Supply in v 1.12

[thedoctorking]

I routinely have a supply shortage in two v 1.12 games as the Soviets. Every turn, the supply percentage in the Resource Status section of the event log is on the order of 20%. I have around 100% of my vehicle allocation in one game, while in the other it was very low and has come up to around 50%. In the latter game, I have had intermittent resource shortages, though these have decreased recently (we lost many resource centers to the Axis in 1941, recaptured most of them in early 1942, and they are beginning to come back on line now in summer 1943). In both games, my army is large (7-9 m) and I have been attacking everywhere I can get an advantage, both on the ground and in the air. My units appear to still have great strength and fairly high movement values. Losses from attrition don't seem markedly higher than in v 1.11 games.

My question: is this unusual or something to be concerned about? Should I try to conserve supply by not attacking or by choking TOE for some units? Is this just a product of a glitch in the supply delivery model introduced in 1.12.00 that will be resolved in future patches, or is this WAD to force the Soviets to concentrate on limited offensives?

[JoeLewis]

This is an interesting question that I have been struggling with and talking about a lot on the Discord forums. The issue comes from Supply NEED which is consistently above 260,000 with only about 80,000 supplies on hand. This creates a supply ratio of about 30% with an army of 7.5 million, 120k guns, 6,000 tanks, and 11,000 planes.Your supply production is more or less capped at 124,000 per turn with 260 heavy industries evacuated.

Since you cannot produce more supplies or create more heavy industry, the only recourse is to reduce the SUPPLY NEED number.

1. What has worked in reducing supply need:
--reducing the number of ground attacks
--disbanding huge numbers of forces (10 x divisions per turn to go down by nearly 1 million men)

2. What has not had a noticeable impact:
--transferring level bombers to NR or other planes that use lots of supplies
--transferring irrelevant factories (USV2) around with free rail space to avoid spending supplies on production
--reducing rail reserve to 0%
--disbanding unused SUs (over 100 AAs, other artillery SUs hanging out in Stavka)

3. Still testing:
--reducing armament production (down to 90% right now; have over 1 million armaments in pool right now so feel ok with this)
--transferring HI and ARMS industries to high resource centers to avoid spending rail on moving resources around for the economy
--reducing TOE for artillery units (currently at 50%)

[Bitburger]

When i patched up to 1.12 i suddenly had a supply of 30%. Reducing fort construction to 25%, disbanding my fortified zones, and reducing armaments to 50 % corrected it. Took a month and alot of ap.

[BrianG]

When i patched up to 1.12 i suddenly had a supply of 30%. Reducing fort construction to 25%, disbanding my fortified zones, and reducing armaments to 50 % corrected it. Took a month and alot of ap.

all this extra stuff to get some normal supply is the issue. its altering the game for not real reasons

The beta needs to be adjusted back to get better russian supply in 42.

[JoeLewis]

@Bitburger - did you reduce all your fort construction numbers? As in the fort construction for cities, units, and there was one other one as well (HQs I think?).

[Bitburger]

Yes, units and cities. Found that the higher the fort level being constructed, the higher the supply costs.

[JoeLewis]

But won't that really hurt your fort construction levels? As the Soviets those are key to building up solid defensive numbers quickly against the Axis.

[eskuche]

At the point when you have supply issues and 7.5 million men you don't really need forts

If you look at the manual the supply costs for higher level forts, as Bitburger alluded to, are really, really, big. When you have extra units (taking supply) sitting in the back on forts (taking supply) it makes sense where a lot of that drain is going to.

[sil01]

Soviet, move 14.

Produced 175,000 resources.
Spent 59440 resources.
!!! 27160 supply not produced due to SHORTAGE of resources.

Why are there not enough resources if there are too many produced?
And there are many more in Stores ...

[eskuche]

Usually this is because of a rail shortage. I see you’re at 20% reserve rail. I bet your RAIL NEED in logistics report at the bottom is only 75-85% met. This is usually the case for unuseable resources.

[sil01]

ORIGINAL: eskuche

Usually this is because of a rail shortage. I see you’re at 20% reserve rail. I bet your RAIL NEED in logistics report at the bottom is only 75-85% met. This is usually the case for unuseable resources.

Absolutely bingo. Only 46%[X(]

[chaos45]

Would seem that the rail system needs work in the next patch especially for the Soviet side....

Interesting that long ago oil resources were made no issue because it limited German mobility to much so now oil/fuel is a non-factor in the game for the Axis when historically after 1941 it was one of the main limiting factors of German mobility...also the reason they historically de-motorized divisions.

[CapAndGown]

One thing that I find a little overdone is the concept of railyards. In the game, the soviets are losing rail capacity as they lose rail yards. Yet as the soviets lost ground to the germans, because they saved most of their rolling stock and locomotives, they actually had more rolling stock per mile of trackage which would increase their capacity for the number of miles of track they had left. Meanwhile, as the germans conquered more and more territory without a significant increase in rolling stock, their capacity per mile of track went down.

[eskuche]

Sorry to bump an older topic but anyone seeking to fix this problem can try to bump up the transport slider for Soviets to 110% or 120% in a future game.