LM5 Mod guide

First disclaimer, I’mma try keep this up to date, but I will sometimes forget, so take things
with a pinch of salt.

Army

This is a 30 width mod. So for your best divisions do 30 widths, your normal 36w or whatever
the vanilla meta is will be shite.

Regarding tanks, the terrain traits for heavies are much worse than vanilla, so whilst they are
still viable, they can be outperformed by mediums in some terrains. The main armaments
are researched on the tank screen, to the left of the chassis.

Light tanks can have medium turrets, allowing for them to be made as a cheaper version of
mediums, with better terrain traits but worse stats in the designer. Only heavy tanks can
have heavy turrets, which means only they (and fixed superstructure TDs) can have heavy
armaments, the best of which come at the final tier of the tech tree: heavy howitzer for more
soft attack and advanced high-velocity cannon for piercing and hard attack.

Chassis naturally give stats as well, including but not limited to soft and hard attack and
breakthrough, so it is almost always worth updating your chassis when you get it.

This leads onto designs, which vary from vanilla as using better chassis gives more
reliability, so you can put more stuff on them. Extra cannons are good, so are stabilisers and
autoloaders and obviously tank radios (researchable either on their own in the tank tree or
with radar tech).

Whether or not to put armour on them is a highly disputed topic, and as such I won’t
recommend either way, but bare in mind the reliability when you start adding significant
amounts of armour, you may need to increase it with wet storage or easy maintenance,

For doctrine, mobile RR is good for tanks, so is GBP. Superior can be alright as well. Mobile
RL is designed to allow tanks to be defensive (as suppose to click and counter click combat)
but it makes you worse on the attack.

And finally, TD battalions have less org than bases game, so a division with only them and
mech/motorised will need to have less TDs in them for org to be sufficient.

Regarding infantry. For strong inf, you want to go superior or GBP. You can upgrade infantry
equipment, AA, AT, motorised, rocket arty, arty and support equipment like you can mech in
base game. This can let you build some very good infantry if you do it right, however they
get more expensive and lose reliability so lose more equipment in battle. Mountaineers are
the best allrounder infantry, but there is other special forces, such as shock troopers as
jaegers. Special forces cap is near infinite. Artillery is only 2w, so generally your special
forces should have 15 battalions, the mix of arty and special forces battalions is your choice,
but the line arty you include, the less org they have, so they become better at attacking but
they defend worse, so they require more micro to be efficient. (REMINDER: AGGRESSION
AND NORMAL BATTLE PLANNING IS BANNED. This is because it can lead to the most
boring builds where if you have enough inf, you can just endlessly attack, and can’t be
counter attacked as you are always attacking. This is boring and cringe so is banned.)

If you want shit inf, just use 30 width bricks (pure inf) with an engineer company and AA.

Regarding mech: pure mech divisions are viable with mobile, generally as defensive
divisions, but if you add some form of arty, they can attack.

Regarding spirits: in spirit of the academy, theoretical school is good as your first army XP
purchase, as it gives +0.3 daily gain. Once you have sufficient army XP, the choice is
between actual combat school for grinding your inf to be higher level, decryption and
encryption for obvious reasons, Anti-colonial struggle (which is basically adaptable but only
for minors) and spirits for grinding aspects of your generals faster.

In spirit of the army, the first 5 are good prewar, depending on your needs, veteran combat
training is good for keeping your divisions at high levels, and the rest are good situationally,
but to maximise tanks generally you go German style combat or fight for communism, fight
for life.

In spirit of division command, unless you want a specific tactic rolled a lot, go logistics for
help in low supply areas, or mass assault for attacking buffs.

Navy

This mod has the naval fleet limits for TFB, and as such you can’t deathstack, as if you do
your navy will output far less damage. This means that even if you start with a navy
advantage (US, UK, Japan) a smaller navy can beat you by defeat in detail if you are not
careful.

The game calculates the limit for you, says how many screens are required, and clearly
shows if you are over on any fleet. Being over on one fleet affects all your fleets so be
scared if you see you are over.

Destroyers and subs take 1 cap space, light and heavy cruisers 2, battleships and
battlecruisers 6 and carriers and super heavy battleships 8. The total cap is 150.

For combat fleets, you need something to deal with screens and something to deal with
capital ships. This could be one ship, like a light cruiser with some torpedoes on it, or two,
like heavy attack battleships with cheap destroyers. The limit for overcrowding (too many
carriers in a battle) is 100 instead of base games 4, so you should never reach it.

Battleships/Battlecruisers are strong in this, so are carriers if you invest into doing them(E.G.
taking spirits to maximise them, high command and base strike)

Below is a basic fleet design you can use, it is not too research intensive, but it also can be
beaten, it is a good intro fleet if you don’t know what to build.

A fleet of 12 of the BC and 39 of the cruisers fills the cap perfectly with 3 screens more than
required. It has good shore bombardment and is competent in battle.
For ASW/SW, there are sub 3s and snorkel 2 in the mod, but there is also sonar 3 and 4.
There is also a new carrier module that has good sub detection and even has some depth
charge damage, so carriers can do alright dealing with them, but they are expensive.

If you invest in ASW, you will be able to deal with subs, even sub 3s with snorkel 2. It may
take time but you will be able to and you’ll be able to protect most of your convoys while the
subs are still alive. If you don’t invest in ASW and your opponent invests in subs, they will be
a massive pain, to the point of it possibly crippling you if you rely on convoys.

For spirits, for spirit of the naval academy you should chose the one that best fits your
build/need. Generally, U.S. for carriers, German for subs, Japanese for
battleships/battlecruisers, French or Italian for quality screens, British or Spanish for convoy
escorts and Dutch for surface raiders. New world navy helps minors build fleets and gives
some bonuses and the red sea army tradition gives army bonuses. For spirit of the navy,
navy dominates is the standard for a navy build, army dominates if you don’t care about
navy. The rest gives bonuses to constructing certain ships, be it refit speed or IC reduction.
Spirit of naval command is self explanatory.

Air

Air is different to vanilla in terms of the stats of modules. The thrust for engines is less, and
is directly proportional to the number of engines, but so is the IC. As such there are 3 ideas
for fighters, an interceptor build, a general fighter build and a heavy fighter build.

For interceptors, the idea is to sacrifice range for low IC, by having a single engine. This
results in a design such as the one below. It has low range but makes up for it by being
cheap and having good combat stats.
A general fighter build tries to balance out the range issues, but at the cost of IC by having
dual engine. It has better combat stats, and better range, but it is also more expensive, so
the interceptor is better in combat per IC.

Heavy fighters have range and good stats, but the trade off is both IC and resources. They
are viable in terms of damage per IC, but they will almost always be outnumbered. The
number of engines you put on is your choice, in the example below I chose 2, but with 3 or 4
I could have had enough thrust for more armour plates or possibly turrets.

For spirits, the only thing of particular note is defensive operations in the spirit of air force
command. It helps no air builds immensely.