Thoughts on the new "pull" system in logistics

[zgrssd]

I seriously can not understand why people want to make a "Maze out of Traffic Signs".
How is that a interesting part of the game?
How is that a test of my skills as supreme Commander?

And do not even dare to compare commanding units in a wargame, with setting the traffic signs. I would have to starting being insulting to properly explain how dumb that argument is!


and



Do not compare in any universe I can imagine!

[Covski]

My take on the whole thing is that I really like the sound of the pull system - not because I've had any great issues with micromanagement or the logistics system in general (aside from the obvious part of being new to the game and learning by trying things out and failing, which is a process I quite enjoy). For me, the pull system just sounds like a more realistic way of handling supply lines - in no realistic situation would truck crews split 50-50 down every intersection regardless if the truck was carrying something that was needed down that direction or not. Especially since this game in general is focused on quite high-level command.

If anything should be done to retain the ability to optimise and micromanage supply lines, I feel like it should be the ability to prioritise certain units or assets to receive manpower and supplies. Actually, I feel like this would be a large improvement to the game in general, regardless of any other changes to the logistic system.

[Tomn]

ORIGINAL: Sieppo

Obviously you understand at all what happens in war IRL. Why didn't Germany just automate their logistics in their Russian campaign .. The logistics system that YOU manage gives you the feeling that YOU made that. Just like it would happen in real life. You mess up? It is your fault. You succeed? You can be happy and get a feeling of accomplishment. It's is why games are played. I will say again, there are tens if not hundreds of easier strategy games out there, try them out! Some of them are excellent.

Gotta ask, boss, are you intending to be insulting? 'Cause you kinda are. Do I need to challenge you to pistols at dawn? Need we appoint seconds, make sure there's a good surgeon on the field?

I'm honestly kinda dismayed that THAT was all you got out of my post.

[GodwinW]

You are such a huge fan of saying 'maze of traffic signs' and raging against it, but I think most people on BOTH SIDES agree on the fact that a maze of traffic signs is not a thing/should not be a thing.

One side says it isn't needed, and the other says it wouldn't be fun if that was necessary.

So, and I've seriously been asking myself this each of the 5 or so posts that you said it in, who are you talking to?
And what's your point?

[Sieppo]

ORIGINAL: Tomn

ORIGINAL: Sieppo

Obviously you understand at all what happens in war IRL. Why didn't Germany just automate their logistics in their Russian campaign .. The logistics system that YOU manage gives you the feeling that YOU made that. Just like it would happen in real life. You mess up? It is your fault. You succeed? You can be happy and get a feeling of accomplishment. It's is why games are played. I will say again, there are tens if not hundreds of easier strategy games out there, try them out! Some of them are excellent.

Gotta ask, boss, are you intending to be insulting? 'Cause you kinda are. Do I need to challenge you to pistols at dawn? Need we appoint seconds, make sure there's a good surgeon on the field?

I'm honestly kinda dismayed that THAT was all you got out of my post.

So I touched your feelings did I ? You admit there is a point? To my earlier comment regarding logic I have to apologise, I think you mentioned also the point that the opposite is also true.

I really do not have the need to wage any internet wars with any people. These are just the thoughts I get with this issue. Like someone said, making things easier and automating them is a slippery slope. One I hope this game is not going to down to since I enjoy it immensely even at this point.

[Sieppo]

And to be clear I never said don't fix the spaghetti roads or some random mine shark suddenly taking away half of your supply, on the contrary.

[Smidlee]

One of the things I love about Distant Worlds is I could automated any area. At the beginning of the game I managed everything but as my empire grow larger I start automate more areas. I like the new pull system for at the beginning I turn it off and micromanagement the logistics. As my empire gets larger especially in the lead I like the option of the pull system to handle the logistics. Something I like to do in early game can become a grind in the late game.

