Road Congestion & Supply Logistics

[rfrizz]

Oh great Arjuna:

[&o]

This is the first of a few questions


Could you discuss road and other congestion and how it is modeled?

I try to avoid having stationary units on roads by adjusting facing, depth, and frontage so that they do not overlap roads.

An example (let's use Return to St. Vith) would be bringing supply units to the north, either just south of the Steinebruck Bridge, or even east of Lommersweiler.

I don't want them interfering progress of units which are passing through.

Does this matter?


One other IMPORTANT thing: For the be benefit of readers new to wargames, a basic truth of supply is the advantage of having the supply center closer to the units being supplied. The farther trucks have to travel to their destination, the worse it is, and you need more trucks to do the same job.

This is as true for a shipping business as it is for a military supply operation. The more distance you have, the more time your trucks are on the road instead of loading and unloading supplies.


Does the Command Ops code take this into account?

[Lieste]

Yes... you should bring the forward echelon supplies as far forward as possible - but not so far as to compromise security. This can be tricky when you are attempting to supply two flanks with intermixed troops - here it is better to position the supply depot farther to the rear, or to re-arrange your troops' physical locations overnight to simplify the supply routing so that all supported elements from one depot are in a similar area of the line, and are directly accessible from their rear.
You should then ensure that divisional supply units are suitably placed on the road network to distribute supply on safe routes to the forward echelon supply units, and to divisional troops, with the artillery (the major consumers) placed near to the supply units.

Improving the survivability of supply is important, and it is worth accepting a sometimes longer or slower route from SEP to the front line to protect capacity over a longer scenario.

Compared to unit movements, the supply columns are mostly very small. There is code that calculates the impact of two units on each other's movement, but AFAIK it isn't applied to supply columns (as opposed to supply units when on the move), and as it stands would probably have little effect anyway because of the low vehicle count for each column - most are 1-4 vehicles - only with depot re-supply or artillery/armour re-supply runs will you routinely see more than this handful of vehicles in a single dispatched column.