As I made a german guide once for Total War: MEDIEVAL II where I applied basic Clausewitz to Total War. It's maybe not very accurate, but it's a bit of a different perspective.

So, loosely following this tradition, this guide applies some general real-life strategies you can abstract from. You'll probably even recognize from various historical or less historical conflicts around the world.
It will be generally revolving around resources and overall strategy and less about the gameplay implementation itself. Take the "real-life theory" lessons with a grain of salt, as I don't really care for perfect historical accuracy and this is a very abstracted depiction of real-life events anyway. Please don't cite me in your academic papers.

If you're interested in more, please read Clausewitz or try to get a MBA or something.

Before we dive straight into the world of numbers, casualties and war, let's get an overview over different topics we aim to dive in today.

In order to apply useful real-life concepts, we need to describe and define parameters we need to take into consideration. As we're talking game, we'll need to understand the rules of the game and how various parameters interact with each other. With that perspective in mind we can then attempt the implementation of theory.

In the first chapter we will describe the general war theory concepts in short:
1. The theory of war
1.1. Clausewitz factors of war (will to war, hinterland, army)
1.2. Clausewitz Friction (the issue of randomness in war)
1.3. War phases (mobile warfare, positional war)
1.4. Schwerpunkt: concentration of forces and it's implications
1.5. The value of capability
1.6. The value of investments
1.7. Strategy and Tactics

In the second chapter, we describe the war parameters and their logic:
2. War as a game
2.1. Tangible Factors (humans, industrial capacity, war supplies)
2.2. Less-tangible Factors (information, willpower, morale)
2.3. Dimensions of war (place, time, amount)
2.4. Game rules
2.5. Asymmetry of the game

In the third chapter we fuse insight into concepts to understand how we can play the game.
3. Playing the war game
3.1. Playing the willpower (defensive attrition)
3.2. Playing the factors (offensive attrition)
3.3. Playing mobile warfare (invasion)
3.4. Playing the capabilities ("rushing the tank")

War and conflicts are as long as the human history. However, first known pieces on warfare are mostly following the heuristic line of thinking about warfare. Additionally, warfare is very susceptible to cultural specifics of the region, time, technology and economical implications of wars.

With one of the first well-known European thinkers on war theory, Clausewitz managed to describe and abstract the change in warfare in the end of the 18th century in Europe. Economies got increasingly better in producing stuff, breakthroughs in philosophy, information and politics allowed for mobilization of national instead of professional armies, increasing the totality of war and the amount of people involved.

Instead of simple monarchs battling each other with their treasuries and armies, "nations" became the main actor and resource in a war. With subsequent symmetrical development of national and superiority ideas and their immense cultural power, everyone in Europe believed in a short and easy victory for their own country.

Militaries all across Europe adopted various new technologies like the machine gun (ironically to prevent wars from happening in the first place), issued guns now featured metal cartridges instead of separated propellant and bullet, industrial base and demographics allowed throwing a vast amount of resources into the meat grinder.

Finally, in 1914, war starts and Germany, required to fight on two fronts, tries to do the Schlieffen-Plan - a piece of classical mobile warfare, aiming at invading France, reaching Paris and encircling the french by attacking from north and south.

With the world, forgetting the humiliating defeat of the russian empire during the 1850's Crimean campaign, has been thinking that ultimately it will be Russia and its vast resources on the eastern front, who will easily crush the back of the German Reich. However, the entente assumptions were wrong again and once more, Russia proved the world its might has been exaggerated and it won't win the war anytime soon.

With the first year not yielding the expected results, stockpiles of ammunition starting to deplete and production capacities unable to keep up with front demands, it became increasingly unlikely the war ends anytime soon, both in the German Reich and the Anglo-Franco West. The front stabilizes, trenches are being dug. Now it's up to us to win the war...

What is war? Baby don't hurt me! It urges me, more war! I think I spend too much time on r/NCD. Anyway.

War is the highest form of escalation as part of the realm of politics. The term above is "conflict" - the confrontation of political will. In classical terms, the origin of war is the political will to a goal and the mean is the collective usage of force to achieve the goal.

As an small-scale example: Your failure does not want to eat up the rice at dinner? No problem, you use diplomacy and ask it politely to eat up - however, it still won't eat the rice. What do you do? That's right, you escalate and threaten it with 2 weeks ban on computer games. I deleted the rest of the example, because I think otherwise the guide will be banned, but we all know what happens next.
That's right, either the rice is being eaten, you find a good diplomatic solution or you escalate further, which is not really funny. But so isn't war.

Anyway, this is how escalation works, so now you know how nations get into wars. When both believe they can win the staring contest and nobody intervenes to help, it's hard to build trust and stop the war from happening.

