Supply Truck mechanic need input.

[ncc1701e]

ORIGINAL: AlvaroSousa

So everyone give me a count on this...... How many supply trucks do you buy for Barbarossa?

2 players I know bought 250 and 300.

Axis: around 150
USSR: around 120

[AlvaroSousa]

I've been thinking about this for days now. Spoke to a few people to get their input. Then I did a little math. I came to a solution on this. So these are my thoughts and the changes we will be testing in the beta.

The combat value of an armor/mech vs an infantry is roughly 2:1 when including their raw combat power, operation point, and retreat bonuses. The cost effectiveness of using supply trucks with only those units is way more effective than infantry so why would you ever use them on infantry. Since infantry is the main force of an army they should benefit equally from supply trucks

The impact of supply trucks for 1 turn makes a small difference. The impact of supply trucks over many turns while attacking makes a big difference as their effect is isn't removed only amplified. This can be seen in the air and on the land.

Over use of them means less units on the map which makes the A.I. and loses the feel of a front line for player immersion.

The game is meant as a gradual grind with occasions of breakthroughs. Not creating a death star armored force blowing away everything in it's path.

My goal is to balance out the extremes to bring the game to balance for a nice long struggle till 1945 for most games with blow outs being rare. If you feel you don't have enough and are slowly retreating as Germany late game? That is a good game feeling. If you are the Allies and feel you need more stuff to push the Germans to win the game but can't build everything you need that is a good feeling. Nail biting down to the last turn excitement.

Taking Berlin in August 1945 is a lot more exciting than running up to it with a tank in 1942. Well at least for me it is.

So in this weeks beta we are trying the following.

Armor, mech, air units will cost double supply trucks to use... 2 trucks per 10 strength
Infantry will still be 1 truck per 10 strength.
Effectiveness recovery reduced from 6% to 4%

[PJL1973]

I think those changes could make things worse. What will happen is that people will stockpile even more supply trucks since there is never any downside (other than production) to building them. In fact, the system is flawed if you want to discourage death star armoured forces. Changing the effectiveness recovery rates makes no difference to that, other than slowing/speeding it up. The problem is not the effectiveness but the way supplies are transported. Once they are built, they can be used anywhere on the map that is in supply and at the same rate. You could create actual supply truck units and then move them to units to merge with them to get better effectiveness, but I think that would be too much micro

A better / less micro solution would be to tie the effectiveness rate of the trucks to supply values with it being less effective in low supply areas. This would reflect difficulties in transporting it to the North African desert. You could even have a system where a better naval patrol on supply routes could affect port values & then the supply system. Similarly, a better-maintained rail network would affect supply and the effectiveness of trucks. In short, the supply level would act as a multiplier for truck effectiveness.

[Nirosi]

The combat value of an armor/mech vs an infantry is roughly 2:1

Hi,

On a parallel note (I was wondering a few days ago, but this post reminded me): I believe this was also part of the reasoning to make armors/mech use double the amount of landing crafts. I was wondering if it would not be appropriate for them to also use double the amount of transport points?

[Nirosi]

Taking Berlin in August 1945 is a lot more exciting than running up to it with a tank in 1942. Well at least for me it is.

+1

[stjeand]

One game I play a unit has a flag on when it received an extra say movement point.
Could there be something saying you can only use X supply every Y turns?

Another thought...maybe more trucks required the further you are from your main supply point for your country?
That would be more realistic since moving supplies from Berlin to Moscow would take must more time than Berlin to Paris.

Just a few thoughts. Might be too difficult to program though.

[ncc1701e]

ORIGINAL: AlvaroSousa

I've been thinking about this for days now. Spoke to a few people to get their input. Then I did a little math. I came to a solution on this. So these are my thoughts and the changes we will be testing in the beta.

The combat value of an armor/mech vs an infantry is roughly 2:1 when including their raw combat power, operation point, and retreat bonuses. The cost effectiveness of using supply trucks with only those units is way more effective than infantry so why would you ever use them on infantry. Since infantry is the main force of an army they should benefit equally from supply trucks

The impact of supply trucks for 1 turn makes a small difference. The impact of supply trucks over many turns while attacking makes a big difference as their effect is isn't removed only amplified. This can be seen in the air and on the land.

Over use of them means less units on the map which makes the A.I. and loses the feel of a front line for player immersion.

The game is meant as a gradual grind with occasions of breakthroughs. Not creating a death star armored force blowing away everything in it's path.

