Formosa

Formosa (aka Nationalist China) is a small Island nation suffering from Nationalist strife and fears of mainland China, but if Formosa reasserts control over its autonomous provinces and regains its stolen land in mainland China it will have enough IC and leadership to rival most Majors, and the highest MP count in the world. Even without a Chinese Reunification, Nat. China is a solid medium power, short on Rares, IC, and early Tech, but decent in everything else. Overall, China is a nation with world-conquering potential... but it needs to survive the first few years to get there.

== Alliances == Tokyo-Tehran Pact

Best option, US, Persia and Japan will make you join for safety reasons. AI Formosa will do this anyway

Axis

Good option but Germany will make you a protectorate if they find out you need to steal their technology, which Formosa becomes Fascist State run by multiple fascist heads of State or a colony of Germany with multiple fascist republics each ruled by a Fascist Head of State.

Technology
Formosa's starting technology can be best described as "Where is it?". They are decent in the Militia and Infantry trees (including having MTN available), and have the ability to make AT, ART, AC, AA, INT, TAC, DD, and CL (though the techs behind those units are all poor). Other than that... no armor of any kind, no radios, no RADAR, no education, no agriculture, minimal-if-any doctrines in ANY tree... not only do they not have Indoor Plumbing, they don't even have the prerequisite.

Also, Formosa's Leadership, while not terrible, is not going to cut it if you want to have a major research base AND get your officer count to reasonable levels before The Marco Polo Bridge incident kicks off the war in July 1st, 1937. Couple that with the fact that Formosa's starting practicals are TERRIBLE in just about every category, and your already strained Leadership will have work overtime just to research anything useful.

Because of this, there are two ways to handle Formosa's tech situation:

Dedicate 6-8 LS into dedicated researchers, keeping 1 "main" unit totally up to date (either MIL or INF), and having the remainder spread out over major techs (say, rotate them between Agriculture, Education, Civil Defense, both Supply transport-techs, Supply production, Rare Material production, IC + IC efficiency, and find a small time to get Radios out), leaving the rest of their LS for officer training (after getting 10 spies domestically). Steal tech.

To steal technology, simply put spies in a target country, set their mission to "tech espionage", and start praying. In theory, you can steal up to 1 tech from EACH enemy country per day, every day. In reality, you will find yourself tending to get 1-2/month. If you DO steal a tech, it will be at the start of a day (hour 00:00).

Formosa is almost tailor-made to use the new Their Finest Hour "tech stealing" rules (which boil down to this: the fewer techs you have total compared to the target country you are "tech spying" from, the better your chance to taking one at the start of any given day); they have enough Leadership to have a good spy-base in a fair number of target countries, while still having LS left over to train officers AND have 1 or 2 LS dedicated to research on projects that are simply too important to leave to chance (say, Education).

That said, Chance is a factor; you can easily steal 20 techs in the first game year, and have NONE of them be useful to you in any way. So the way to handle tech stealing with Formosa can be summed up as this:

"In the first game year, I will steal 10ish techs. I should assume that none of these will prove useful to me, and as such, build what I know I can field. Should an awesome tech reveal itself to me, I can deal with it at that time"

You WILL get some tech at *some* point where you think "this is good!", but you won't know which, or when, until it happens.

As such, you will likely want to keep one (or all) of the following on some type of research:

Light Armor. Research will probably take you until the end of 1936,and then building those first few brigades even longer, but if you ever plan on using tanks, you have to start somewhere. NOTE: if you luck out and steal M-ARM from someone, go ahead and turn this tech off until later (you'll need it eventually to get SP-ART) 1 type of capital ship. While good use of land-air cover can make even CA+CL-based fleets reasonably useful, it's highly unlikely that you will be ruling the waters with CL as your biggest ship. Which capital ship you choose can be based on any techs you pick off of the majors though.