Deriving from the definition of war by Clausewitz, a war party consists of three interlinking factors of war:
> will to war (the determination to hold onto your war goals)
> hinterland (unrealized potential)
> the armed forces (realized potential)

Starting from the bottom, the armed forces are considered the primary means of war. They are used to wage war.

The hinterland is a german term for "the land behind". It provides for the armed forces and in modern terms is the industrial base, the territory or any other participant of war, which provides resources to the armed forces, including humans, weapons, ammo, food in a sustainable way.

The will to war comprises both, the morale of the armed forces and the support of the hinterland to wage war. Traditionally, with personal decision-making it is the ultimate commander of the forces - the monarch himself - on whom we are forcing our will upon. In modern understanding the general public and its elements in the armed forces are even more important as they actually carry out the will.

In classical warfare, it is imperative to destroy one of the three aspects to win a war, which is where the three major strategies can be derived:
--> destroy the enemy army
--> capture enemy hinterland
--> coerce the enemy to stop resisting you

Note: In modern terms, you need to destroy more than one of the aspects to achieve peace as a hinterland full of angry people will create a new army (realize the potential), the armed forces without hinterland will play insurgency or go into exile to continue the fight from somewhere else (realized potential is still a threat) and a hinterland with armed forces, but with a broken will to fight is not a guarantee it won't seek revenge 20 years down the line. There are other factors and perspectives on the issue as well, it's just a reminder, that the overall theory of armed conflicts is broader than our limited perspective of a WW1 general.

War consists of quite simple things. However, in wars, simple things are the hardest.

Imagine you need to plan a school trip to the zoo with 20 kids. 10 kids live in Town A, 10 kids in in Town B. You assign a team leader to group B and task him with meeting up at the zoo at 10 am. You get into the bus with the kids from Town A and get off the bus at 10 am. Group B is still not there. You start to guess why the other group is still missing (ofc. the phone is down).

Frictions are basically all the eventualities that make it harder to execute the plan. It can be a late kid, a broken bus, sudden case of diarrhea, bad weather - you name it.

If you check out the strategic map, you'll see all kind of things happening: mutinies, mud, thunderstorms. You plan to close the encirclement next term, but you get stuck in muddy season? That's how friction is modeled in the game. Don't expect to be able to execute every plan seamlessly. Delays and issues are part of the game. That's how war works. Try to keep a cool head and play a strategy, not a battle.

Generally, two war phases are known to us:
--> mobile phase
--> positional phase

The mobile phase is maneuvering and moving forward. Think of it as trading resources for territory. When will you trade resources for territory? When the trade is advantageous to you. When a trade is advantageous for you?

Let's introduce basic equations (source: I made it up to simplify, but there should be a credible and accurate source for that - also it's an abstract concept, so don't expect "no casualties" in real life):
--> Combat Force N = Human * force multiplier
--> Casualties = (D/A)^n * (d/a)
... D = Combat Force Attacker
... A = Combat Force Attacker
... n = non-linearity factor, dependent on overall technology, intensity and so on.
... d = factor for all defensive advantages
... a = factor for all offensive advantages

What do we know?
Your casualties go down non-linear with the overkill of forces you have as an attacker. Think of it as a street knife fight. With 1v3, expect to die, with 4v3 to win, but probably lose one or two, but with 100v3, you can win without losing even one of the 100 people.

A fight 1v3 maybe winnable if you have a gun and bullets (a increases).
A fight 10v3 is harder to pull off in hand-to-hand, if the enemy has a close corridor to guard or the high ground (d increases).

Therefore, a trade of resources for territory is then favorable if the strategic payout is higher than the sum of all casualties sustained to achieve the territorial gains. When the strategical gains through territorial gains is not worth it, you better check if you really want to do it. Maybe defending Verdun 'till eternity is worth it more than advancing.
If the strategical goal is worth it, it is imperative to trade, but how to? By creating local superiority to minimize your own casualties and therefore, maximizing the efficiency of your trade and increasing the odds of the desired strategical success.

What happened during the Great War?
Basically, in order to win with the least amount of casualties, you better bring superior fire power or superior body count.
Now, right before WW1, we invented the machine gun, which gave the defender an absurd amount of force multiplier, which the attacker couldn't bring to the table, because tactics still have not adapted, weight and availability locked the MGs to stationary positions.