My goal is to balance out the extremes to bring the game to balance for a nice long struggle till 1945 for most games with blow outs being rare. If you feel you don't have enough and are slowly retreating as Germany late game? That is a good game feeling. If you are the Allies and feel you need more stuff to push the Germans to win the game but can't build everything you need that is a good feeling. Nail biting down to the last turn excitement.

Taking Berlin in August 1945 is a lot more exciting than running up to it with a tank in 1942. Well at least for me it is.

So in this weeks beta we are trying the following.

Armor, mech, air units will cost double supply trucks to use... 2 trucks per 10 strength
Infantry will still be 1 truck per 10 strength.
Effectiveness recovery reduced from 6% to 4%

Few observations so far:
1. Difficult now to increase the effectiveness level of paratrooper unit to 100% to do a paradrop. The time to do it, the frontline has already changed.

2. Barbarossa. Plenty of Rifle Corps units to destroy. Since a land / air unit consumes 6% of effectiveness per combat, units effectiveness are going down very quickly.

3. Barbarossa still. Since my infantry units are advancing with 5 operation points only, the mech/armored units are not enough to kill all Soviet units. Mech/armored units needs to do a pause for the infantry to catch up because they can no longer afford the effectiveness losses alone.

4. My fear is that not been able to destroy a big amount of Rifle Corps before they get converted to Army means game over very quickly.

5. The Soviet strategy is easy. Retreat in order not to be attacked by the infantry units.

I switch to beta once sillyflower told me he has the corps to army conversion and I have seen the effectiveness dropping for my units.
Second Barbarossa on going against MorningDew, I feel the same. Effectiveness is dropping very (too?) quickly.

Any other feedback?

[AlvaroSousa]

This is why this is beta. To test.

[stjeand]

Thoughts...some of the below might be very difficult to program...others might be to restrictive...
but throwing out some ideas that perhaps could be modified or used in conjuction with others.

1) Supply trucks usage cost: (partially being tested in Beta I believe)
Armor take 2x
Air take 1.5x
Inf tak 1x.

2) HQs are the supply depots of the game. So supply trucks can only be used close to an HQ.
1/2 hexes away 1x supply trucks.
3/4 hexes away 1.5 supply trucks,
5/6 hexes away 2x supply trucks.
Further than 6 hexes is to far to make supply trucks effective. Cost in resources would be too high to travel so far.
This could be used in conjunction with option 1 making supply for armor very expensive if you are 5 or 6 hexes away from an HQ/supply depot.

3) One of the highly unrealistic things with supply trucks is that you build them and can use them anywhere...that seems far to unrestrictive.
NOW this maybe to complex and difficult to program.
Supply trucks are assigned to HQs and only units within range of those HQs can use them.

4) Supplies for Armor / Inf / Air are the same to a point but armor and air require alot of supplies that infantry do not.
Create supply trucks for each type and be costed appropriately.
Might be to complex and difficult to program.

5) Restrict the amount of supply trucks that can be BUILT to a percentage of the countries base logistics. 1% to 2% may be enough based upon Germany which must have close to 5000 logistics?



Personally I would love 3 and 4 but I think they would take a lot of programming and add more complexity that I think Alvaro is trying to avoid.

So in lew...I like the thoughts of 1 and 2 both being used and possibly add 5.

Thoughts?

[AlvaroSousa]

All good ideas and I thought of all of them. But I want to keep the system simple. Supply trucks are an abstract concept representing many supply things but mostly sending extra supplies via trucks to the front.

The key is finding a balance to a long game till 1945 and a nail biting ending where both players had fun while keeping to a reasonable historical accuracy while allowing extra possibilities.

It might be I might adjust the base effectiveness recovery later. Dunno yet.

[stjeand]

Well good to know.

Sadly that is what my brain thinks about while I try to sleep.

Yours probably does too.


I had thought about supply depots but...seemed overly complex and added units.

I guess if you used the HQ distance piece OR even hex supply level for how many trucks it would cost to supply...
Effectiveness would not drop as badly but you would have to wait for your supplies to catch up rather than just keep using trucks and keep going.

Now my brain will get stuck trying to figure out something else...

[ncc1701e]

ORIGINAL: ncc1701e

ORIGINAL: AlvaroSousa

Armor, mech, air units will cost double supply trucks to use... 2 trucks per 10 strength
Infantry will still be 1 truck per 10 strength.
Effectiveness recovery reduced from 6% to 4%

Few observations so far:
1. Difficult now to increase the effectiveness level of paratrooper unit to 100% to do a paradrop. The time to do it, the frontline has already changed.

