Reliability of soft factor intelligence

[Kantti]

Hi,

In my server game against Nix I stumbled upon an interesting situation. I isolated his advanced pz korps where his 2 panzers showed red soft factor for fuel and 2 motorised were orange. I askes how many mp's they got on their turn and was surprised to hear that the leading panzer had 29 MP's without getting any supplies through. Other panzer had 19 MP's Those orange motorised division got less (26 and 1 even if they showed higher fuel levels on soft factor). Is the soft factor on enemy counters reliable information? Or is there some other explanation (I confess that I still don't have a grasp on finesses of supply rules) how isolated panzer (isolated from HQ and from railhead) unit got 29 mp after showing red soft factor for fuel and being adjacent to enemy and after 2 aerial bombardments. The units were buildupped last turn, but as said, they showed quite low fuels and must have had some fatigue from battles from previous turn.

[Kantti]

Sorry, to clarify, units were built up on turn 9, on turn 10 they made their penetration, on soviet turn 10 I isolated them and on turn 11 they got mentioned MP's despite all adverse conditions.

[Kantti]

This all makes me wonder how one can stop Germans in 1941 in the south once they break out past Stalino if supply is no constraint to them if they can first get around 50mp turn and then 30 mp turn despite most adverse conditions possible. Of course after such 80 mp dash they will be totally out of supply for long, but they have already hinged Soviet defences totally at that point as it is usually impossible to get enough unit density in open southern steppe to stop encirclements when panzers can wade through steppes on that pace.

[DeletedUser1769703214]

ORIGINAL: Kantti

This all makes me wonder how one can stop Germans in 1941 in the south once they break out past Stalino if supply is no constraint to them if they can first get around 50mp turn and then 30 mp turn despite most adverse conditions possible. Of course after such 80 mp dash they will be totally out of supply for long, but they have already hinged Soviet defences totally at that point as it is usually impossible to get enough unit density in open southern steppe to stop encirclements when panzers can wade through steppes on that pace.

Was there an HQ with these surrounded units? Were there any fuel drops to them?

[Stelteck]

Hardluck have the most probable cause :
- An HQ with fuel dumps was here and supply the panzers from inside the pocket.
- Heavy fuel dumps may have been performed too.

A full loaded HQ coming out of a HQ builtup have probably 2 turns of reserves.

[morvael]

Isolated units may also draw directly from city in nearby hex.

[Kantti]

No fuel drops if I recall correctly. If there was, aren't they already accounted for in the soft factor? There was no HQ with units, there was no friendly city (units were trapped just east of Salino, city complex still in my hands).

[Nix77]

I don't think I made any drops there, and as Kantti said, the fuel gains from the drops would be seen on the Soviet player turn.

The units in question were actually more than 30 hexes away from railhead, and the HQ was >25 hexes just to give the units support in case of counterattack. So basically everything in the corps was out of supply. Would the HQ be able to deliver fuel from dumps on the start of my turn? I don't think that happened though since one of the divisions had only 2% fuel. The division that surprised Kantti was the one with 58% fuel.

[Kantti]

I don't think that HQ could have delivered anything because HQ was not in the isolated pocket.

[morvael]

It would be good to see unit supply details screen for those two.

[Nix77]

No supply at all received by any of the divisions in the supply window, as expected. I'm blaming it on Stavka intelligence mess-up

[morvael]

Soft factor is accurate, but it should be visible only for units with detection level above 6.

I think it may be buggy for units with more than 100% needs, but below it shouldn't.

[morvael]

Remember there are also leader rolls involved in determining MP as is fatigue and truck shortage (for motorized units), thus that orange division may have failed its roll and that's why it got less MP compared to fuel it has vs those red divisions.

That said, red means the unit has up to 40% needs, orange means 41-55%.

19MP fits into 50MP*40%. 26MP less so, but if in the meantime (your logistics phase, your turn, and his logistics phase) he lost many fuel-consuming elements from that unit his fuel% may have been higher when it came to determining MP.