Additionally, various new long-range artillery systems as another force multiplier entered the arena, which added new capabilities to both, attacker and defender - but also put a strain on the logistics. Luckily by 1914, train has been militarized not only by Prussia, but by any major power in Europe. The uniqueness of modern artillery has been the ability to kill and suppress infantry far from behind visual range - basically not risking their own soldiers. So, you guessed it, they started mass-producing artillery and the shells. With the WW1 industry standards, this of course didn't come cheap as able manpower became a limited resource - but at least you don't lose as much people on the front. Losing people on the front is less sustainable than constantly re-using people in factories. Of course you'll still need the numbers on the front actually using the systems, which is why you probably can draw a nice substitution function graph between people in factory-people on the front, but then it's a dynamic system as people will be dying on the front and technology moving forward and this is why, kids, you really need to start paying attention when the teacher starts talking letters rather than numbers in the math class

Back to the topic
So, while stockpiles and the steady supply of ammunition were available, the local numerical superiority and the effect of surprise during the beginning of the war and enthusiasm drove the German offensive forward during the initial mobile phase - when the point of parity in the equation of both forces ("culminating point") has been reached on a strategic level, the advance stopped and the positional phase began.That's where the game begins.

The goal of the offensive phase, according to Clausewitz, is to achieve all war goals within the time-frame before the culminating point, as to: destroy either the hinterland through an invasion, break the will to war or destroy the whole enemies armed forces.

Germany aimed at "invasion" and "destroying the will to war" by pushing straight to Paris, thus demoralizing the enemy and stripping it away of a big portion of its hinterland (the captured territories of northeast contained about 58% of steel production and 40% of coal as per wikipedia referencing 'Gerd Hardach, The First World War: 1914-1918 (1977) pp 87-88'). As the war aims goes, it also allowed to cut off the allied forces from steady supply from Great Britain

The positional phase is the time of parity between both forces on a strategic level. A goal of the situation, depending on the strategy, is to break the positional phase and get back into the mobile phase (i.e. gaining an advantage and therefore ground to accomplish initial war objectives). You don't have to though.

The heuristic local attackers advantage needs to be 3:1-7:1 in terms of manpower (ceteris paribus) depending on time and person you ask.
Breaking a stalemate therefore, where the defender has an overwhelming advantage due to technology and entrenchment, requires ceteris paribus an even greater advantage of means.

Therefore, to get back to the mobile warfare, the party needs to create an advantage of resources and/or technology. If that is provided either locally or across the whole front, the side with the advantage can then move up, breaking the stalemate.

Historically, the technological advantage has been pursued through various future-shaping new combination of available factors like planes+machine-gun or tractor+steel sheets+machinegun or fertilizer+artillery shells are being developed. And by "combine available factors" I mean research.

An advantage in resources can very well be a relative (comparative) advantage. Meaning, we both lose resources, but the enemy does it at a higher rate, therefore running out of them earlier. This is what advantageous attrition looks like.
This can be accomplished by favorable trading, but not resources for ground, but resources for resources. Killing more than the enemy kills yours means the resupply of his units will cost more than yours. Trading local supplies for strategical wear-down by shelling his positions with abnormal amount of artillery without ever advancing is another method to increase the relative advantage (as replacing people actually costs money, while replacing artillery shells costs only supply). By researching the logistical/tax tech tree you also allow simply having more resources in supply and money than your enemy.

By the way, if we go the route of "increasing amount of monetary resources", from an economical perspective, it makes sense to research the logistical/tax-tree as soon as possible as the value from researching additional taxes depreciates linearly with runtime:
... m = monetary gains
... x = additional amount gained per round
... n = remaining rounds

... t(total) = mean estimated amount of rounds (enter an appropriate statistical function here)
... t(n) = current round

n = t(total)-t(n)
m(research item) = x*n

Therefore, the later we touch the tree, the less advantages we get from it. This is why "knowing what strategy to choose" is so important early on.

Of course, the function didn't took into account that by investing the gained resources in, for example, logistical hubs or medical tents have an increasing value the more battles are fought on the part of the front. It also didn't account for opportunity costs of investing for an early tank and therefore the time preference depreciation for research points.

As we already established in the previous chapter, overwhelming force concentration is necessary to win battles with the least amount of casualties. The Schwerpunkt (literally German "mass point") is the concept of concentrating units in point and time either for a decisive battle or for cracking enemy defenses to capture ground.

From the three key factors mentioned in the beginning, we know that playing decisive battle aims to destroy the enemy armed forces, while capturing ground is part of capturing hinterland.

Playing the decisive battle as intended is practically impossible: in WW1, the abilities of countries to produce new soldiers have simply been too great in comparison to the rate of soldiers dying. Therefore, wiping out the enemy armed forces is practically impossible. However, we can bleed out the resources by constantly attacking in one place, focusing on killing enemies (advantageous trade between your supplies and his money). Killing a lot of enemy units also diminishes enemies willpower.