MIL, INF, and AT/ART Morale/ORG doctrines. Your IC will be largely tied up, so these techs will improve your land forces without needing to pay IC for a month or 2 of upgrading. Rare materials Production. Only a person who's played NatChi can fully appreciate just how bad their Rare Material situation is. (Side note: the +5% resources minister will, once he becomes available in 1937, probably be worth more than the -% consumer goods one to you). Every little bit helps... it doesn't matter how much IC you have if it's all turned off.

Tech stealing tip: "dividing up" your Spies' mission will cause a dramatic drop in their ability to steal techs; even if you put 3-bars worth of priority on Tech Steal and only 1 bar on only 1 other mission, that's still cutting your tech steal potential to 75% of what it could be. However, you can't steal ANY techs if your spies all die due to counter-espionage. So while this does require micromanagement (probably want to check that Intel screen at LEAST once per game-week), try and do the following:

If the enemy target has 0 or 1 spy, go for 100% tech steal. If the enemy target has 2 or 3 spies, do a 50/50 split of tech steal vs Counterespionage. If the enemy has 4+ spies, go full Counter-espionage until you can bring the number down.

The whole point of tech-stealing is that you don't have to use your Leadership to get the techs yourself; that is wasted if you end up having to use large chunks of Leadership to replace lost spies that were trying to steal blueprints. The best way to avoid this is to make sure your spies aren't dying in droves, which is best done by making THEIR spies die in droves instead. Extra Bonus: you are indirectly costing opponents THEIR leadership for every spy you kill ;p.

Note that the AI likes to batch-build spies. If you notice a target's Spy Count going up rapidly despite your counterespionage efforts, don't despair; unless we are talking about the USA, it will taper off again eventually.

Tech steal Targets Since tech stealing is more effective vs targets that have more techs (especially more techs than YOU ;p), it makes sense to just target larger countries. Here are my recommendations (remember, as long as you have the leadership to train spies, target as many of these as you want):

France (rating: A+). This country is a democracy (penalty to counterespionage), has another penalty as it is part of a faction (I.E. the "neutrality" special effect is not in play for them), has a low LS with which to train spies to counter you, has a boatload of techs to steal (including Medium Armor, if you get REALLY lucky)... this country is more or less a tech-buffet. As long as the Random Number Gods do not frown on you, you should get a fair number (4-8) of techs from these guys prior to the war with JAP (and of course, continue to steal more after it starts). UK (rating: B-). These guys are in the same boat as France, although they have a bit more Leadership to train counter-spies than FRA. The reason for only getting a B- is because "standard" China strategy involves using the Raise Threat mission on these guys from day 1 until your own neutrality reaches zero; as such, you won't actually be trying to steal from them until almost 1937. Once you do reach ZERO NEUTRALITY, however, these guys join France on the buffet line. GER (rating: B). They have a bloat of techs to steal as well, and also don't get the "neutrality" bonus; that said, they do have more LS to train counter-spies, and since they are Fascist, they don't get the Democracy penalty when it comes to stopping your spies. Still, the benefit outweighs the cost in my book. JAP they'll let you so you and them can defend yourselves from the communist faction ruling the mainland. ITA (rating: C). They are Fascist and get the Neutrality bonus to start, but their LS is so terrible (except compared to France) that they won't be training many counter-spies to take advantage of it. Given their starting techs though, if you are trying to tech steal from ITA, it's because you are specifically desiring techs that have to do with the Ocean. Which certainly aren't bad, mind you, but rather specific. SOV (rating: C-). They are Communist (which, like fascist, does not suffer the Democracy penalty), but have low LS for counter-spies, and no Neutrality bonus. However, as erratic as their starting techs are, you probably will only see 1 to 2 techs from these guys before Marco Polo, which isn't exactly a good expenditure of Leadership on your part. That said, much like JAP, if you plan on putting 10 spies in SOV for combat-espionage purposes anyway, may as well have them do something while there. USA (rating: D-). While they are a democracy, they will also have the neutrality bonus, and a MASSIVE leadership base with which to train counter-spies from. They also have rather poor starting techs to steal from in the first place. If you are following my advice and only try and tech steal from a country after getting them at or below 3 domestic spies, then there's a good chance you will never even end up getting the USA to the point where you can try it. So by all means, put spies in their country for the goal of just killing their domestic spies (hindering their LS spent on research) if you want, but don't target them for tech stealing early (you can change your mind circa 1939 if your own techs are still low-ish, but it's just not worth it at 1936) they'll give you tech after Chins declares war on you.

