scrambled making emergency infantry divs as fast as I could and force deploying them as soon as possible. They advanced still and took Moscow but my fighters were absolutely smashing them. Managed to obtain green air just when I was thinking the game was lost.
I honestly thought I was done at one point but the Germans just stopped attacking, which gave me breathing space to make some more equipment, absorb their attacks and arm up again. The USA then got involved and then started invading northern France. Then after what seem like an age of attacking along the front, pausing then attacking again I managed to wear them thin. It was then the case of targeting weak Hungarian divisions along the front to try and get small encirclements of like 2-5 divisions, then slowly but surely whittled them away until a full frontal attack just smashed them. Then had to invade down through Egypt and the peace conference fired. Germany puppetted and achievement unlocked!
In the end I had about 6 Million casualties but managed to just inflict more on the Germans, eclipsing any of the allies on war score so the conference was fairly easy (still don't really understand them!!! Especially the whole "passing" thing). It was a crazy game, really hooked me in.
Didn't make use of anti air in the end, had enough factories pumping out fighters that I eventually overcame them. When I was at my lowest ebb, pushed way beyond Moscow I was having to massively over-stack my airfields - had no other choice! Unless there is any other way, I think you have to expect to get pushed back by the Germans as the Soviets. Then once the USA get involved it becomes a little easier and the Germans just can't cover so many fronts. I can't count the amounts of times I lost Sevastapol to an Italian invasion though, was nuts!
The whole plan of using tanks on a fallback line to plug various gaps straight up didn't work with the templates I had. That plan got chucked fairly quickly and they just got thrown onto the front line!
One funny little thing that happened: there was a row of level 10 forts on the Romanian border down to the black sea, maybe 4 tiles and I got around 35 divisions accidentally cut off there. They stayed in those forts for the whole game and didn't get wiped out! They inflicted around 500k casualties on the Romanians, for about 20k deaths on my side, was an hilarious accidental thorn in their side the whole game. They just couldn't push me out and I couldn't rescue them!
Good man! I'm playing it now as well. Just to see if I forgot to tell you something important lol.. Do you have the DLC by the way
Let me know how you found it - I watched FeedbackGaming's guide, but I think its from a much earlier patch whereby you start with way more guns and tanks - unless I missed something - it wasn't straightforward to follow his guide with the current patch.
One thing I had to be careful with was to not agree to the allies suggestions at the Yalta conference. I chose the option to continue to dictate peace on my own terms, rather than splitting Germany up, as I needed to puppet them for the achievement. That was an unexpected little curve ball at the end, but made the right choice!
(got all the DLC)