Playing the capturing ground is not as great as you might think, because incremental gains in land does not diminish the enemies ability to produce soldiers. However, you can try capturing HQs (northern France, Paris HQ or the German HQ), which ends the game or at least stops the inflow of new means of warfare to the front from GB. There is also the secondary benefit of bleeding enemies willpower.
Additionally, by encircling enemy units we gain a double advantage: encircled units can't attack, so we free a whole bunch of resources, while the enemy front is weakened by the amount of encircled units. Again, this attacks his willpower as well.
So capturing ground is strategically mostly a mean, not a self-sufficient goal. Depending on our strategy, we should capture different ground differently.

Attentive readers have noticed, that practically anything bleeds willpower in this game. In general, there are not many ways besides a bit of agency/luxury stuff in the tech tree to boost your own willpower or attack enemy units morale.
Most commonly, creating a very effective meat-grinder on an advantageous front part where the enemy then bleeds a lot more than you is the way to go, if you want to focus on enemy willpower. Reason is that during offensives we tend to lose units and usually lack all the building infrastructure to gain additional leverages. However, killing a lot of enemy infantry by artillery without losing enemies while utilizing the maximum of our leverage is quite effective to deplete enemy monetary resources and his willpower.

Force concentration in the tactical battles translates to inherently more supplies (because more units on a field = more supplies) and therefore there are more units and artillery to call in a tactical battle. Due to force multipliers on defending side like machine guns and trenches, you can lose a lot of your units if you attack head on, therefore you will use artillery anyway, which costs a lot of supplies

The laws of a finite mathematical set and basic common sense teach us: a glass filled with champagne means less champagne in the bottle. A concentration of forces implies forces deficits on other parts of the front.
Assuming equal distribution of enemy forces it does not mean we are exposed along the front. As we know, the defender has an inherent advantage, therefore there is an range of stalemate power parity, meaning nobody can attack successfully. Most of the time, neither you, nor the enemy have a decisive advantage. There is a solid unit amount floor, under which the enemy absolutely will push and win against you with minimal effort - so you can't expose the front completely. There is a dynamic optimum ratio between units spread in defense and units concentrated.

This ratio is influenced by various factors that we are already familiar with from our casualty formula: defensive advantage and overall amount of force. Defensive advantage is not only trenches and machine guns, but also all sorts of non-supply infrastructure.
For example, we can significantly increase the comparative willpower advantage by building medical tents. Ceteris paribus, even a minor defeat leads to less willpower loss on our side than the attackers, which is sustainable to keep defending the front even with an overall resource disadvantage.
Another way is to increase the overall force by building supply hubs (remember, more supply in battle = more units called, more artillery shells fired, more trenches build = more forces concentrated) or pair your units with new force multipliers (tank battalions, planes).
Both measure free resources to re-allocate your units to your Schwerpunkt.

Another affecting factor is the symmetry of the game: the more units you pull away towards your Schwerpunkt, the more the enemy can pull away towards his. So an enemy who creates a Schwerpunkt himself allows you to pull either more resources to yours or relocate the forces to his Schwerpunkt in order to decrease his success rate.
Theoretically, if both forces and resources are equal and playing an optimal strategy (shifting around their Schwerpunkt and counter-Schwerpunkt), there is a reasonable argument for an overall impossibility of one side gaining a decisive advantage over the other through the usage of force concentration alone.
Not shifting forces at all is in game theory the inferior choice all the time as the enemy will gain an advantage through force concentration while you don't.

Finally this all concludes in the ultimate result of the importance of having more overall force: volunteers, tanks, planes and respective force multipliers. Of course, this again is ideally symmetrical, so how will a war ever be won by any side? Basically luck: friction, informational asymmetry, stupidity of one of the enemies, and a risk of having a Schwerpunkt that we've not talked about yet.

A rule of investment is diversification as one of the key requirements to actually feast on the only free lunch in finance. The main issue with investing everything into one asset is basically the risk exposure that comes from risk concentration. An army is susceptible all sorts of risks as well: mutiny, sabotage, weather conditions. Shifting a group of forces to counter enemy attempts of forming a offensive force concentration works rather well until your artillery gets stuck in mud and heavy rainstorms block your ability to move. Concentrating forces means concentrating the risk. So maybe having only one concentration is sub-optimal and having only the bare minimum across the front may be so as well.

In general, there is an optimum in the trade-off between the loss in case you're too late to defend the sector and the cost of opportunity of the additional idle forces staying in defense across the front. Theoretically the risk is again, pretty symmetrical. However when applied, there are differences in the loss between different sectors. A sector is becoming increasingly important to defend if the cost of losing it is encirclement. A sector also is becoming increasingly important to defend if it has a realistic chance of being taken in one turn (2 stars sectors with 2 bordering tiles) as losing ground is in this game very expensive to willpower (in reality it is often as well, but there are plenty of examples where giving up the wasteland, but preserving manpower was the right strategy).