2. Barbarossa. Plenty of Rifle Corps units to destroy. Since a land / air unit consumes 6% of effectiveness per combat, units effectiveness are going down very quickly.

3. Barbarossa still. Since my infantry units are advancing with 5 operation points only, the mech/armored units are not enough to kill all Soviet units. Mech/armored units needs to do a pause for the infantry to catch up because they can no longer afford the effectiveness losses alone.

4. My fear is that not been able to destroy a big amount of Rifle Corps before they get converted to Army means game over very quickly.

5. The Soviet strategy is easy. Retreat in order not to be attacked by the infantry units.

I switch to beta once sillyflower told me he has the corps to army conversion and I have seen the effectiveness dropping for my units.
Second Barbarossa on going against MorningDew, I feel the same. Effectiveness is dropping very (too?) quickly.

Any other feedback?

Finally, I start to like it. It gives a real feeling for the Germans that logistics can be a problem in Russia.
My only concern is to play with this new rule against France in 1940 (I never did so far).

Germany perhaps needs to start with a little more trucks against a strong PBEM Allies player. Give them something like 60 trucks instead of 40 trucks in September, 1939.

Still no other feedback? I am surprised.

[WraithMagus]

To ease myself into the game, my first campaign was playing as Axis against the computer in the North Africa campaign. I learned fairly quickly that there was no point in me buying reinforcements, because they can't catch up to the front in time to make a difference, anyway, and yet, I needed every supply truck I could get. I spent every production point on either reinforcing units or supply trucks, and used supply trucks on every armor unit every turn because there is simply no way to keep up with the effectiveness attrition without them. (I also used them on air units, but air units are practically useless at that scale, and even without air cover for the enemy, sending ground strike missions out would just result in 2 lost air strength for 0 lost enemy strength.) While I could cut off other units by sending the mechanized Italian unit around the enemy to cut supplies without even fighting (real unsung hero of the campaign), and my CL/DD fleet could interdict supplies to ports they tried to defend, there was absolutely no way I was going to push the last defender off Port Said without spending three rounds buffing my Afrika Corps armor units and slowly grinding the defender down even with the supply trucks, since I couldn't cut those units' supply. (I also had to shift them over to Heavy Tanks and use my one specialization to give one of them Heavy Artillery just for this one unit on Port Said.)

I don't mind the "micromanagement" aspect of them that much, as there's a hotkey for them. It's only slightly more management than having to move every token already is - just a memory game that you have to punch "K" before moving a tank every turn.

If you want to remove or reduce supply truck use, then you'd need to also deal with the underlying reason why players are so heavily reliant upon them, which is the way that effectiveness is vital to combat and also constantly being drained by any unit you rely upon doing literally anything. Especially in places like France where you need to squeeze through a narrow front, making sure your top units are in top shape is more important than having more units that can't fit on the battlefield to help you, anyway.

Hence, if you want to remove constant use of a supply truck button, maybe consider rethinking the entire system from being a single-use supply unit button to being a logistics pool (but not called that to avoid confusion with the logistics already in the game) where you have a certain number of units that get priority supply the way that you can assign priority reinforcement? The basic reason it's an issue is that this game is not designed to make you only use supply trucks once in a while, it's designed to make you constantly pump supplies on your most-used units that are in the thick of the fighting. Effectiveness just does not recover fast enough without using them. (And I mean "keeping units above 70% effectiveness", not trying to top my units' effectiveness off at 100% or anything.)

You could have a supply truck pool that can give up to a certain amount of total strength priority supply at a time, and those units recover effectiveness like they are getting supply trucks every turn until you turn the priority supply back off. Supply trucks then don't need to be built every turn, although you could make use of the priority supply also cost some fraction of the strength they are supplying in production, oil, and logistics every turn when in use, both for realism and so that it isn't "use it or lose it" and players aren't reflexively maxing out their priority supply just because it's there (like with rail movement).

If you go this route, one thing to consider would be that you can keep building supply trucks to increase the truck pool and therefore increase how many units can be in priority supply, but that these trucks can be destroyed by partisans, destroyed when enemy movement/Zone of Control cuts a route to a friendly unit's supply (since there might be trucks that were en-route to those units, and if close to that unit, there could have been a supply depot nearby), destroyed when a unit retreats (especially if they were getting priority supply, as the supply trucks of that unit are overrun by the advancing enemy), or destroyed during strategic bombing. (Historically, one of the most effective things strategic bombing could target was simply the rail lines connecting supplies to the front. It's kind of odd that you can't strategically bomb rails themselves in this game.) This would make it like merchant marine, where players can build more during the game, but constant losses mean that you shouldn't have some overwhelming truck pool that means you aren't forced to make choices about what your priorities are unless you are so overwhelming your enemy that you're clearly winning, anyway. (For that matter, why can we build more shipyards, but not more trains?)

