[Beta AAR] Their Finest Hour - Explorations in Custom Game ModeHi guys!A lot of people expressed their concern that the new Custom Game Mode gives unfair advantage to the player. A lot of people were curious how much manoeuvre it gives to the player. This AAR is meant as a response to that. I'm going to try to redeem the CGM (as we call it) in your eyes and explain how good an addition it is to the game.Let's take Italy for an example. Italians before the WW2 made a considerable commitment to expanding their navy. The decisions were made what ships to produce, with what equipment, how many and what their purpose was going to be. Italy was all over the place with their war plans, the potential battlefields and potential enemies in the future wars changed constantly for them. Their preparation was poor, their industry inefficient and lacking stockpiles of materials, and then they gave a good deal of what they accumulated to the Nationalists in Spain.If you decide to start in 1939 or 1940 with Italy, you are going to suffer because of this whole historical predicament – and it's a nice start for a number of people who want to replay the war as closely to history as possible. But many people don't like to go into the war unprepared. If you decide to start earlier, in 1936, you have three years to correct some of the mistakes of the past, stockpile resources for example or better prepare your navy for taking on the much superior and much more numerous British ships.Three years isn't that much though – and there's only as much as you can alter during those years. Your research ability is limited after all, and you can't unbuild what was already built by Mussolini's order before 1936. And that's when the CGM comes to play, it allows you to do precisely that – reach further into the past, change some of the earlier decisions of your government to better suit your gameplay. If you don't like what the country you're going to play did before 1936 – now you have a way to influence that and make them more to your liking.Taking it screen by screen: You can use the CGM to edit the earliest 1936 bookmark for any country in the world, or even one of later bookmarks. At the moment available CGM scenarios are all the start dates between the Road to War and Pearl Harbor, as shown in the screenshot.The first stage of edits is Diplomacy. You can do a number of things here, lowering your country's neutrality is one of them if you wish to attack someone earlier than usual or mobilise your industry earlier than usual. Joining and leaving factions is another - if you wish to play Axis or Comintern France for fun and laughs, you can make this happen through this mode. If you don't like where your country has aligned diplomatically in the years before 1936, you can change their position in the diplomatic triangle, move them more towards the faction you'd like to support. You have 1000 points at your disposal for all those actions, that doesn't let you reshape your country's entire diplomatic standing, but it allows you to make some changes to it. If you don't want anything to be different, you can choose to not edit anything here – and just go to the next tab directly.In the Technology section you can alter your country's technological setup by just a tiny bit, or revamp the whole of it. You can remove a number of researched projects and invest points into something else, or scrap everything and start from scratch, starting with WW1 tech levels and investing available research points into the projects you consider necessary. In this AAR we'll take the conservative approach and will only alter one very important decision made by Italy before 1936 – we will remove some of the points invested into the Battleship research and instead try to research Carriers reshaping the naval expansion policies of the Italian state before 1936.In practice it's pretty easy, you reduce the levels on BB techs (shift+double click), and the game gives you research points you can add as new levels of the CV techs. Let's resign from the battleship research now. We don't want big guns at sea, no longer our doctrine, let's pretend Mussolini figured battleships won't be that useful in the next great war some time in the 1930s.Italy can't become more modern than Germany using unmodded CGM – you need to resign from one technology to get points to research another. The maximum number of research points you can use is limited by the general level of technological development of your country at the beginning of the scenario. You can make your country more modern if you want to, it's as easy as editing a text file, but by default this screen is set to not give the player anything more than he should historically have.As you can see, I only got 1800 research points for unresearching the battleships, and that only lasted me enough to get carriers up to the 1934 tech levels (and since I ran a few points short, I only got a half of the carrier AA tech!). So I get to start with carriers, but they will not be very modern and I only made a fair trade of one unit for another. And of course, I'm losing my battleship research to trade for it.To finish the alteration, it's worthwhile to visit the air doctrines tabs and see if everything is in order there. Italians have very nice starting naval aviation doctrines, they are almost meant to have carriers – but I decide I need even more focus here – and figure to remove logistical and installation strike doctrines to pay for the remainder of the carrier AA research – and to purchase better Nav Pilot Training to bolster my starting CAGs a bit.In this screenshot you can also see the new increased ahead of time research penalty – which applies to the CGM as much as to the normal game. 1936 doctrine only costs a bit under 300 points, 1938 doctrine researched in 1936 (two years ahead) costs almost four times as much. It's very discouraging to research things before their time comes, it's better to spread out.With that covered we proceed to the third tab, deployment. Possibly my favourite part of the process. This is where a lot of magic happens. You can edit your starting order of battle here, and unlike during actual gameplay, you can edit it very quickly because production and deployment is instant in this mode.What you can do here to your OOB can save you a lot of hours compared to starting without the CGM, let me give you a few examples from my Italian campaign. First of all we migrated from the battleship to the carrier doctrine, so let's disband some of the old Italian battleships.As you can see, the principle is the same as with research. You have to remove some units from the starting order of battle to produce other units. You can only limit yourself to smaller changes - disband one ship and replace it with a wing of airplanes, or you can wipe out the entire army and rebuild it from nothing according to your liking. It's entirely your choice what degree of changes you decide to make in this mode. You can also skip it entirely and start with the historical setup.Having disbanded my battleships, I can now produce carriers – but carrier is not a cheap thing and Italians are not really experts at building them. The price of a modern carrier with two wings of carrier air group is really steep. Because of this, I decide to replace my old rusty BBs with CVLs. It'll give me one good task force with four wings – and I will trade 4 capital ships for 4 capital ships of similar power (let's be honest, an old Italian battleship isn't really that strong). I can build my carriers with CAGs – but I can't afford them yet so I decide to build them without. Maybe I'll scrap something else to add CAGs? 14500 IC days, not only do I ditch the old battleships, replace them with more universal carriers, I also save some points while at it, to be spent elsewhere.Now the fun part, I produced the CVLs with just a click because I had enough points from disbanding my old battleships – and I am allowed to deploy them directly to any port where I want them. Units are moved instantly in this mode, you can put your carriers in the Sicily, in Venice – or in Libya if you want to. You can quickly rearrange their positioning without having to rebase, disband or reorganise. And you can remove some ships to replace them with different ones if you want to change your fleet composition.This comes handy for all kinds of forces, not just the navy. Look at this, I have 6 divisions of 2x Infantry here, so called binaries. I decide I don't like my future army to be binary, I select them all and disband with just a click.I get the points for disbanding and use them as IC days to quickly rebuild them into triangles – deployment takes just a second and *puff*, I have four 3x Infantry divisions where just a second ago stood my binaries. You can't imagine how much time it saves to rearrange your army in the CGM like this – move between binary, triangular or square divisions, produce attachments you need, place the units where you want them. If you want to switch the British Army of India to light binary divisions and attach armored cars and cavalry to them, you can do that in a blink of an eye – and then deploy them to Burma directly.To end this text, I move my four divisions of infantry to Africa, together with a wing of tactical bombers – and upgrade the airport down there to service them better. This will allow my soldiers to push harder from the south during the coming war, while my bombers provide strategic support for them limiting enemy movements. My three minutes of fame are over, time to return to the mines of betatesting, start cracking them rocks before they realize I'm gone. ;-) Thank you for reading.What do you think about the custom game mode now? What edits are you going to make in your first Their Finest Hour game?