All in all, you will have to create force concentration if you want to play most of the strategies. As human leadership is a factor of itself, you can play with a spread equally front as well. However, we see that same-move attacks (technology/care package upgrades) are game-changers, as well as high-end sabotage, but also any other investment that drastically change the equation. We see, that there is a ratio between concentration and defensive spreading, since friction disturbs the ideal game altogether.

A strategic capability is an ability, which is backed-up by will and knowledge to wield it.
An ability is basically the possibility of an entity to make something happen.

Usually we mean something advantageous or unique by "abilities". Nobody cares if your organizational ability is to form a very coherent phalanx if you're in the age of firearms. However the ability to delete a city from the map very well.

Speaking in capabilities, artillery is the capability to risk-free harm enemy assets avoiding exposure. The degree varies to available supply across the front, sure, but all-in-all this is what provides the main value to artillery. Derived from that comes the capability to destroy enemy vision (balloons) from afar or force enemies out of trenches by throwing gas shells on them.

Air assets are primarily not of value because they can harm infantry (there are way cheaper way to do it), but because they can be used to counter tanks, other planes and artillery. They are however vulnerable to enemy air assets and the late Flakpanzer as well.

Tanks are primarily of value because they counter infantry, especially in combination with suppressing artillery. The capability here is to break through enemy lines or counter enemy offensives.

Capabilities are not as interesting if the enemy has the means to counter them or has them as symmetrically as well. A capability is only then especially interesting if it generates strategic advantages and that is what we need to be looking for - this means, assessing the enemies capabilities, choosing your own.
This is mostly the game with the tech tree: you can't have it all and you have to be willing and able to deploy the chosen stuff for it to generate value.

For instance, buying the first supply upgrade is not worth it, if you never deploy one. Buying gas masks is worthless if the enemy lacks the capability to throw gas. From an abstract point of view, investing points can be either done tactically (looking at blatant ROI) or strategically (looking at capabilities). Efficiency can be a strategic advantage as well (f.e. by the usage of medical tents), however, if it is not part of your strategy (attrition!), then your investment does not add value and you should spend the points somewhere else.

Feel free to create your own formulas for this part. I may add some later, but here's the general idea:
We've already mentioned the value of investments when it comes to tax increases.

Generally, the game can be broken down to:
investment return = [damage done to enemy]+[resources gained yourself]+strategic returns

In a very broad sense, the overall game depends on our objective. If our mission is simply ending the war, then we may choose to throw our infantry into meat-grinders with the intention to reaching the capital before the willpower is down - no matter the cost.
If our objective is to preserver our own human resources in the process, we will choose other strategies like, generally, "leverage capabilities" (basically a euphemism for tank abuse, air spam, artillery rain - everything that preserves our own forces).

So depending on objective, we can adjust different investment valuation based on our strategic preferences - in the sense, that it increases the strategical payout by, for example, winning the game sooner.
This comes down a bit to strategic assumptions - how likely is it, that the means will actually win the war sooner? How likely is a superior asymmetrical answer to our investment? What element do we see as our primary limiting factor and what enemy factor do we want to diminish? (willpower, gold resources, time, supply, territory).

In reality these decisions are usually dictated by asymmetries between enemies. Germany in WW1 was strategically limited in time as the lack of access to foreign goods and colonies made it especially hard to endure a long war. The pressing situation of two fronts put quite the burden on the strategic command, now having to fight two quite formidable fronts at the same time. This is why the high command chose to invade France (literally, this is the chosen strategy) with the goal to end the war as quickly as possible on the western front by reaching Paris.

The allies, on the other hand, could generally afford more time, especially after the US started mass producing supplies. Britain for example invested heavily in propaganda, which has mostly a heavy long-term effect. After accumulating enough strategic advantage through a long phase of successful defense, the allies switched to new objectives.
With US joining the war, mobilizing up to 4.7 million personnel, the statistical out-production and new capability leveraging (tanks & co.) with first successes on counteroffensives finally broke the back of the German willpower to continue to wage war.

Just a quick note: yes, the game is mostly easy enough to win. Playing a strategy just makes it more fun and coherent. After all, this is where our motivation to play games comes from - besides trying to get a better grade in game theory on your economics degree.

Strategy and tactics (and operations as some coherent piece of strategy and tactic in between) are sometimes more, sometimes less blurry.
In general, we formulate a strategy - an overall goal and a plan how to reach it. "Win the war by reaching the enemy capital" in long-term for instance.

The strategy sets the overarching goal and the path to reach it, for which we utilize tactics as methods to progress.

