Production is the mechanic that decides more games than anything before combat even starts. If you understand how factories are split, what production efficiency is, and why you keep running short on resources mid-game, you'll play better than most people from day one.
Factory Types
There are three types of factory and each produces something different. They're not interchangeable, so the ratio between them defines what kind of country you're building.
- Civilian factories: construction, trade, consumer goods, and equipment licenses bought from other countries. Base output of 4/day (5/day with coal and electricity available).
- Military factories: land and air equipment — rifles, artillery, planes. Base of 3.5/day (4.5/day with coal).
- Naval shipyards: ships, submarines and convoys. Base of 2/day (2.5/day with coal).
Production Efficiency
Each production line in a military factory starts at 10% efficiency and climbs gradually toward a 50% cap (both values improvable with technology and national focuses). Without any bonus, it can take up to 500 days to reach the max.
Switching production lines penalizes the efficiency you'd already built up. How much you lose depends on how drastic the change is: if you only switch to a variant of the same design you keep up to 90% of the efficiency, but if you switch to a completely different equipment type you can drop as low as 10%.
In practice: don't switch your tank or plane design every other week just because a new part showed up in the designer. Plan the design ahead of time and stick with it long enough to pay off the accumulated efficiency.
The 7 Strategic Resources
Everything you build depends on having access to these resources. If you're short on one, the production line that needs it loses performance — up to -100% on the factories with lowest priority.
- Oil: refined into fuel for ships, planes and vehicles.
- Aluminum: planes and support equipment.
- Rubber: planes and motorized or mechanized units.
- Tungsten: anti-tank artillery, heavy armor, medium and heavy tank guns.
- Steel: the most across-the-board resource — infantry, artillery, tanks, ships, trains.
- Chromium: advanced engines, armor plating, and modern tanks or ships.
- Coal: doesn't go directly into equipment, but boosts the output of every factory that's "fed" by it.
Common Mistakes
The typical new-player mistake is building too many military factories too early, before having a solid civilian base to support them, and then redesigning equipment every few months, wiping out all the accumulated efficiency. Prioritize civilian factories early on, pick an equipment design, and stick with it.