[Sieppo]

ORIGINAL: Smidlee

One of the things I love about Distant Worlds is I could automated any area. At the beginning of the game I managed everything but as my empire grow larger I start automate more areas. I like the new pull system for at the beginning I turn it off and micromanagement the logistics. As my empire gets larger especially in the lead I like the option of the pull system to handle the logistics. Something I like to do in early game can become a grind in the late game.

Yes good point. Most of the 4x games become a grind end of game. Haven't gotten the feeling here yet, I guess it is because you just are so compelled to be involved in everything all the time. It gets quite hard in larger planets but I also like it, can't just click away.

[zgrssd]

ORIGINAL: Sieppo

ORIGINAL: Tomn


Meanwhile while all this is happening you're capturing enemy assets, branches which now require some degree of logistics to make use of so that they become productive for your empire, but every logistical point devoted to an asset branch is a logistical point not spent keeping your forces in the field supplied, so you want to carefully prune those branches with traffic signs to ensure that a minimum gets through while reserving most of your stuff for your offensive. If you don't do this, you either starve and stall out your offensive, or extract fewer material benefits from your conquest. Not ideal!

The upshot of all this? A player who DOES do all this in detail can sustain a lightning-fast, highly effective offensive for a fraction of the time and cost it would take to upgrade logistical bases to overcome inefficiencies through raw capacity instead. That brings snowballing benefits - hitting the enemy faster without pausing for logistical upgrades means they have less time to react, less time to recover, and less ability to mount an effective counteroffensive, which means you take fewer losses on the offensive overall which means you can devote even more resources to strengthening yourself which makes it even easier to break through their lines and of course breaking through their lines means you're sapping resources from them which further weakens them and on and on it goes until they shatter entirely. And make no mistake, you can sustain an offensive remarkably far on a L1/2 truck station if you channel it correctly. Micromanaging your logistics allows you to support larger, faster offensives further from your logistical bases at a cheaper price - the ONLY real cost is the time and effort it takes to do so. Does it not make sense to do so?

Now, could you overcome the AI without using such tricks? Yeah, almost certainly. But that does mean that every war you fight will be slower, more expensive, and less effective than it could be, and when you add up the cumulative effect of multiple wars that adds up over time to put you in a worse position overall. And in a real sense, that's what it all comes out to - the individual effect of most traffic sign micromanagement is relatively small, but the cumulative effect over time becomes a major advantage, and to do without when you KNOW you can take advantage of it is to fight with one hand tied behind your back. And let's not even talk about multiplayer - someone who doesn't use these tricks is going to have a real hard time against someone who does, all else being equal.

Obviously you understand at all what happens in war IRL. Why didn't Germany just automate their logistics in their Russian campaign ..

They had Quartermastesr and Supply Companies. They were slightly smarter then teh Autoamtion we have.
I doubt anyone in the Cabinet about Adolf had to deal with Traffic Signs.
Except in your world, where Adolf Hitler apparently was also a Traffic Sign Nazi?

I still lack the words to express just how stupid the question was, without being insulting.

[Sieppo]

ORIGINAL: zgrssd

ORIGINAL: Sieppo

ORIGINAL: Tomn


Meanwhile while all this is happening you're capturing enemy assets, branches which now require some degree of logistics to make use of so that they become productive for your empire, but every logistical point devoted to an asset branch is a logistical point not spent keeping your forces in the field supplied, so you want to carefully prune those branches with traffic signs to ensure that a minimum gets through while reserving most of your stuff for your offensive. If you don't do this, you either starve and stall out your offensive, or extract fewer material benefits from your conquest. Not ideal!

The upshot of all this? A player who DOES do all this in detail can sustain a lightning-fast, highly effective offensive for a fraction of the time and cost it would take to upgrade logistical bases to overcome inefficiencies through raw capacity instead. That brings snowballing benefits - hitting the enemy faster without pausing for logistical upgrades means they have less time to react, less time to recover, and less ability to mount an effective counteroffensive, which means you take fewer losses on the offensive overall which means you can devote even more resources to strengthening yourself which makes it even easier to break through their lines and of course breaking through their lines means you're sapping resources from them which further weakens them and on and on it goes until they shatter entirely. And make no mistake, you can sustain an offensive remarkably far on a L1/2 truck station if you channel it correctly. Micromanaging your logistics allows you to support larger, faster offensives further from your logistical bases at a cheaper price - the ONLY real cost is the time and effort it takes to do so. Does it not make sense to do so?

