Supply issues

[Rhetor]

Dear developers,

There a few issues with supply distribution in the original TOAW, which, in my opinion, should be addressed.

1. Supply should be diversified. Lack of fuel should completely immobilize the motorized formations.
2. There should be supply dumps, which would give the option to capture enemy supplies. Moreover, if such supply dumps were introduced, units would not be such affected by temporary encirclement.
3. The traffic of supply wagons/trucks/trains should be somehow simulated. An armored/cavalry raid in the rear of the enemy front should affect the enemy supply distribution, even if not all the possible supply routes were not targeted. Moreover, in the original game it is possible to bring supply to infinite number of units via a single road or railway, on which movement of units is not even affected. In reality, of course, such road/railway would be clogged by thousands of wagons, trucks or trains.

[golden delicious]

ORIGINAL: Rhetor

1. Supply should be diversified. Lack of fuel should completely immobilize the motorized formations.
2. There should be supply dumps, which would give the option to capture enemy supplies. Moreover, if such supply dumps were introduced, units would not be such affected by temporary encirclement.
3. The traffic of supply wagons/trucks/trains should be somehow simulated. An armored/cavalry raid in the rear of the enemy front should affect the enemy supply distribution, even if not all the possible supply routes were not targeted. Moreover, in the original game it is possible to bring supply to infinite number of units via a single road or railway, on which movement of units is not even affected. In reality, of course, such road/railway would be clogged by thousands of wagons, trucks or trains.

A necessary (and desireable) pre-requisite for this is quantified supply; ie, a battalion uses less supply than a regiment.

[JAMiAM]

For what it's worth, TOAW's supply model is one of my pet peeves with the program. However, in spite of all the god-like powers I pretend to possess, I must still work within the realm of the possibilities that are allowed by the current state of the base code. Ralph has informed me that Norm's highly abstracted supply paradigm is tightly woven into the code through various and sundry sub-routines. Therefore, no simple fix exists for totally reworking the way TOAW treats supplies. We can make minor tweaks, here and there, but anything truly substantial would take a top-to-bottom rewriting of the program, and that is something that is not envisioned by Matrix. In short, change will be "evolutionary" rather than "revolutionary".

That said, don't give up hope. Like I mentioned, it is recognized by all as a "weakness" in the current code, and there are things we can do to tweak it. We have some very imaginative minds working on the project and Ralph is very competent.

[ralphtricky]

ORIGINAL: JAMiAM

For what it's worth, TOAW's supply model is one of my pet peeves with the program. However, in spite of all the god-like powers I pretend to possess, I must still work within the realm of the possibilities that are allowed by the current state of the base code. Ralph has informed me that Norm's highly abstracted supply paradigm is tightly woven into the code through various and sundry sub-routines. Therefore, no simple fix exists for totally reworking the way TOAW treats supplies. We can make minor tweaks, here and there, but anything truly substantial would take a top-to-bottom rewriting of the program, and that is something that is not envisioned by Matrix. In short, change will be "evolutionary" rather than "revolutionary".

That said, don't give up hope. Like I mentioned, it is recognized by all as a "weakness" in the current code, and there are things we can do to tweak it. We have some very imaginative minds working on the project and Ralph is very competent.

Thanks James.

Please be aware that when James talks about evolutionary changes, he's talking about the way that the player perceives things. This does not mean that I won't be making major changes to the code while I'm working on it, but that many of the changes won't be noticable by the players. I anticipate making a lot of changes under the hood in future releases, where there are areas that can be improved upon. For the initial release, we're balancing how challenging the features are to add, and how important they are in the overall scheme of things.

There are a lot of places where Norm had to make the decision of whether to make things faster or more flexible. He made the decision of faster in most cases, including the supply model, which was the correct decision at the time. Unfortunately, that makes it more difficult to change. I'm looking at it, but we need to be careful to not make large changes that are going to delay the release date, or jeopardize the quality of the release.