All this said, this might be something for WarPlan 2, rather than this game, as I'm sympathetic to the people who say that you shouldn't make major changes when they've learned the current game's balance. I also made posts about how limited and boring I found Order of Battle's logistics/supply system to be, and found myself outweighed, so maybe I find logistics more interesting than most players, but I think WarPlan and Unity of Command's supply system are some of the better supply systems in strategy games, and I'd like to see certain ideas, like the cost of supply increasing as you move further away from supply points, expanded upon. As mentioned earlier, the US/UK could push more goods through Normandy beach than in ports around Calais will allow because they were willing to use sinkable barges to make quickie piers for unloading supplies. In the Pacific, a key part of the unrelenting US advance in the Pacific were mobile drydocks. Again, why not let us build more trains? For that matter, strategic bomb train stations and rails, and build new rails. I think having some sort of way to actually change the map's natural supply routes adds a lot to the strategy of the game.

To make a modified version of what stjeand was saying, it may be somewhat more complex, but not seriously more complex for the player if your supply pool or logistics pool is taxed more the further you are from Main Supply. This could also replace that artificial limit on the US's logistics by just making an increasing logistics cost to supplying units far from home. (For example, more merchant marine/supply trucks are used to keep units in North Africa in supply because it is further from Home Supply than it would take to keep units in northern France in supply for the UK.) It would also make "Lend/Lease" (especially as an actual game mechanic) make more sense - the Americans can just sell the USSR tanks they couldn't keep supplied in the Eastern Front so that they eat from the USSR logistics pool instead of the US one. Extreme distances by rail away from main supply might also eventually start costing a small penalty to logistics (so that you can't just ship something from Siberia to Berlin in one round and for the same cost as going to the next town). I don't think this would necessarily be complicated to the player, just have an indicator on a unit's info panel that they have a logistics cost of X to keep supplied and a tooltip that explains that they're relying upon long-distance supply and there's a swamp between them and the nearest rail. Having a supply heat map to color-code how much more it costs to field units in different areas is enough to get the idea across even without needing to subject players to specific math. (You might need to toggle for country, though.)

[WraithMagus]

ORIGINAL: AlvaroSousa

Taking Berlin in August 1945 is a lot more exciting than running up to it with a tank in 1942. Well at least for me it is.

ORIGINAL: AlvaroSousa

The key is finding a balance to a long game till 1945 and a nail biting ending where both players had fun while keeping to a reasonable historical accuracy while allowing extra possibilities.

I'd like to push back on this a bit, as well.

Strategy games like this should allow for what happened in real history to be a possibility, but should never have mechanics that outright force situations to go historically. If you make the game just pure attrition based upon production values and starting military unit power, then there's no room left for strategy in this strategy game, and it becomes wholly unsatisfying.

I remember being very disappointed in the first Operational Art of War, for example, because it talked up this big game about its realism, and there was so much research done into making its units as realistic as possible, and the back 50 pages of its manual was just historical stats of different types of tanks... except none of this mattered at all, because it was a game where you couldn't pick what units you took into a scenario, you couldn't organize your units, you couldn't choose where you deployed your units, and all those varied types of tanks were sitting inside tokens that consisted of 100 different individual units that were blobs of a dozen different unit types, and even beyond this, the only way to play the game was to simply grab all the tokens in an area, smoosh them into one super-stack with really big numbers, then mash your stack into the enemy stack until their numbers go down. The scenarios were too short to even reposition a unit of armor from one front on the map to another if you wanted to, so all that effort on detail was completely wasted because the game wound up being too strategically shallow for any of it to matter. It wound up being a game with such a low skill ceiling that it felt like you could train a chimp to play at the highest skill levels because there didn't feel like anything you could do in the game besides smoosh units into stacks, then mash your stacks into enemy stacks over and over.

Now, I'm not saying that what we're talking about here is going to have that extreme an impact in any way, just that trying to get the war to "naturally" end at the historic date regardless of player skill is not a goal you should be pursuing except in the vaguest sense. (I would say "it would only make sense if two players of the same skill level were playing that things should go historically", but that presumes that the leaders of both the Axis and Allies were equally skilled, and also had perfect coordination like we have in this game...) Allowing players to have an impact on the game is just naturally going to mean that players who understand the game and make all the right choices up against bad players (or a weak AI) should result in lopsided, ahistoric victories, or else the player isn't having a meaningful impact upon the game. And if the player isn't having a meaningful impact, why play, when you could set it to auto-resolve or just watch a documentary?