A tactic we use to move forward towards the capital is, for example, an armored breakthrough. We utilize it over and over again to keep moving forward towards the enemy capital.
A tactic that helps us burn through enemy resources is accumulating supplies, building 10 howitzers and pound the enemy positions for 20 minutes. Even if it's only a "minor victory" and you didn't captured an inch, if the enemy gold resource decreased by 3600 gold and you paid less than 200 supplies for it, it's absolutely worth it.
A good tactic is to destroy the vision balloons during the opening salvo to ensure the enemy can't target your positions with his artillery and conceal your troop movement.
Another one is to advance with tanks and infantry to enemy trenches while the enemy infantry desperately tries to climb out due to your simultaneous gas attack.

Even on the strategic level it might make sense to speak of "tactics" if you allow the enemy to capture a territory, to them outflank him over the flanks and encircle his attacking units. This might be a tactic we could employ to prepare for a big counteroffensive with the strategic goal to capture ground.

Unfortunately, our operational level is quite cut out as we can't really do many things on the strategic map to directly influence the tactical battlefield. Some measures would be: sabotaging infrastructure before your offensive or fighting a small skirmish in the same round to exhaust the enemy before the main push.

War as generally a game. It is the exercise of moves by players, utilizing means and maximizing parameters to achieve outcomes and receiving payoffs.
Now that doesn't sound as playful if you consider that "utilizing means" mostly means risking your own people and killing others. On the other hand as a violent competition of political wills it goes deeper than we often assume.

Most of the time the game can be broken down into many smaller games based on scope, dimension or time-frames.

The good thing about computer war games is that there are no real consequences besides you insuring your wrist, your eyes and your back from staring onto the monitor. This and the fact that computer games model the reality always in an imperfect way, makes it harder for you to transfer the lessons learned to the real life - even though some war parties truly behave in a way that makes you think about Hearts of Iron 4: electric boogaloo or the AI in Wargame: Red Dragon. Unfortunately most games that try really hard to depict reality are either too ugly or too complex to be played. So even this game is pretty abstracted from reality - the cost of logistical lines, the incompatibility of supplies between armies and different weapon systems is all either not modeled or abstracted.

In reality, making a tank from scratch requires not only research and industrial capacity, but also plenty of time. Infantry has to be trained in advance not in retrospect, you can't just "buy supplies" and then decide if you want to fire them down the light or heavy artillery or give them to your troops to eat. This is not how it works. The devil in reality is often in the detail and this is why you usually don't start earning the big bucks after university and the most frequent reason named for start-ups or, frankly, any projects to fail is social component of the team. It really sounded different when you listened to the guy on Youtube, who proclaimed "just make a company".

However, when pushed into abstraction, we have the opportunity to learn lessons about reality that we previously oversaw over all the details we got bombarded every day by your local newspaper.

At this pace the guide won't neither be written nor read before next Christmas, so let's hurry up here.

There are obviously quite some factors we as a player of the game operate with. We have clear tangible factors like humans, factories, war supplies, gold reserves.

We also have usually non-tangible factors like willpower, morale, information.

A little setback
In this game willpower and morale are actually modeled. Imagine trying to quantify your individual willpower you use to do your laundry or your personal morale when you play chess and you suddenly start losing. Information is quite tangible in the factual sense ("I know that the text is getting too long for many people to read"), but try quantifying the degree of being informed or the value of the information you have.
If it's not insider knowledge about a stock price or knowledge with what you're extorting someone - well, good luck with that. By the way, this is neither financial advice nor instigation or promotion of violence, crime or anything else. I just love radical examples, because people tend to understand the obvious better.

Back to topic
As you might have noticed, the amount of humans you can waste is not modeled, but gold resources very well are. Think about it like there is a manpower limitation, but the National Will will sooner be zero than you would be able to waste all the humans in your country.
In general, this is why big manpower losses come at a cost of replenishment (buy new uniforms, new weapons, train them) and national will.

Factories are really not modeled as an entity, but you can invest into various industrial programs and taxes to increase the military output (with war taxes you redistribute more societies resources towards the war, even though you obviously don't create new factories just by increasing taxes).

War supplies are what your units use to shoot, to fly or to prepare for an attack. You can buy them with gold.

So as we see, gold reserve is our main key resource. This means, denying enemy gold reserves and increasing ours is, the main economical underlying of the game. It also means, you need to maintain a balance between available gold reserves for replenishment, supply and assets you buy.

I personally recommend to learn from past mistakes and mobilize your industry early on to maximize the economical gains from it, but depending on your strategy this might be unnecessary.

Since the enemy also loses gold from casualties, you know what to do? That's right, create as massive casualties for him as possible to run him out of gold, thus increasing your strategic advantage. Simultaneously try not to die or at least die less than your enemy.