Now, could you overcome the AI without using such tricks? Yeah, almost certainly. But that does mean that every war you fight will be slower, more expensive, and less effective than it could be, and when you add up the cumulative effect of multiple wars that adds up over time to put you in a worse position overall. And in a real sense, that's what it all comes out to - the individual effect of most traffic sign micromanagement is relatively small, but the cumulative effect over time becomes a major advantage, and to do without when you KNOW you can take advantage of it is to fight with one hand tied behind your back. And let's not even talk about multiplayer - someone who doesn't use these tricks is going to have a real hard time against someone who does, all else being equal.

Obviously you understand at all what happens in war IRL. Why didn't Germany just automate their logistics in their Russian campaign ..

They had Quartermastesr and Supply Companies. They were slightly smarter then teh Autoamtion we have.
I doubt anyone in the Cabinet about Adolf had to deal with Traffic Signs.
Except in your world, where Adolf Hitler apparently was also a Traffic Sign Nazi?

I still lack the words to express just how stupid the question was, without being insulting.

I still fail to understand the thing about where playing a complex game about totally managing your empire turns into "I don't want to play it like this, automate everything that feels annoying". Like why do we have to research army organizational structures? Or how thick the armor should be? Surely Adolf did not do it. Or schwarzkopf or whoever. I'm talking about a game, it's about doing stuff like this and I'm happy that I finally have a very complex wargame where I can feel responsible for everything. Like the 4x ww2 of dwarf fortress. But I guess it's a lost game trying to explain it to the masses.

[Sieppo]

I've also played war in the Pacific extensively. There is nothing to compare to this there because everything is proper and mature (nothing like the supply system here but its basically only precise micromanagement and also considered the finest and most detailed war simulation ever. Its not like strategems happen irl.. ) but even so I actually like how things are done here. I hate the fact that the masses come and want something special become dumbed down. Because it is exactly that happens when you start automating things because many think it's too complicated or time demanding otherwise.

[KingHalford]

Ok so now we've this new opinion that people are spouting as fact: "The push based logistics system doesn't allow for meaningful decisions, it is a mere binary switch "optimal"/"not-optimal" setting that you have to manage and that's it".

This is utter rubbish. Consider the case where you're low on logistics points in a city, and need to decide whether to send your trucks to resupply frontier troops, or to get that new Asset up in a city in the opposite direction. That's a meaningful decision, and the automated system does not fix this, it just adds two systems to do the job the first one did just fine.

I can think of other cases where altering the flow of supply one way or another reflects a genuine tactical decision and I'm sure the rest of you can too. I reject this "fact" completely, and add it to my evidence that the original claims made about the traffic light system were hyperbolic, and that's me being charitable.

This kind of thing annoys me: there are several valid and reasonable reasons for demanding an automated system, including "I just don't like having to click on traffic light management buttons I find it boring", and that's fine. But can we stop making stuff up and then holding it up as fact please? It does nothing to help the development of the game.

[76mm]

ORIGINAL: Tomn
So let's start with something simple: Near your front, your forces are being supplied by a railhead with rail connection and a truck station in the same hex, along a straight road with one branch leading to the front, and another branch leading to your SHQ. Now place a 100% (or 95%, if you like) in your logistical hub hex leading back to the SHQ.

Boom. You just doubled the logistical capacity available to your front, because your railhead is still shipping in enough supplies via rail to supply the hex with the truck station itself, but the truck station is now passing on its entire output to the front rather than splitting half and half between the front and the useless road leading home. You can now field double the army you could before at no additional cost.

