Nauru Island (RHSAIO)

[Buck Beach]

I think I saw something here awhile back about the strength of the almost 7,000 labor force and 700 vehicles at Nauru Island. FYI, in my game (3 week of 1/42) the 900 Japanese troops have been battling there for about 3 weeks and can't take it.

[el cid again]

You are seeing a supply sink - possibly for the last time. [I think we may not need them after the next Matrix update - and they will then "shrink" to only perform demolition and token defense missoins.

The problem is that it takes 30 squads to eat supplies from a single resource center! So I had to reduce these to a firepower value of 0 or 1. A supply sink contains a few engineers, three times as many labor squads of one sort or another, and the balance in motorized support squads (which are smaller than regular support squads in RHS, but list as if they have a vehicle). The number of engineers is the cube root of the total sink size (so the labor squads is 3 times the cube root and the total non-support 4 times the cube root). A supply sink does several things:

1) Eats supplies (Nauru makes resources but not suplies)

2) Destroys the resource centers (and other industry if it exists) in the hex when the hex is assaulted

3) Defends the hex even if no military units are present (but not very well)

4) Rarely it also supports civil aircraft - or any aircraft using civil aircraft hubs.

Capturing a supply sink is not very hard (any more). They have horrible morale and experiene, horrible national modifiers, horrible commanders, are planned for the wrong location, and almost no firepower. But they DO have squads. The bigger the sink, the more it requires you take it seriously. You either starve it out - AI's strategy - or you must hit it in force with proper support (air, naval gunfire, artillery, armor). Nauru ALWAYS falls - don't worry about that. But it is big enough you cannot capture it in a single assault by a minor unit.

IRL Nauru is a guano mine, with a mechanized movement system for the guano (bird poo used for fertilizer) - sort of a tramway for the stuff. It has a proper staffing of some size - but not the size we show - because technical considerations dictate the number of squads rather than duplication of the literal labor force. It is a compromise system - and the best we yet have. But wait until next year - we will have a much better system in all forms of WITP - I think - or at least I hope. Ideally we will have soft control in one way or another of each location.

Supply sinks worked well enough we will NOT get rid of them - but we will get rid of function 1 - so they will substantially disappear - and not be so big and hard to take at major resource centers. When they are not big enough - we will add labor squads and compensate with supplies to make them supply neutral.

[Buck Beach]

And in fact Nauru did fall since my post. The Japanese sent another similar size group as the original and it fell within a week of game time.