Diplomacy
As Formosa, your biggest, most painful problem over the first four years is going to be your Rare Material Resource situation. You will get a "slight" reprieve from it when you reunify China as a democracy, but even with the "influx" of rares from conquering the other states, you will still be running a heavy deficit. Metal you are more or less good on (you will run a deficit, but the deficit vs your starting amount isn't a terrible problem for quite a while), and energy will be in the red a lot, but that's only because you get so little oil that the game is converting energy to fuel; don't worry, the game is smart enough to STOP doing this if your energy gets low. Rares should be your only main resource CONCERN (though if you can trade for a bit of metal or oil on the side, it can't hurt).

As such, as soon as the game begins in 1/1/1936, you should (after spending the time to pump out starting spies), use your Leadership to power-raise your Diplomacy points; what you are going to do with them is open up trades with the USA. your relations with them start out low; and since the "price" of goods is based on relations, what you want to do is to open up a bunch of supply-sales to them to raise your relations to about 100... once you get to 100, then open up more trades with them for 1 energy to get relations to 200. Once you hit 200, THEN start opening up trades with them for the maximum amount of rares they will sell to you (20 per trade, but be sure never to drop them below a 10-per-day surplus, otherwise you may find them cancelling all trade routes en masse). Do not worry about going bankrupt; given this game's mechanics, and China's situation in particular, it is far better for you to run out of money now, then rares later.

The big reason for this is, once the war with China starts, you will NOT be able to trade with the USA and Japan any more; any attempts to do so will just result in your convoys being sunk WAY faster than you can replace them (and you don't have the IC to replace them anyway). you can always "cancel" trades to get money, but once 7/1/1937 hits, you can not get the trade routes with the USA back.

As of 7/1/1937, you will have to shift all of your trade partners to land-connected ones. The major players in the world of Trade that you will be "connected" to are:

UK France (assuming the Hu Hamin event has fired, you will have direct-contact with a French port in Southern China. You may wish to start trading with them as soon as you do, to build up relations for when 7/1/1937 hits) Portugal (same as France, they have a port in Southern China) Japan. They'll have you join the Tokyo-Tehran Pact and be allies with them because they with America are worried about China conquering you. USSR. Please note: you DO NOT start with a land route to them. Look farther down in the "strategy" section to find out how to handle this little issue. IMPORTANT NOTE: if an AI ever offers *YOU* a trade, it will be at 200-relation values. So if they are offering to sell you something, and you need it, by all means take it. If they are offering to BUY something from you, then do NOT take it, unless you are desperate for the money, since the trade rate will be bad.

Do not worry about joining a faction. While there are certainly people who have played the game and gotten China into any of the 3 factions, those types of strategies aren't really for a "tips for beginners" guide. Once you've played NatChi a few times and know the ropes, you will be able to figure out which-and-when you want to do this for yourself. For now, just go it alone.

Production China's starting IC is not great. You will be able to boost it significantly over the first few months (see the Strategy section as to why), but even after the boosts, you will have to be judicious as to what you build. For example, the half-done Light Cruiser they start with... you can let it finish if you want, but the 7-ish IC it's taking can be (read: should be) better spent elsewhere.

If you don't feel like reading a ton of text, just jump to the bullet points to see what I recommend.

One thing to remember: As your Leadership is low, that means any land-unit you build is going to need a non-trivial amount of Leadership assigned to Officer production to staff it. Any land unit... except one.