I have to admit that the logistic systems still completely confuses me...for instance, I don't understand your statement above...if you have road and rail along the same route, and then a "road only" route to the front, why does that double capacity to the front, why isn't the road still sending half the capacity back to the SHQ? Did you delete the road along the rail route? AFAIK the traffic signs don't distinguish between road and rail traffic. I just don't get it...

[demiare]

ORIGINAL: KingHalford
This is utter rubbish. Consider the case where you're low on logistics points in a city, and need to decide whether to send your trucks to resupply frontier troops, or to get that new Asset up in a city in the opposite direction. That's a meaningful decision, and the automated system does not fix this, it just adds two systems to do the job the first one did just fine.

This is pure imaginary example as such situation is possible only if you're:
a) Lacking Truck Station / have it underleveled and don't want to build it in that city (why???).
b) Overextend zones and admin strain to extreme amount by trying to build something 20+ hexs away.

Both are very unwise moves that shouldn't be encountered in normal game. Else you have a typical situation of lacking logistic points and pull system will not going to change anything here.

[Tomn]

ORIGINAL: Sieppo

So I touched your feelings did I ? You admit there is a point? To my earlier comment regarding logic I have to apologise, I think you mentioned also the point that the opposite is also true.

I really do not have the need to wage any internet wars with any people. These are just the thoughts I get with this issue. Like someone said, making things easier and automating them is a slippery slope. One I hope this game is not going to down to since I enjoy it immensely even at this point.

I'm trying to deescalate, boss. Trust me, "being insulting" isn't the same thing as "having a point" - if it were, the only thing you'd ever need to prove yourself correct is to call someone an idiot.

If anything, I was more concerned that you overlooked my points in favor of making your own.

ORIGINAL: 76mm
I have to admit that the logistic systems still completely confuses me...for instance, I don't understand your statement above...if you have road and rail along the same route, and then a "road only" route to the front, why does that double capacity to the front, why isn't the road still sending half the capacity back to the SHQ? Did you delete the road along the rail route? AFAIK the traffic signs don't distinguish between road and rail traffic. I just don't get it...

Right, so here's the thing about traffic signs: They're one-way. If you block OUTGOING connections in one direction, you can still receive INCOMING from that same direction. The railhead in that scenario isn't producing train logistical points, it's merely establishing a connection so that your train station further up the line can push logistical points forwards the railhead. That gives you the incoming logistical capacity you need. Now if in the same hex as the truck station and the railhead you place a block moving back towards the SHQ, you're now channeling the whole of the truck station's logistics out towards the front, while still receiving logistical capacity from the rail coming in from the SHQ. Lemme see if I can diagram it.

(Train points from SHQ) -> (Railhead+Truck station) -> Front

There's the situation, a three hex map - one hex with rail and road leading up to your logistical base, one hex with the railhead and truck station, and one hex with road leading to the front. Now let's suppose for the sake of argument that the train station at the SHQ is pushing 1000 capacity to the railhead, and that the truck station produces 1000 capacity total. Without roadblocks, the logistical situation would look like this:

(1000 train points + 500 truck points) <--> (1000 train points + 1000 truck points) -> (500 truck points)

Because the truck station is splitting its capacity between both branches, right? But if we set up a traffic sign in the logistical hex towards the SHQ, we've forbidden the truck station from pushing points towards the SHQ while not denying incoming train capacity, so instead we get this:

(1000 train points) -> (1000 train points +1000 truck points) -> (1000 truck points)

Try it out for yourself - I've done it, and it works. It was a real revelation when I realized that traffic signs were one-way stops, not two-way - there's a number of funky little things you can pull off once you understand that, though mostly not quite as dramatic.

Edit: If you have a train station instead of a railhead, then yeah, the block will cause the entirety of the train station's produced logistical points to be wasted - but you'll still get the incoming logistical capacity from home. It's cheaper to set up a railhead for this scenario since you don't actually need the hex to produce train points, but it'll still work with a train station, just inefficiently. However, if you then set up a new rail line to a new rail head or station further down the front, the block will benefit the train station as well, again doubling capacity by forcing it to concentrate towards the front.