If you think a longer game is better, why not aim for an Allied victory in 1947 instead of 1945, after all?

[baloo7777]

I agree with some of your supply ideas, WraithMagus, like the distance from a port of supply and the supply pool with losses abstracted. I don't like the idea of building trains or rail lines to change existing supply routes, but I think you are right about Strategic Bombing being used to destroy/cut rail and supply lines. I completely agree and thank you for your description of fighting using supply trucks hence what it would be like if that system was changed or nerfed. That has been my experience in France and Russia, needing 250-300 supply trucks for the clear weather turns to advance, and another 100+ to defend through the Russian Winter.

[ncc1701e]

ORIGINAL: baloo7777

I agree with some of your supply ideas, WraithMagus, like the distance from a port of supply and the supply pool with losses abstracted. I don't like the idea of building trains or rail lines to change existing supply routes, but I think you are right about Strategic Bombing being used to destroy/cut rail and supply lines. I completely agree and thank you for your description of fighting using supply trucks hence what it would be like if that system was changed or nerfed. That has been my experience in France and Russia, needing 250-300 supply trucks for the clear weather turns to advance, and another 100+ to defend through the Russian Winter.

Excellent, during the Russian winter the Germans will no longer be fed with supply trucks. A limited Soviet counteroffensive will have some chance of success.

But, I am myself concerned for France 1940. I need to test this against a strong human player. But, France will have limited trucks also.

[WraithMagus]

ORIGINAL: ncc1701e
Excellent, during the Russian winter the Germans will no longer be fed with supply trucks. A limited Soviet counteroffensive will have some chance of success.

But, I am myself concerned for France 1940. I need to test this against a strong human player. But, France will have limited trucks also.

You could also just make it cost more supply trucks in bad weather. If we wanted to add in an increased logistics cost for units far from home, then having to traverse bad weather to get there should also add to the effective distance, as it takes more effort to get the supplies to their destination. I'm sure players would be more hesitant to use supply trucks in a blizzard if they have double or triple cost, or have to rethink priorities if a supply priority cuts a lot more units off.

That said, I wish weather was a lot less monolithic in this game. Everything from northern Spain to western Russia will have the same weather everywhere, instead of allowing for something like storms up on the northern end of the Eastern Front blocking air strikes, but clear weather on the southern end meaning that all airpower gets shifted down south for a turn.

[ncc1701e]

ORIGINAL: WraithMagus

If you want to remove or reduce supply truck use, then you'd need to also deal with the underlying reason why players are so heavily reliant upon them, which is the way that effectiveness is vital to combat and also constantly being drained by any unit you rely upon doing literally anything. Especially in places like France where you need to squeeze through a narrow front, making sure your top units are in top shape is more important than having more units that can't fit on the battlefield to help you, anyway.

I just realized recently I was not taking care of HQ at all. I was taking care of them for combat but not for effectiveness recovery. Now, I am pressing the S key more often. Also, you need to rotate your spearhead otherwise your army will suffer.

The new rule is interesting because it obliges me to be more careful with logistics. Before I was just using trucks.

[WraithMagus]

ORIGINAL: ncc1701e

I just realized recently I was not taking care of HQ at all. I was taking care of them for combat but not for effectiveness recovery. Now, I am pressing the S key more often. Also, you need to rotate your spearhead otherwise your army will suffer.

The new rule is interesting because it obliges me to be more careful with logistics. Before I was just using trucks.

That might be hypothetically viable in good weather, but in my game, it's been either heavy rain or snow for 9 months in the dreaded Russian Win-- I mean Belgian Spring. (Seriously, Germany took Paris in 6 weeks after declaring war on the Netherlands, but in this game, it was 6 weeks of glowering at us from across the Rhine before the heavy rain turned back to snow light enough to invade through.) If I don't have trucks to counteract the loss of effectiveness from being in heavy rain or snow in May, nothing gets above 70% effectiveness. Even pulling a unit aside frequently (which I have to do just to recover strength) isn't enough, as they don't recover effectiveness even sitting on rails when there's a storm.

You lose too much effectiveness for just existing in a planet that has weather in this game to rely upon natural supply to recover effectiveness.

[ncc1701e]

Yes, France 1940 against a competent Allies opponent will be a problem. See this screenshot, as you can see I have used lots of trucks (green icon)
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