Militia In TFH, Going heavy INF for China is not impossible, but it's almost an "all-in" strategy. The number of officers you will need to support that type of army will bleed your LS dry, and force you into a "less is more" strategy. Also, since any given division of JAP's INF will beat any of yours (unless you had a REAL good tech stealing run), and JAP is likely to eye any open ports as an "invade here" sign, it's just tough to pull off overall.

As such, the "MIL overload" strategy is the best one; at least up until JAP is off the mainland and you have the peace to use your IC/LS for a year of uninterrupted buildup.

You have a lot of starting MIL lying around, in 2xMIL setups. I advise combining these into 4xMIL divisions; eventually (read: 1939 at LEAST) you will get a tech that reduces MIL frontage, allowing you to use MIL as a swarm over your foes. Until then, however, you need to consider MIL as just less-powerful INF, and use it accordingly. However, let each MIL Corps-HQ have 2xMIL in it as well. This will let it see combat; while not normally a "key" stat, when using MIL swarms, combat reinforcement chance is nothing to sneeze at, and that's what the Corps-HQ skill provides, so don't skimp it. (That's not to say you still can't put your Old Guard leaders there, mind you ;p).

You should get started on building 3 divisions of 4xMIL immediately, and from now until at LEAST JAP is a memory, you will continue to produce these 3 4xMIL divisions. This is not to say you cannot produce even more MIL than this; it's just 3 runs of 4xMIL at all times is the bare minimum. At 3xMIL per build "cycle", this means you can make a brand new corps after every 2 build cycles (with a 2xMIL left over after splitting the 6th one to add MILs to your Corps-HQ). Do just that, you can never have enough MIL. Trust me.

Once you have reunified China (see the Strategy section), continue the MIL builds, but rather than putting them into corps, place 2 divisions of 4xMIL on each port you own, until all ports have 2 divisions of 4xMIL on them. Once they do, go back to make MIL-corps.

With the army's backbone out of the way, you will notice you still have a lot of IC left over (or will anyway, after the first few game months when the "terrible" laws are still in effect). You also start the game with 33 divisions of 2INF sitting around. No reason to let them go to waste.

I recommend taking 30 of said divisions and making 5 corps (I.E. 1 full army) out of them. that's 5 divisions of 2xINF per corps, and add 1 2xINF to the corps-HQ as well.

I like to call these 6corps. You will see this term used throughout the rest of the guide, so now you know what it means ;p.

(the last 3 divisions of 2xINF are up to you; I like to drop them into the army-HQ, army group-HQ, and theater-HQ, so that my top-generals can see some direct combat, speeding up their leveling gain, and learning them some combat traits, especially during the "easy" war that is Chinese reunification)

But what do we add to the 2xINF to give them more punch than a 4xMIL?

I don't recommend AA; their stats aren't terrible, but they upgrade poorly, and unless your spies show that JAP is going MAJOR heavy on the airforce, their primary effect is wasted; furthermore, lategame, they are generally a waste overall, as a high-tech TAC can shred even an AA-supported division with ease. So they are "meh" early, and bad late, making them a poor choice.

I don't recommend AC yet; JAP INF divisions will not be affected by their armor, and as China, you are not exactly in great standing with regards to Fuel, which AC use. You are going to want your fuel for Air and Naval power (once those programs get off the ground), so best not to use a chunk of it placing AC in your 6corps.

I don't recommend ART To Start. Yes, it is a great INF-killer, but with balance changes in TFH, it's cost is --massive--, and China's starting Artillery Practical is terrible. So while a good unit, you will get out so few of these pre-JAP that their effect during the critical early-war phase will be minimal

Therefore...