[JWW]

ORIGINAL: zgrssd

I seriously can not understand why people want to make a "Maze out of Traffic Signs".
How is that a interesting part of the game?
How is that a test of my skills as supreme Commander?

And do not even dare to compare commanding units in a wargame, with setting the traffic signs. I would have to starting being insulting to properly explain how dumb that argument is!

We don't want to make a maze. We want to continue to have the opportunity to create realistic supply routes within the framework of the game. To some of us, it is interesting, even if it is not interesting to you. And it is just as much a test of your skills as supreme commander as personally directing the movement of a small militia unit, overriding the operational commander to personally direct units in an attack, or sitting down with a union leader in a distant town within your empire to discuss worker salaries.

Frankly, setting the traffic signs is a critical function in ensuring the success of real world supply lines. And the logistics system in the game models real world convoy operations in many ways. The units that control traffic are usually Military Police units. Just to give you a sample, I found this in the first document I could find that has good definitions for them. It is a training document for MP convoy support operations, and here we go:

"One of the main battlefield missions of the military police (MP) is battlefield circulation control. This is
to meet changes in tactical situations and route conditions. In a battle there is great need for such
control. Enemy forces interdicting the main supply routes (MSRs) disrupt movement. This creates a
need for extensive rerouting. One of the basic control measures is the traffic control post (TCP). The
responsibility for the TCP is that of the squad/team leader. You must know and be able to set up and
maintain a TCP.
1. Traffic Control Post.
a. MP personnel set up a TCP at critical points on main supply routes to control movement of
vehicles and personnel. The exact place where to put the TCP will be given to you by the provost
marshal (PM) operations section. At times it may be necessary to set up a TCP that is not called for by
the plan; i.e., congestion on an MSR at a junction. The number of MP and the types of weapons
needed to man the TCP are based on mission, enemy, terrain, troops, and time (METT-T).
1-1 MP1007b. The successful operation of a TCP includes preventing delays and congestion; ensuring
movement priorities are honored, enforcing rules and regulations. They must make adjustments for
unscheduled road movements, and be prepared to reroute as needed.

A roadblock is used to limit the movement of vehicles along a route or to close access to certain areas
or roads. Checkpoints are used to control movement. Roadblocks are checkpoints set up to ensure
that unauthorized vehicles are not using main supply routes (MSRs). They ensure that convoys move
along routes according to their priority and are kept on schedule."

Link

The evil roadblocks in the game are performing the control measures that MPs or local civilian police would perform in ensuring the the MSR stays open and supplies roll to the right place and not down a road to nowhere.

[demiare]

ORIGINAL: jwarrenw13

Frankly, setting the traffic signs is a critical function in ensuring the success of real world supply lines. And the logistics system in the game models real world convoy operations in many ways. The units that control traffic are usually Military Police units.

I really don't understand why you're argue now - military logistics is still in game and still important.

Now just your supply officers are finished elementary school and know:
a) place & nominal consumption of your industry zones and population of cities
b) location of your military units.

You still need to develop logistic network, plan in advance your needs for raising regiment or strategic move and deal with shortages. You just waste less LP in routine daily operations and it's great as in dire circumstances of any regime in game you aren't expecting to have a lot of corruption so there is no lore reason behind wasted LP but flawed logistic system.

Seriously, would you call flawed units pathfinding "interesting"? Technically pre-1.04 system were something similar to it.

P.S. Take in mind that we MAY need to balance logistic system later. As it forced to deal with massive wastes - I'm quite sure that currently generation of LP & logistic movement points are way too high and this is a reason why you see current changes as a nerf.

[Tomn]

ORIGINAL: KingHalford
Ok so now we've this new opinion that people are spouting as fact: "The push based logistics system doesn't allow for meaningful decisions, it is a mere binary switch "optimal"/"not-optimal" setting that you have to manage and that's it".

