So after playing through most of 1914 so far in this game as the Central Powers, I've noticed a few things:
1. Corps are very small, to the point where they're not actually even very helpful for saving CPs. At most you can save on the artillery you throw in next to the two divisions.
2. You only get up to 4 army groups with the Ottomans involved, and those army group leaders have very small command ranges compared with the fronts they would be expected to fight in, especially the eastern front.
3. Due to the high CP cost of corps and their small size, armies can't get particularly powerful without going significantly over CP limits. And that's assuming you can even put your armies in the chain of command, which in many places on the eastern front (and any theatre that isn't France, Serbia, or Armenia) just isn't possible.
4. My starting pool of 3 star commanders is extremely limited, and it will take a while to promote 2 stars up to army commanders.
5. The starting OOB from turn 1 on this game is quite unusual for an AGEOD game, with lots of independent corps running around.
So between all these factors, I'm quite confused on how I'm supposed to play this game compared to a game like CWII or WoN. My instincts are to want to have everything in the chain of command, with large corps under powerful armies, but that just isn't possible without massive CP penalties and more army groups. Instead, I've been more-or-less keeping the starting OOB untouched and putting newly created units into independent corps. Since I don't have many armies and the ones I do have are all full, this seems to be the only option, but it comes with a lot of problems like being unable to synchronize move and losing out on army group leader bonuses. Is that just what I'm supposed to do or am I missing something?
I have one other question: I seem to recall hearing in other AGEOD games that a commander suffers penalties for leading both a division and the whole stack at the same time. Is that true for this game with corps? My corps commanders currently are leading both the independent stack and their personal troops at the same time, some of them with loose extra troops as well, and I'm wondering if that's causing me problems. That said, the game started them out that way, so idk.