Anti-Tank Before anyone asks, no, I don't expect JAP to roll up in 7/1/1937 with a major tank force. However, that's not why I choose this unit. It will:  Reasons for Anti-Tank: Raise your practical much faster than ART due to their much lower cost (which you can then later use to actually BUILD ART for your 6corps... I'm not ignoring that specific brigade, just not building it yet) Scales much better than, and is a more major factor late-game than, AA (really, ALL infantry-based divisions should have an AT in them when you end up facing either the USA, USSR, or GER), so they will never go obsolete. Allows you to start training the most # of your generals in Combined Arms warfare early (you can get between 1 and 3 full corps worth of AT prior to the Chinese Reunification, and essentially have ALL of your 6corps, as well as the army, army group, and theater HQs similarly equipped before the JAP war, depending on what else you are building). You should build at least 3 brigades of AT at once for attaching to your 6corps, or more if you desire (at the cost of planes or ships). Start these builds as soon as you get the war-economy law passed.

Once all of your 6corps have an AT, THEN go ahead and stop the AT builds, and start building ART instead (doesn't necessarily have to be 3-brigades at once this time; until you unlock the Superior Firepower tech, you won't be able to fit one into your corps-HQ, so if you want to "streamline" these builds, do them in multiples of 5 instead of 3 until said tech arrives)

This should leave you with a bit of leftover IC. You can start building practical for the Naval escort of your choice (you have both CL and DD from the start, and can definitely benefit from some low-tech meat-shields come late 1938/early 1939), but I recommend going with

Tactical Bomber You certainly won't be taking Air Superiority away from JAP anytime soon, but unless you lose Beiping, their INTS based in Dairen won't be able to hit farther west than... well, Beiping. Your TACs can bomb with impunity farther than that, and unlike China with its basically inexhaustible manpower reserve, bombing the snot out of JAP's land forces will cause some good old long-term attrition to them that they'll have to deal with.

I do ABSOLUTELY NOT recommend trying to "IC-whore" as China. Their resources simply won't support it.

I also don't recommend making a tank-program until at least the JAP war starts (giving you the Total Economic Mobilization boost to your IC), as with ZERO practical, they cost an arm and a leg (EXCEPT, in 1 specific case: if you steal either LARM or ARM tech from France PRIOR TO 6/1/1936, you can get some tanks out before the JAP war starts; since you start with 2 brigades of CAV handy, if you build 2 tanks, that will give you 2 early faster-than-INF Combined-Arms armored divisions that JAP will be hard-pressed to field a counter for, as most of their divisions won't have an AT... and those that do, you can let the MIL-swarm handle.)

Main Nationalist China Strategy Timeline As soon as the game starts, before unpausing it, go into your Diplomacy screen and select the "prepare for war" event. China's Neutrality starts at 80, and we need it to be zero. This decision, available only to countries with 30 or less IC (which you have right now, but as SOON as you enact a better IC-law, you won't, so hit that button fast), causes them to lose 0.2 Neutrality each day, every day, for 9 full months. This means that, even in a vacuum, NatChi can have it's neutrality down to ~24 by October 1st 1936.

In addition to low Neutrality being needed to declare wars, it also affects your Consumer goods requirement; the lower your Neutrality, the less % of your total IC needs to be put into consumer goods in the Production screen. So this event will indirectly boost your IC output. Then, set up your starting production builds, and give orders to your existing armies in accordance to what I've put under the "production" heading above, creating or disbanding HQs as needed.

Also, you are going to want to allocate 100% of your leadership into Spies. Unpause the game.  Spies BEFORE YOU PUT ANY SPIES DOMESTICALLY (yes, that's right), get 10 into the UK on the Raise Threat mission, AFTER THAT get 10 into either Vietnam or China on the Raise Threat mission as well. Once those 2 are "full", THEN get your domestic count to 10; after that, continue to force-produce spies to get 10 into each country you plan on tech stealing from.

China is not high on anyone's spy-target list. Once you counter-espionage yourself to a spy-free state, go ahead and swap to either increasing Unity or your Party's Organization. Personally, I do organization, because increases to Unity are day-by-day instant, whereas any increase to Party Organization then has a time-delay as it translates itself into Party Popularity, which is what's actually necessary to get rid of that annoying "fractured government" penalty to your Unity ;p. If bad goes to worse, you can always swap over for a short-term boost to Unity of course.