This is utter rubbish. Consider the case where you're low on logistics points in a city, and need to decide whether to send your trucks to resupply frontier troops, or to get that new Asset up in a city in the opposite direction. That's a meaningful decision, and the automated system does not fix this, it just adds two systems to do the job the first one did just fine.

I can think of other cases where altering the flow of supply one way or another reflects a genuine tactical decision and I'm sure the rest of you can too. I reject this "fact" completely, and add it to my evidence that the original claims made about the traffic light system were hyperbolic, and that's me being charitable.

This kind of thing annoys me: there are several valid and reasonable reasons for demanding an automated system, including "I just don't like having to click on traffic light management buttons I find it boring", and that's fine. But can we stop making stuff up and then holding it up as fact please? It does nothing to help the development of the game.

What you say is entirely true if there's not enough logistical points in the system to supply all needs - it's the economics of scarcity, where you're forced to allocate limited resources one way or another based on what you consider more important. But what about when you DO have enough logistical points in the system to cover everything, if only it was properly directed? Then it DOES become an optimization problem. You either direct the flow correctly so that your troops are fed, or you don't and waste logistical points. Not a lot of meaningful decisions to be made there, I reckon, and unfortunately a good player is more often going to have sufficient logistical flow than he is going to have to deal with insufficient flow, and a bad player probably won't yet have the mental toolkit to diagnose and fix the problem manually anyways.

Are there edge cases where you might still want to manually direct flow even when there's no scarcity? Sure - reassigning points for managing a strategic transfer you find important, for instance. But the question isn't whether edge cases exist or not, the question is "Does the prevalence of such edge cases make it worthwhile to require you to fiddle with the logistical system manually at all times?" To put it another way, hypothermia is a serious medical condition and you should absolutely layer up to protect against it, and it would make perfect sense to don cold-weather gear in Antarctica. Does it make sense to do so at all times of the year in Quebec? In New York? In South Carolina? In Florida? How often do these edge cases occur, and are they worth the aggravation of dealing with the system the rest of the time when they don't? That's something that everyone has to answer for themselves, but for me, personally, I don't find the edge cases occur often enough to make it worthwhile.

But that does bring up another question: do the edge cases warrant manual fiddling at all? What you're describing is a meaningful decision, yes, but it's also a prioritization problem overlaying an optimization problem. The meaningful decision is your choice of priorities - everything after that is simply twisting knobs until the flow does what it's supposed to, same as the rest of the time. Is manual control NECESSARY to make that decision? What if you attached a prioritization system to the pull system, so that you could designate given units or assets low, medium, or high priority (or even a percentage priority, if you like granularity) so that in times of shortage the logistical system automatically diverts towards what you consider more important? Et voila - you're making the same meaningful decisions, but no longer having to manually manage traffic signs to do so.

Of course, that comes with its own problems and isn't a perfect solution - namely, coding a system like that is likely to be complex, may introduce weird new bugs, and might prove hard to understand. Whether or not it would be worth it to include a system like that would be up to Vic and his estimate on how difficult it would be. But you see I hope how the meaningful decisions you point out aren't intrinsically married to manual management - they CAN be separated, if desired.

Edit: Just fired up my first 1.04b3 game and it turns out you actually CAN designate tiles to receive custom pull points so that they're automatically diverted where you wish, so...yeah! Not sure how that applies to priorities and such, but yeah, the tools to make the kinds of decisions you're talking about are still in there, you just don't have to worry about it the rest of the time.

ORIGINAL: jwarrenw13
The evil roadblocks in the game are performing the control measures that MPs or local civilian police would perform in ensuring the the MSR stays open and supplies roll to the right place and not down a road to nowhere.

While I can't quite speak for zgrsssd, isn't that his point? You're the supreme commander of an entire nation in arms, yet doing the duty of MPs.

Now I don't necessarily agree that being a supreme commander is inherently better than acting as a MP, or that there's no pleasure to be had in being a MP, but if someone's playing Shadow Empire largely for the experience of being in high command and making grand sweeping decisions, you can see how one might resent having to do the muckwork of low-level staff, yeah?