Non-tangible or less-tangible factors as they are modeled in the game are information, willpower, morale.

Morale is what makes units surrender and willpower what makes nations surrender. Information is what allows you to make better decisions.

Morale can be improved by assisting infantry with tanks, sending care packages or getting them drunk through construction of a pub. I believe mutiny is a neutral event that decreases morale. Additionally, you can decrease enemy morale by driving up with your tanks to them, killing them, but also pre-attacking them with a support attack before your big battle. Finally, you can do plenty with all sort of sabotage.

Willpower or National Will is the overall willpower of a nation to keep throwing away their sons life for a greater cause. It increases with big victories and/or gaining ground, buying luxury items and spontaneous events. It decreases often with practically everything besides big victories. It also diminishes with spontaneous events and I believe per default after 1918.

Finally, information. You can gain information about enemy structures and units. The outcomes for battles in auto-resolve are presented pretty transparently, but there is always a chance the auto-resolve thinks differently than it displays. The tendency is usually correct.
Most of the time, the amount of chips is sufficient for you to shift your forces around. This is maybe a bit very transparent, but OK.
This is the explicit information about the enemy.

There is also implicit information about the enemy, you'll mostly see if you either fight the battles yourself or the enemy loses assets during auto-resolve. This is what enemy capabilities are. Does he wield planes? What kind of planes? What kind of artillery shells comes down? What are the structures on the field I just conquered? From that you usually can abstract what state of the art the enemy is in right now.

Combined with explicit information you should be able to determine what capabilities you maybe lack, where you might excel and where you should plan your next attack.

Since willpower breakdown ends the game, it is interesting to focus your strategy on stripping away the willpower. However, as there are many ways to diminish willpower, it is kind of yours to chose from.

In reality, willpower is not a one-dimensional factor. Often, countries that "should collapse any day now" tend to hold tight for half a decade, while others crumble sooner than expected. The alignment between high command and civil society is also not always given as interests and willpower diverges. Often the greater determination can be traced to the war justification itself, as the defending side naturally has a lot more reasons to fight for and lies are eventually doubted by the attacker. In this game, the will is assumed to be symmetrical, but keep in mind it's not always is. Great losses may lead to decrease in willpower, but sometimes only increase the determination. A declining empire losing one battle might crumble in its core, while breaking the willpower of insurgencies by defeating them militarily is nearly impossible.

What we basically already used, but not defined are the dimensions of war as in place, time and force.
We already established force as a variable that depends on unit amount times their different specified and unspecified multipliers.
Time and place are pretty self-explaining as standalone concepts.

The art of war is accumulating the necessary force in a advantageous time in an advantageous place to achieve results you wished for. But as we already stated, it is easy to plan a school trip on the paper, but then the bus brakes down on the highway.

Mostly redundant, but clarified in short.
Both opponents try to coerce other opponents to give up. Practically reduce the opponents national will to zero. This is what they manage their assets for in time and space to destroy one of the enemies factors: resources and armed forces.

In the computer game, this means specifically that enemies play a sequential game on a strategic level and a simultaneous game on the tactical level. However, this is pretty fluid as reinforcements are limited and often will be used in waves, thus creating a bit of a sequence again.

It is also possible to disrupt the strict sequence of movement-attacking as attack-moving is a thing with the highest possible care package upgrade.

As we already found out in previous chapters the game itself is designed pretty symmetrical, however some aspects might be worth mentioning.

Overall, the starting situations are slightly different. Allies (entente, i know, it's just easier to call them allies) got a heavily fortified Verdun and one point in recon. Germans start with one point invested in heavy artillery. They just pushed forward, so there isn't much gained.

The main strategic advantage of the Germans is the interchangeability of their forces. There's not that much to say than it just works and you can use them on any fronts. I think I've read somewhere the range of the German heavy artillery is greater, but it's mostly not the limiting factor I am not sure about the source anymore.

Allies get quite the morale penalty for mixing their units, therefore limiting their ability to accumulate forces. As an advantage they get quite many diverse unit bonus effects to their units.
The light tanks of the french are fast, but very vulnerable, limiting the offensive capabilities overall. However, their infantry is cheap.
On the other hand, the British Empire brings great tanks, but generally more expensive infantry. The US army brings the same french tanks and overall decent infantry. Belgium is compatible with everyone, but it brings no tank to the table.
As an ally you will learn to deal with these asymmetries.

There are of course some historical asymmetries, but I believe that the events are mostly balanced out, while in 1917 Germany starts receiving units from the eastern front - and the allies units from USA.

Our examples throughout the text should mostly suffice to give us an understanding of how and why as well as what. This chapter will be mostly a wrap-up where we describe most of the strategies again in short.

