Heavy Tank Fuel Consumption

[mroyer]

I finally got my regiment of heavy tiger tanks ready for action... off the behemoths rumbled, out of the capital heading east to wreak havoc at the front... but, wait, what?, in one turn my entire fuel reserves are gone, thousands and thousands of oil...

Sure, we can blame the player (and blame rests squarely on the player's shoulders for not noticing beforehand), but is it reasonable that heavy tanks are SO extreme in fuel consumption. I did a little earthly research as a comparative study.

The Republic of Regina in Shadow Empire shows heaviest Tiger tanks consuming a whopping 17x more fuel than the lightest tank in the arsenal, the Crusader. By comparison, the Wehrmacht King Tiger (of 20th Century Germany) is less than 10x the fuel hog of the Panzer I, the lightest Wehrmacht tank.
(See Tables Below)

Plus, the real-life fuel-consumption is much smoother progression from light to medium to heavy and doesn't have the all-out-of-proportion leap that the Shadow Empire progression shows.

Unless I figure this out with some sort of fuel-efficiency tech, Regina's single regiment of heavy tanks will be akin to the Italian WW2 navy - stuck in port and largely ineffective.

Any thoughts?
Is this as intended?
It seems heavy handed and makes heavy tanks a very poor investment.

-Mark R.

[boomboomf22]

Are you playing on 1.05? Cause I think there were some tweaks to fuel consumption done. I agree that the numbers still probably need a rework. In the interim I would suggest using rail movement to move heavies to where they need to be. TBH that is actually how most tank units were moved strategic distances in real life.

[Clux]

What its the Weight - Engine Power - Real Engine performance? I'm asking this questions cuz when you design a new model, it could weight 800, and you put on it a double heavy engine of 800 power but once than the design its made a prototype its real engine performance could be a worse, similar or better, depending on the engine roll than you got.

When your have an under powered engine it consumes a LOT more of fuel, plus it has a mobility penalty.

[eheiser]

Oh Mark, that is hilarious. I actually lost sleep over that regiment! They are at least in a good spot to block an invasion.

[eheiser]

In fact, I've had to redesign every single tank model the whole game because of a tendency to pick a big gun and thick armor.

[mroyer]

ORIGINAL: eheiser

Oh Mark, that is hilarious. I actually lost sleep over that regiment!

Well, that was the goal, really... [8D]
So we can declare success!

What its the Weight - Engine Power - Real Engine performance? I'm asking this questions cuz when you design a new model, it could weight 800, and you put on it a double heavy engine of 800 power but once than the design its made a prototype its real engine performance could be a worse, similar or better, depending on the engine roll than you got.

Interesting. I put the biggest engine possible on it and yet it is still somewhat under-powered. (see figs below)

So I moved the regiment to the frontier zone by rail, but then moved it perhaps 6 hexes in the next turn to the actual battle lines. So...

42.5 oil/hex * 18 models (of 10 tanks each)/regiment * 6 hexes hexes moved => 4590 oil!
You can only imagine my expression when that bill crossed my desk...
And I was thinking I'd done a good job at building up a nice reserve of oil.

[Twotribes]

There are techs to alleviate the cost 2 of them

[GazBot]

Ah now this is why you saw me only use them once against your attack on York!!!

Was the same thing - though they did help repel that attack - but keeping them on was simply not sustainable.

You need one of the applied sciences techs - which gives you fuel efficiency savings - which will bring that consumption right down.

Alternatively you try again when you have nuclear engines!!!!

[Soar_Slitherine]

ORIGINAL: Clux

What its the Weight - Engine Power - Real Engine performance? I'm asking this questions cuz when you design a new model, it could weight 800, and you put on it a double heavy engine of 800 power but once than the design its made a prototype its real engine performance could be a worse, similar or better, depending on the engine roll than you got.

When your have an under powered engine it consumes a LOT more of fuel, plus it has a mobility penalty.

A less powerful engine always consumes less fuel for a vehicle of a given weight, as far as I can tell, and when I checked up on the fuel consumption, the final model's value was always the same as the one indicated when picking the engine, regardless of engine design rolls. The reason you're seeing high fuel consumption values on vehicles with underpowered engines is that adding lots of weight both increases fuel consumption and tends to result in an underpowered engine, not because an underpowered engine equals higher fuel consumption.

[Clux]

ORIGINAL: mroyer

Interesting. I put the biggest engine possible on it and yet it is still somewhat under-powered. (see figs below)

So I moved the regiment to the frontier zone by rail, but then moved it perhaps 6 hexes in the next turn to the actual battle lines. So...

42.5 oil/hex * 18 models (of 10 tanks each)/regiment * 6 hexes hexes moved => 4590 oil!
You can only imagine my expression when that bill crossed my desk...
And I was thinking I'd done a good job at building up a nice reserve of oil.

Well, the main problem its than you're still using metal armor, if you were using Polymer armor you could get roughly twice the strength at 1/3 of the weight, still there is a linear tech than helps you by lowering the fuel usage of Diesel Engines.

[mroyer]

Yeah, my applied science council switched to 100% effort on researching fuel-efficiency a turn or two ago after I realized the magnitude of my fuel consumption error. Thanks for the heads-up on polymer armor. I've discovered that, but haven't researched it - the military council is working on improving personal armor right now. I presume polymer armor, once researched and developed, would constitute a whole new tank model and won't help this existing tank regiment.

This is all very interesting and by no means a knock on the game. I haven't decided yet whether I think the 42.5 oil/hex is out of whack as the first-shock impression made it seem. I'm going to dig in to the German panzers (also not using polymer armor [:)] ) a bit more deeply for comparison.

For example, the King Tiger's armor and gun, by chance, is approximately what Regina's tiger's armor and gun are. But if the panzer I is different from Regina's Crusader, then that might throw off my normalizations thereby affecting the conclusion.

Thanks, everyone, for the thoughts and suggestions. This is the sort of depth that makes this game so great, regardless of whether we can quibble over exact values.

-Mark R.