To use another analogy, suppose there was a game about naval warfare in the Age of Steam, where you're an admiral in command of one national fleet or another. But while you're busy ordering fleet divisions about, trying to guess the enemy's intentions, and doing their level best to get that goddamn battlecruiser squadron to give you some actual goddamn actionable information instead of cryptic remarks about a battle, the game ALSO expects you to manually stoke the boilers of every individual ship, shoveling in more coal and bleeding pressure where necessary.

Now, is it realistic that this needs to be done? Absolutely. Is it vital for the upkeep and management of any individual ship? Certainly. Is there a certain degree of thinking, planning, and management that goes into this? No doubt. Are there going to be some folks in love with this mechanic, so little covered elsewhere? Heck yeah!

But are there also going to be a sizeable amount of players, even I would guess the majority who would consider such a mechanic to be an irritating distraction from the business of leading a war fleet to battle, and would greatly prefer that it be automated or abstracted so that as fleet commander you see and manage only that which is directly relevant to your role as fleet commander? Also very much yes.

Again, of course, I stress that none of this is some universal, objective fact with anyone who disagrees turning their face from unfiltered TRVTH. Some folks enjoy manual logistics and thinks it's part and parcel of being a supreme commander, and other folks don't. But you can see how if you don't, you'd greatly resent being forced to do so, yeah?

[zgrssd]

ORIGINAL: Sieppo

ORIGINAL: zgrssd

ORIGINAL: Sieppo




Obviously you understand at all what happens in war IRL. Why didn't Germany just automate their logistics in their Russian campaign ..

They had Quartermastesr and Supply Companies. They were slightly smarter then teh Autoamtion we have.
I doubt anyone in the Cabinet about Adolf had to deal with Traffic Signs.
Except in your world, where Adolf Hitler apparently was also a Traffic Sign Nazi?

I still lack the words to express just how stupid the question was, without being insulting.

I still fail to understand the thing about where playing a complex game about totally managing your empire turns into "I don't want to play it like this, automate everything that feels annoying". Like why do we have to research army organizational structures? Or how thick the armor should be? Surely Adolf did not do it. Or schwarzkopf or whoever. I'm talking about a game, it's about doing stuff like this and I'm happy that I finally have a very complex wargame where I can feel responsible for everything. Like the 4x ww2 of dwarf fortress. But I guess it's a lost game trying to explain it to the masses.

So why do soldiers feed themself? Why don't you have to put them in a high chair and feed them like a baby?
Clearly this would be a exansion of the Logistics System you would enjoy!

In what universe is a supreme commander of a nation responsible for deciding if 101 or 102 trucks will go down a road?

[Sieppo]

ORIGINAL: zgrssd

ORIGINAL: Sieppo

ORIGINAL: zgrssd


They had Quartermastesr and Supply Companies. They were slightly smarter then teh Autoamtion we have.
I doubt anyone in the Cabinet about Adolf had to deal with Traffic Signs.
Except in your world, where Adolf Hitler apparently was also a Traffic Sign Nazi?

I still lack the words to express just how stupid the question was, without being insulting.

I still fail to understand the thing about where playing a complex game about totally managing your empire turns into "I don't want to play it like this, automate everything that feels annoying". Like why do we have to research army organizational structures? Or how thick the armor should be? Surely Adolf did not do it. Or schwarzkopf or whoever. I'm talking about a game, it's about doing stuff like this and I'm happy that I finally have a very complex wargame where I can feel responsible for everything. Like the 4x ww2 of dwarf fortress. But I guess it's a lost game trying to explain it to the masses.

So why do soldiers feed themself? Why don't you have to put them in a high chair and feed them like a baby?
Clearly this would be a exansion of the Logistics System you would enjoy!

In what universe is a supreme commander of a nation responsible for deciding if 101 or 102 trucks will go down a road?

I'm totally sure you can find that 99% of the actions performed in the game are things not performed by a supreme commander IRL [:D]. Thus I'm not going down that road.