ORIGINAL: Mike Scholl
ORIGINAL: el cid again
I guess I don't understand the point of this whole excercise. What excessive supplies?
OK. Consider Malaya. Yamashita took the place in 100 days with three divisions - because he could not feed more than that. In the game you can take it in 10 days with as many divisions as you like - because you don't have to feed them - they can eat the local supplies. Col Tsuji (chief of operations for Yamashita and author of Japan's Greatest Victory - Britian's Worst Defeat) tells us of his delight at capture of "Churchill's supplies" - but that was not enough to feed the corps.
The British surrendered for lack of supply - and they had run in many supply ships. In the game you don't have to run supplies into Malaya. It makes its own.
Many places in the game are self supporting or more than that because resource centers make supply points - which is pretty much nonsense. Supplies should be made in manufacturing centers from oil and resources - not in resource centers themselves - or else not in the quantity represented. It distorts reality so much Japan is NOT forced to export supplies to feed its military at all. It took me 5 DAYS to stabolize Japanese production on my first try - stuff and nonsense. This is the critical point of the war - Japan goes to war to get resources and oil that it needs to MAKE its military goods - not to capture colonies that make these things already.
CID. It's simply another example of the need to cobble together an AI that could give the appearence of playing the game leading the designers into foolishness. Rather than try to program it to actually have to move supply in game terms, they took a "shortcut" and simply shoveled supply all over the map for it to use. Just look at the piles sitting in insignificant and unoccupied Dutch bases in New Guinea at the start of the game. And in areas that would host major campaigns, they invented the "Supply Factory" to cope with the AI's ignorance.
That's fine, but I would point out that if you're not clever enough to figure out an AI to play with the rules and implements you have in mind, then scrap the rules (supply) and lose the implements (transports) and simply reduce "shipping" to an element of time in game terms (it takes so much time to "ship" various amounts of units from the USA to Australia, for instance).
Frankly, I don't know what the problem is. There is at least one game on the market which demonstrates reasonable success in this area, and with a logistic model entirely more complex than the ridiculously-simple one devised by Gary for
WitP. I just don't see that as a viable excuse. Again, it stands to reason that if one is unable to carry through on a game concept, then that concept needs to be scrapped, and perhaps a new concept is then called for. But you don't leave it in the game in the name of "AI feasibility" when in fact the AI
still doesn't work, meanwhile head-to-head play is royally flushed.
At the very least you might think that the mechanics of supply/resource generation could have been deferred to the editor, where then the player would be allowed to "turn the equation on its head" as it were, eliminate "supply" where it wasn't wanted and thus force both sides to ship this vital thing from their respective home countries. That
still wouldn't render the concept of "supply" as anything more intelligent in military terms, but AKs at least would then be given some critical function to perform, most especially on the Japanese side of the board. What this game
actually cries out for is
two different forms of supply at the highest level. The first form would be a General Supply (GS) point for all-purpose consumption--everything on the board would need this to function. Then you'd also need Military Supply (MS). The latter would come in six distinct flavors:
Bunker Oil (BO)
Aviation Gasoline (AVG)
Gasoline (GAS)
Navy Munitions (NM)
Army Munitions (ARM)
Air Munitions (AIM)
That would work neatly yet still not be too complicated for anyone with interest. The beauty of it is then all three military arms could then be required to use different combinations of those six sub-types of military supply.
Warships/AK/AP would require BO, NM and GS (CVs would also need AVG, smaller naval assets like patrol craft and submarfines would need GAS in lieu of BO)
Army units would require ARM, GAS and GS
Air units would require AIM, GAS and GS
And so on. It would only be needed to determine in what quantities different kinds of units used different flavors of military munitions. This would also enable the designer to put restrictions on Japan's ability to supply both its ships and planes with the requisite fuels by simply limiting its ability in the home islands to produce these kinds of military supply. But
all military supply would need to be produced at home (for both sides, except in the case of America everything you'd need would already be there, whereas for Japan it would be more the case of a zero-sum game, with whatever quantity produced of one item would correspondingly reduce that country's ability to produce another--again, with production caps set on BO and AVG) along schedules for projected needs, and then shipped to the respective war theaters and be there in time for the action. And should a critical convoy happen to be sunk then you're simply SOL somewhere.
For the Allied player the main problem would be to set up a functional supply system, and that would be easier said than done with the above restrictions in place.
But even with these additional details in terms of types of supply, the question of how ports and air bases operate and must be maintained is still with us, allowing the system too run to fast and too easily. As I've suggested more than once, a simple fix for ports would be to rate them on a 1-100 scale or something of the like, and then fine tune the specific port levels all over the map. That would take some serious map study, but it should be doable, and we would then be able to at long last deal with the difference real-world functionality of a back-water place like Noumea and San Francisco, of for that matter the bare beach alongside Lunga Roads versus the natural facilities found across the water on Tulagi.
After ports were rated 1-100, then it would also be necessary to impose restraints on both 1) port maximum build size in a given location (off the top of my head, if Tulagi were rated with a maximum port build size of 10, say, then Lunga would have a cap of 1), and also rate all supply types for port caps (say, GS would move at a rate of 1 penalty point in terms of supply movement with regards to time, whereas NM might have a penalty of 1.
x). Some research and thought would be required here, but again it's doable, and in combination of the necessity to both specifically produce and ship NM and BO would pretty much get rid of the phony resupply of warships all over the map.
Same thing for air bases. I believe it was you, Mike, who suggested at least three years ago that maintenance of planes should be modeled on the number of props in use, both in terms of supplies consumed and time required for service. (If that wasn't you, then I apologize to whoever it was who addressed this detail first. No matter who it was, it is an astute approach.)
Couple of details. The Allies (especially the Americans) were better equipped all around to build ports and airfields as they went along. To distinguish this difference between their ability and that of the Japanese (which is already partly addressed in the OOB with regard to available engineer squads and engineer vehicles) one additional form of supply might also be required. Call this Building Supply (BDG), something the Japanese were in relative short supply of.
Finally, the addition of USN Service Squadrons (ServRon) is called for. Without the inclusion of these very specialized (and critical) entities the naval war in the PTO makes little sense logistically speaking.
