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::a causal report::

just kinda feel like typing tonight...

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This planet was really enjoyable: A colossal Base Sea planet, 65% ocean, with a 'spiderweb' or peninsular archipelago land form maximising the exposed coast line. Quite cold, cold enough to freeze out Earth crops beyond the tropics, but with good native life adaptations enabling xeno-agriculture. This was meant to be an MTH map, and it was.

Also, it was an Island start, so relatively protected and therefore easier.
The Maritime Trade House play quickly became very important. And mainly I wanted to talk about how that worked.

In general the MTH play was quick, fun and directly affecting the game. The whole system and its different connected parts, with the cards and the tense troop landings and sharply limited logistics budget, mixed in with the surprisingly important Trade House diplomacy, totally succeeds in my opinion.

Organizing the logistics streams and maintaining them was the main challenge in this game run, as it should be for any Island start. And it was this which caused me to lose (or virtually lose) the game. In part it was my inexperienced use this system which contributed to the point I've left this game, but there may also be a bug involved, maybe, see below. Mainly though, I could use the MTH system just fine the first time, and the current deadlock (or collapse lol) comes down to some specific decisions and my luck running out just when I had taken a chance on one MTH over another. If there is a bug in the logistics logic, I'm not blaming it for my deadlock or loss. Its just the way I played.

So in a nutshell, the issue is capacity, or tonnage. I can't keep my operations fed over seas. Or more accurately: I can't send in the battle units I need to fight. Consequently, the Tanks are owning the day once again. Even bare-bones AT Gun units are too heavy to transport, while RPG troopers are an undiscovered model.

One reason for these tonnage problems may be that I've been miserly with the friendly MTH requests to my empire, keeping a very tight grip on my available population, which I regard as a sterling resource. My total remittance in people has been about 15,000 head over the whole game, at least two-thirds of that being to my nearest and dearest MTH, called ' 'Lamia Waters'.
Plenty of IP went their way. Just not so much population.

One reason I made the decisions to keep the Lamia recruiters out was that I don't trust any MTH to use resources well. Meaning, I have the sense that they could lose anything and everything at any time, no matter how many people I gave them. But also, I was never able to successfully buy a share in 'Lamia Waters', not yet. Consequently, even though it was clearly in my interest to make the Lamia House as powerful as possible for purely logistical reasons, the fact that I was not party to their operation meant that I was looking elsewhere for another MTH to truly call my own.

That better deal was there, but in another hemisphere, which was very cool.
Developing the "Battle Mode" MTH could have worked, I think, given time. But I rushed the game. Now, just before turn 100, with my best offensive efforts being choked behind am intractable Maritime logistics bottleneck, I think I'm going to re-roll. I have the heavy units to send in to beat back the enemy tanks, but I just can't find the MTH capacity to support me.

I hope that is a little interesting. The main lesson I wanted to report was that Maritime Trade House Capacity is important. But more in detail, even though there were many other MTHs on this planet, in my contact and with plenty of capacity, replacing the services of my first, home-town MTH, the Lamia Waters guys, proved too difficult on this run.

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The AI also deserves its due for virtually winning in this run. The mainland mainland regime opposing me is a juicy super-Major with a population of 1.3 million, three times what me and my allies can muster together. I knew the risks of declaring war on them when I didn't yet have to. Even now, we have we have far from lost the war, absolutely speaking. But the possibility of an opening decisive attack has passed.

There are no winners in war. But in a game, you can make mistakes and just try again.

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But I promised a potential bug. Here it is:

<<see image posted below>>

Its hard to catch in an image, but basically my two distant SHQ's don't connect when it seem like they should.

It may be something about the way I put together my MTH streams, perhaps something about which end of the logistics stream is the "start' or embarkation point, and which the destination. But despite having a steady stream of logistics points between my two SHQs, the 'Transfer" window reports "No logistics connection could be found". It is still possible to transfer goods through a third point, 'Mothman Coast" in the image, but this capacity is partial and management intensive.



Save game:


Thanks for reading, thanks for making the game, glhf

The last SHQ Connection bug image here:
Also, the save game is here:

having difficulty attaching the save game.

I checked out the save, and I can't see any reason why the transfer between the SHQs is unavailable either. There seems to be a contiguous line of unspent logistics points.

Thanks for looking

Soar_Slitherine wrote: ↑Mon Oct 28, 2024 8:07 pm There seems to be a contiguous line of unspent logistics points.

My thoughts too. Also, it's possible to Strategically Move units directly between those SHQs, even while unable to directly transport materiel.

I can think of two possible reasons for this problem. First, maybe it has to do with one set of logistics points being generated by SHQ 1 and the other by SHQ 2. Logistics between two SHQs has seemed finicky and temperamental to me before. The respective log points may not be able to see each other and find each other and shake hands, despite the streams crossing or at least meeting.

Second, it may have to do with which *end* of the logistics is the nominal start ('embarkation') and which the destination or unloading point. This would make the SHQ transfer problem part of the more interesting issue with the MTH mechanics I found in this run.

As I may have said above, some of the troubles, the main ones, I had on this run were to do with MTH capacity. The far away, southern MTHs (ie. Battle Mode) had ample tonnage, but the nearby Houses (Lamia, Greyline) were absolutely knackered from shooting at each other. So, I tried to meet my urgent need for short-range transport, which should have required only one 'good' contract beginning and ending in my home sea-zone, with at least one long-range contract from the very distant MTH. If that makes sense. Because the logi streams all intersected, I thought it would work better. But it was very hard to manage.

The no-SHQ-to-SHQ-connection issue may be just one symptom of how mixing MTH logistics streams is a little unstable.