Once you have 10 spies in all desired targets, cut your Leadership-spy spending back to 1 or 2 LS (depending on the number of foreign tech steal targets; if just FRA, UK, and Communist China are spy-targeted, 1 will be fine, if you add GER, JAP, and ITA you will need 2, and if you throw USSR and USA in, you may actually need to keep 3 LS in spies to maintain a 10-ratio.

Laws I do not normally use the "reserves-army" trick as China; yes, it does allow me to pump out a higher amount of AT and MIL pre-10/1/1936, but China also desperately needs Officers prior to that time as well, and at the Volunteer Army law (which is necessary for the reserves-trick to work properly), China's poor LS total is just going to be a drop in the bucket of your needed Officer numbers. I recommend getting to the 3-year draft ASAP; that said, you don't have to "incrementally" increase the law. With "Prepare for War" and UK-based Increased Threat missions running, you should be able to get to the 3-year Draft (and for that matter, the Wartime Economy) laws within a month or 2 of the game-start, so just wait until you can take those 2 laws straight-up, and save yourself the money to buy rares from USA instead. Major Education should be kept for maximum LS, and the starting press law can stay put; do swap to Mixed Industry some time around May though (the initial difference in IC granted to you from the law vs lost by the Consumer Goods demand at this time is almost invisible, but the efficiency bonus makes up for it, and as the day-by-day bonus of Prepare for War ticks away, the lost-to-CG amount of IC will continue to shrivel up). Go ahead and leave the training law on Minimal though; getting the units out faster is indeed ideal, and the EXP they *don't* get will EASILY be acquired during the Reunification War.

Ministers

Hu Hamin This event can (and will, unless something breaks) trigger any time in 1936 after March 1st. The normal outcome of it is that you will automatically gain control of the Southern Chinese coast (including that awesome port), as well as a random number of Guanxi's Combat units and HQs (the units being more valuable, of course ;p). The much-more-rare outcome is that Guanxi will declare war on you... which sounds bad, but ironically, this means you can ramp-up your IC earlier, and Guanxi's army is rather pathetic, so stopping them with even your starting forces AND their low officer count is of little difficulty. Should this happen, its your choice whether you want to stomp them fast to annex them fully (which will allow you to use the 6corps you would normally use against them later to speed up the next step of reunification instead), or keep them around until the "Main Reunification" allows you to preserve the better laws (meaning you have more IC for a longer time). I won't go into detail which is better, since the %times this happens is so low it's more of a "treat" than a strategy you should assumingly prepare for.

Officers It is assumed that you will put all of your spare LS (minus the 1-3 for spies and 1-2 for "key research projects") Into officer generation as soon as you enact the 3-year draft law. This should get you close to, if not at, the 100% officer count by the Reunification War. While you can technically go up to 140%, 100% is more than enough to begin the operation.

Order of Battle: Chinese Reunification The difference between Nationalist China and China as a whole is almost double the IC and 50% more leadership. Also, while you will never run a surplus of Rare Materials, your deficit of materials/IC will be slightly lower with the other states under your banner (techs not withstanding, of course). As only 1 of the states (CommChi and their impressive unit count + favorable defensive terrain) will prove difficult to up-end in any way, there is no reason (other than roleplaying, of course) not to do it.

You want all those Chinese states under your banner. Period. They even have NatChi cores on them, which means you get the full benefit from taking them; no occupation law penalties, no non-core 50% reductions.

The earlier you start the war, the earlier you can start earning land and air combat Experience Practical (useful for Doctrine research), experience for your units and generals, and getting the other state's resources/IC folded into yours, easing the huge strain you may have noticed between "what I want to build" and "what I can actually build".

Assuming you, Like me, choose China as your "main threat target", the war will go like this:

China will send 1,000 Airships at you assuming you will defend with a Navy. Then they invade you with the Airships. As they do you should join the Tokyo-Tehran Pact and they can help you fight against China. However China will use it's Comintern Pact.