Commonwealth Burma Faction Design

The back story to this design is that, I wanted to round out my faction designs with a counterpart for the Italian faction design, but having thought about this for a while, I felt doing either a Chinese Nationalist Army or Commonwealth forces in Burma would be much more interesting, to complement my USMC and Japanese factions. I researched the Chinese Nationalists and found that there was no realistic way to solve that jigsaw puzzle within 'Relic standards' of realism and balance. So I opted for the Commonwealth forces in Burma.

The Design

In T0 we have the standard repair and construction unit, Sappers, but also the Universal carrier. The Universal carrier is important for this design as its not only your early harassment vehicle, but crucially as well, its the faction's primary tow vehicle. With teching it can be upgraded with a Mortar, making it into a mobile indirect fire platform, but also an Ambulance, giving it reinforcement and healing abilities.

T1 is your only immediate teching option and can be purchased immediately, it contains your HMG, the Vickers, and the 2 pdr, your ATG. With my suggestion for substitute units, detailed here, you can swap out these team weapons for Chinese Nationalist equivalents, namely the Type 24 Maxim and Type 30 ATG respectively. T0 and T1 give you basically all the tools you could need in the early game.

From T1, you have a T2/T3 split. In the base of T2 you have a Piat team, which is your hand held AT. It would be great if you could mount these in Universal carriers like in Coh1 and be able to fire on the move. T2 also has 2 side tiers, Tier Alpha and Tier Beta, which it shares with T3. With Tier Alpha, you have the 3.7inch Mountain Gun, your primary indirect fire piece, and then the Stuart Jalopy which is an early harassment vehicle, somewhere in power close to a 221, but slower and more armoured, potentially also being able to transport squads. You could also substitute it for the Daimler MK.1 Sawn Off, which is the same sort of idea but faster, cheaper and less health. Once you advance to Tier Beta, you have access to much heavier light vehicles. The standard Daimler Armoured car would be somewhere in the realm of the Greyhound in power, whereas the Morris C9/B would probably be the most dangerous Flak HT in the game, with its 40mm Bofors. I strongly suggest making that unit somewhat like the OKW flak HT, in that it can't fire while on the move and has a set up time.

Over in T3, this comes later than T2 and once built gives you access to Gurkha Rifles, which in this incarnation are purely assault infantry but also the ACW Indian Pattern. The ACW would primary have the role of a mobile light vehicle counter with decent infantry harassment. You would use this to hunt down 221s, Kettens, 250s, Panzer Is, Carro Veloce L3/35s and Type 94 Tankettes and 251 Halftracks, that sort of thing. Once you unlock Tier Alpha, you get access to the Staghound AA, a robust harassment unit also capable of mobile suppression, and the towed bofors. Once you reach Tier Beta, you get the Valentine, which is roughly equivalent to the Crusader and T-26 in power. The Valentine would have a variety of upgrades, notably the DD conversion, allowing it the ability to ford water, a feature that runs through many of my other designs.

The primary purpose of the shared tiers is not only to control the timings of the various units but also to make side teching and back teching more affordable, diversifying build orders. Once either T2 and T3 have been built, or Tier Alpha researched, you can then tech T4. T4 have the Chindits as your lategame infantry unit. You can then tech up to T4.5, which is the ultimate stage of teching. Here you have the M3 Lee, as your default medium tank, which can also be substituted for the Sherman. The QF 3.7 inch AA Gun is the Flak 88 equivalent and serves as the answer to heavy tanks and tank destroyer play. Finally you have the Priest, which is your mobile heavy indirect fire piece.

Battlegroups

My thinking with the Welrod is that it should function kinda like a short range Jager Light infantry squad, where it has a high chance to perform crits. Another route would be to make it so that the weapons has 100% crit chance from camo.

You also have the American forces in Burma which you can tap into.

One of the conveniences of using a Commonwealth in Burma faction base is that you can use Chinese Nationalist forces in your battlegroups.

The other advantage of doing this faction is that it opens the door for Thai units to be used in the Japanese faction.

Caveats

Creating an allied Burma faction that is both balanced and reasonably historically accurate is hard because of the lack of variety of the units that served in that front. Therefore, some corners had to be cut, for instance, I'm fairly certain the Staghound AA and the Valentine DD were not used in the Pacific. Likewise, I haven't been able to find mention of a tank destroyer being used by commonwealth forces in Burma and the faction reflects this. Ideally something like 17pdr SP Achilles could be used to round out the faction, but I have not added it here. If I find solutions to these problems I will update the design, feel free to make suggestions.

My Other Designs

- Free French Proposal.

- Italian Proposal.

- USMC Proposal

- Hungarian Proposal.