Out of supply - what is going on in this situation?

[mroyer]

In the following figure, the entire front circled in red is without supply source and reduced in operations/movement. I'm not sure why the units are reduced. The supply numbers show them at varying levels of map supply, and the yellow circled unit is actually on a good-order rail line that can be traced back to Germany.

What is going on?
(this is the start of the turn and none of the units have moved or performed any action.)

Thanks for any thoughts.
-Mark R.

[AlvaroSousa]

The units north in red have both their rail lines cut by partisans. The terrain to walk around them is rugged so it is harder to get to the front lines.
The Southern armor is in slightly less supply because they are in damaged rail that hasn't been repairs yet.

Put a unit in the northern center damaged hex to ensure it gets repaired and no more partisan hits that can make the problem worse.

Welcome to the Russian Front.

[Toby42]

I still can't believe that Partisans were that strong of a force to affect supplies to that large of an area?

[AlvaroSousa]

You are seeing it as an absolute when really the hit is minor. Units can survive 3 turns out of supply before having really bad effects. You always have supply trucks.

And in this scenario if you were an 8 map supply you would get ~20 effectiveness recovery with an HQ. In that 2 map supply spot it is 8 recovery. It's 12% less for 1 turn. It's not unreasonable.

This was the only way I could make partisans just challenging enough for players while having a better than non-effect

[mroyer]

If the effect is purely for game purposes, I get it - the game is only an abstraction of real life effects for entertainment purposes. There will always be distortions in any abstract model and playing enjoyment is more important than factual realization.

Nevertheless, we are a historically minded crowd with very high expectations (perhaps too high [:)] ) that game distortions are minimized without impact to playability - heck, for me that is the very definition of a "good" game - and Warplan largely delivers on that count. It is an excellent game.

In that vein, I can't help but view game events through the lense of history and try to explain game events by rationalizing them to what could actually have happened in real life to cause those events. In this case, I'm struggling with that without introducing all sorts of cartoonish-charactures of actual partisan capabilities.

So set the stage here, up to the previous turn, I had kept every urban and significant rail junction hex in this front garrisoned with a German division. The Soviet Union then executed a nice cavalry break through of the thin Axis lines in the Pripyat Marshes area. Believing the cavalry thrust was largely unsustainable, logistically, I quickly plugged the hole as a short-term expedient by shifting nearby garrison units to the breakthrough area (part of that gaggle of units to the southwest of Minsk). My plan was to thwart (or at least slow) the breakthrough and then re-garrison the urban/rail hexes on the next Axis turn.

Instead, instantly in the ensuing Soviet turn, the partisan noted the un-garrisoned areas, formed two divisions, organized a major offensive and thoroughly wrecked hundreds of miles of rail bed thereby sealing off an entire front reducing the operation points of all units by over half. This is a wildly successful military operation that eclipses the efficiency of any other offensive so far in our game.

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So, lets try to rationalize this in terms of what might have happened in real life to have such a glorious result in the game over a two week period.
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First, alert partisan observers throughout the front need to notice German garrison movements and correctly deduce that those movements constitute a full evacuation of garrison duty. Any delay in that reduces the time needed for the rail-damaging operation.

Second, local partisan bands need to be notified, assembled and organized for the operation. We're talking a massive operation here (a couple partisan units showed up on the game map) so that's perhaps ten's of thousands of people on the move.

Logistic and tactical plans to support such a large undertaking need to be drawn up. Capability to simply feed and equip such a large force for two weeks of hard labor, wagon trains, foraging expeditions, and so on need to be developed and executed. Heavy equipment, bulldozers, excavators, etc.. to thoroughly uproot rail ties and destroy rail beds, water towers, rail stations and so on needs to be acquired.

Historically, the vast majority partisan activity against rail lines was limited to pick-axes and shovels operations pulling up the rails themselves from the ties, an activity that was easily repaired in a day or two. To have a rail line out of commission for weeks or months necessitates much more extensive effort to damage not only the rails, but uproot the ties and ruin the bed. That demands a lot of heavy equipment that partisans rarely had access to. (Yes, later in the war, even perhaps at Kursk, there was some marginal success at this - but it was in coordination with and under the command of the regular Soviet military and not a spurious event.)

Similarly, moving dismantled rails far from the bed to prevent quick repair was equally difficult requiring heavy transportation equipment to accomplish. Destroying the dismantled rails also took a lot of effort too - typically involving bond-fires to melt-soften each rail and twist it around a tree or post so it couldn't be re-used.

All of that took a lot of time, heavy equipment and effort to accomplish. A regular army in controlled scorched-earth retreat could do it - they were properly equipped and supplied and had time to execute on it. But, could 10 or 20 thousand unorganized partisans destroy a hundred+ miles of rails in just two weeks?

Unless they are the stuff of the next Marvel movie, I highly doubt it.

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I think successful partisan operations, as represented in the game, should only erode the effectiveness of affected units. Nevertheless, I shall enthusiastically play on with the hopes of discovering I am utterly incorrect in my assessment and Alvaro has it right after all - I truly hope that turns out to be the case [;)]

-Mark R.

[mroyer]

Finally [:)] I really wasn't intending to have a discussion of partisans with this thread. I really just wanted to understand the game mechanics at play. I'm still confused why the yellow-circled unit has any effect at all. I'll need to study Alvaro's answer and the manual to see if I can figure that out.

[AlbertN]

That is the first time I see something like that as half of the units, even at supply level of 7 units should operate fine. I understand at 3 or lower but 7? Or 9 even?