We already established, enemy national will is more of an indirect factor rather than a direct one.

However, we can purposefully play willpower only by defensive attrition. What does this mean? Well, during the static phase of war, those who attacks usually suffers more casualty, therefore building infrastructure to reduce your own casualties and therefore national will loss even if losing a battle is a strategy.
It aims at just balancing enemies force concentration to prevent further ground-takes and make the enemy bleed out national will (and a bit of resources) on the offensive.

It works in general, but you will need to shift forces around to prevent great losses and others. It is especially great to play if you don't want to play tactical battles as you can focus yourself on the strategical odds instead of your tactical proficiency.

As we established previously, as we provide casualties to the enemy it costs him not only willpower, but primarily gold reserves.

With this strategy we aim the enemy to bleed out of resources to increase our advantage to such a level, that we can later on steamroll him with superior military spending on tanks and planes during an offensive.

In this strategy we need good logistics and force concentration, while the rest of the front behaves like in strategy 3.1.. Then we play one or more time per round on the force on the concentrated sector in question. We don't attack with infantry, but systematically eradicate enemy structures and infantry with artillery. Yes, it costs supplies, but we don't care as 3000 accumulated supplies are enough to keep hammering the enemy for 20 minutes by 5-10 howitzers. This costs us nearly nothing on the strategical level, but costs the enemy an arm and a leg each time we do it.
As for the rest, the infantry can remain in their trenches and shoot individual counter-offensives the enemy will pull sometimes.

This is basically offensive attrition. If you go out with +200 gold replenishment costs (all hail the bonus system after a tactical battle fought) each time, while the enemy goes out with costs <-1500 he will absolutely be unable to do anything else besides fighting you on the front sector.

It is in core basically defensive attrition, but we are the ones who initialize the fight.

This strategy aims to exploit the fact that we receive great payoffs from encircling enemies.

We already established some options to do it in a less dynamic way (namely, fall back, outflank, encircle), however they aren't as sustainable as the 2 options we will be presenting here.

First, set a realistic territorial goal. Reaching the enemy capital unfortunately is not always realistic (mostly due to time spent with rearmament). Encircling the Germans from and in the North and then close the central pocket on Verdun works sometimes quite well, but also do offensives in the south.

One both proposals have in common: moving forward is imperative for success. What do we need to move forward efficiently? Troop concentration, tanks, fighter planes and care packages to keep moving forward.
We probably also need a steady supply of gold and supplies.

The trick here to start with small pockets and keep moving forward to bigger encirclement as every encircled enemy frees up flanking resources we then can utilize to keep pushing. Search points of low resistance (1-2, max. 3 stars) and attack there. If successful, redirect your units to new fronts. This is how not only enemy willpower will quickly crumble, but also yours will rise and with each made encirclement you snowball into even higher strategic advantage in forces, basically snowballing into the enemy.

Playing the capabilities is more of a procurement and tech strategy rather than a military strategy itself.
We try focusing on getting tanks, planes or other assets with the primary goal of exploiting the asymmetries in capabilities.

For instance: we tech the plane tree, we get bombers and then each battle we fight first for air superiority, destroying enemy vision and air defenses. Then we fight for enemy artillery batteries, reducing their capabilities to zero, while maintaining our own. Finally, we can shamelessly exploit our air dominance. Does the enemy wield tanks? Doesn't matter, the asymmetry of having many planes renders their capabilities in artillery and tanks useless.
Even if the enemy starts building more fighter planes for some reasons - we actually focused on planes, so no chance.

Another example is tank rush, where we just tech for the tank to exploit the enemies weaknesses. Then we only buy some fighters for support (just in case of bombers) and the steamroll infantry trenches with 8-14 tanks at the same time.

Another example is cheap (siege) artillery. Bombarding the enemy for 6-8 days (~50% trench destruction) renders trenches or anything pretty useless, creating significant gaps in enemy defenses.
Another point can be the intelligence tree: sabotaging the enemy infrastructure before a battle hurts really hard, if that is what the enemy relied upon. As long as the enemy doesn't play counterintelligence much, it is hard and reliable.

But you get the case: try to get unique capabilities, that the enemy can't counter and then exploit them to the max. This is a bit abstracted from the Schwerpunkt theory, where having a concentration of efforts on something creates ubereffective returns, while the rest can take the luxury of remaining relatively weak - at least until the enemy shifts his efforts to counter yours.

Be realistic about it though: nothing unique comes cheap, so don't try to be everywhere with everything as then you won't get anything done.

Things to do in the guide:
--> add some more strategies I come up with
--> fill in some screenshots/illustrations
--> clarify ambiguous passages after review
--> Wish the reader all the best and a great day