Resource pathways

[Andrew Brown]

ORIGINAL: Local Yokel

I really wouldn't recommend enlarging light industry for no reason other than the fact that it is an inefficient supply generator relative to heavy industry.

Yes, HI is much more valuable. However LI does have one advantage - it doesn't require fuel to run, only resources.

Andrew

[Local Yokel]

Thanks, Andrew! I ought to have remembered that resources also represent such things as agricultural production. Good to know that the import shipping burden has been matched against what was required in reality. For me, this the most significant improvement in AE over the original game, where you had an unrealistic surplus of merchant tonnage, in CHS at least.

[erstad]

Jim, the Home Islands need 35K resource beyond what is produced "locally" (the difference between my number and LY's is that I am including Sakhalin in the "home islands" for this purpose).

The entire on-map resource stockpile through the entire empire at start is about 7M. (About 20 days worth). Even if every last point is moved to Japan, that's only 200 days worth of operation. Not nearly enough to last for "44 and 45" (and presumably 46). Granted some additional resources will be captured in the DEI but transporting them will be problemmatic due to the distance.

[erstad]

ORIGINAL: Andrew Brown

ORIGINAL: Local Yokel

I really wouldn't recommend enlarging light industry for no reason other than the fact that it is an inefficient supply generator relative to heavy industry.

Yes, HI is much more valuable. However LI does have one advantage - it doesn't require fuel to run, only resources.

Andrew

Yeah, but the payback is bad. 1K to repair an LI center, and it produces a supply point per turn. Takes around 3 years to break even. Not sure it's worth it.

[Local Yokel]

ORIGINAL: erstad

Jim, the Home Islands need 35K resource beyond what is produced "locally" (the difference between my number and LY's is that I am including Sakhalin in the "home islands" for this purpose).

The entire on-map resource stockpile through the entire empire at start is about 7M. (About 20 days worth). Even if every last point is moved to Japan, that's only 200 days worth of operation. Not nearly enough to last for "44 and 45" (and presumably 46). Granted some additional resources will be captured in the DEI but transporting them will be problemmatic due to the distance.

Good to see that my figures seem to be agreeing with yours, since with these statistics I'm never sure whether my results are in the right ballpark!

People looking at this may be saying, "If 7M stockpiled resources is only good for about 20 days production, how does LY come up with his 1426 days' reach figure?" May be worth stressing that this latter figure is one that takes into account daily resource generation. I make this an aggregate daily output of 273400 resource points. If it is assumed that the stockpile is only drawn against to the extent required to cover the daily shortfall of resource points - 5100 - the stockpile can be eked out for a long time.

The problem remains, however, that if resources are in the wrong place, the stockpile will be drawn down. Hence, the resource issue is substantially a transport issue. The oil/fuel issue is one involving larger absolute shortfalls of supply relative to demand.

[SireChaos]

ORIGINAL: erstad

ORIGINAL: Andrew Brown

ORIGINAL: Local Yokel

I really wouldn't recommend enlarging light industry for no reason other than the fact that it is an inefficient supply generator relative to heavy industry.

Yes, HI is much more valuable. However LI does have one advantage - it doesn't require fuel to run, only resources.

Andrew

Yeah, but the payback is bad. 1K to repair an LI center, and it produces a supply point per turn. Takes around 3 years to break even. Not sure it's worth it.

But local light industry near the resource center drastically simplifies the transportation - 1 unit of supplies is easier to transport than 15 units of resources.


As for resource stocks on the HI, (speaking of Scenario 2) WitpStaff tells me they´re around 45 days´ worth at the beginning of the campaign. Shipping only from Manchuria, Korea and Hokkaido, I´ve manage to make up for about 70% of the shortfall, so now at turn 24 I´m at 38 days´ worth of resources. So they should, in a pinch, last until early May ´42 even without shipments from the DEI.

[Zebedee]

ORIGINAL: Jim D Burns
Japan has plenty of lift to manage that kind of daily income once they get the ships where they need to be. They have close to 200 or so AK's that have over 6000 capacity, that alone gives them over 1 million in cargo capacity and that doesn't count the hundreds and hundreds (perhaps thousands) of smaller sized AKs. So getting the resources home won't be an issue.

Half of the needed 40,000+ resources are produced in Manchukuo and Korea, very short runs indeed. Once you get some of the Korean ports close to Japan maxed out for faster load speeds, you'll be making the moves to Japan in one day.

The rest of the areas he's listed are all within a week's sailing time of the home islands, so it's only the shortfall of 5,000+ that will need to be brought home from areas that can be considered long haul runs.

The fact the extra resource sites in the DEI's that Japan needs to capture are spread out in smaller ports will be the big problem for Japan, requiring many smaller AKs due to the loading speeds of the smaller ports.

But using ports like Singapore, Balikpapan and Soerabaja as collection hubs for the smaller AK runs should help mitigate some of the issues so many small runs will bring up. Escorts of course being the main problem.

But overall, Japan has plenty of AK lift to both haul the resources and get supplies to the front. So until the allies can put a serious dent in the AK fleet, Japan should have no troubles at all keeping things humming along smoothly once they get their supply net set up.

Jim

Hi Jim,

Just some rough, dirty calculations (assumption being the mother of all fubars but crashing on... apologies for any grotesque mistakes I may have made but this is how I see things right now and would appreciate any reassurance possible by people pointing out any dumbness on my part) -

Let's assume that a transport moves 3 hexes per turn. Let's assume that it takes one full day to load to capacity and one full day to unload. Let's assume that the resource port is 3 hexes away from the delivery port. In order to deliver X resources per day, you need 4 * X tonnage to deliver it. For a run of 21 hexes, this means 16 * X in capacity. Increase this number to start building a surplus for late war.

Just as a 'fresh air' example. Let's assume that the average longhaul journey is 12 hexes. So you need a transport capacity of 470k (longhaul) + 150k (shorthaul) to break even = 620k. To build up a stockpile, you then have to bring those resources from longhaul.

So with a total Home Island usage of c.270k resources per day that means adding in another 2.7 million shipping to create a functioning network. Over 3 million tons of capacity in total for a network which will allow you to build up a day's stockpile every day.

Hope that explains my scepticism about Japan being able to avoid having to haul resources for the last couple of years of the war.

The sole advantage of hubs is that it will minimise the number of escorts required for journeys to and from the home islands. However one has the issue of then protecting the 'local' transport too. And that also adds to the carrying capacity required.

Throw in the fuel requirements to do this and it's a toughie. Agree it's not an unsurmountable problem, and Japan will get a chance to build up resource stockpiles on Honshu with careful management but this stockpile will be unlikely to be anywhere near what you suggest for Honshu (and maybe not for the entire Home Islands depending on just how hard you squeeze the other islands for resources in order to get the benefits of the reduced fuel usage of the short haul trips).

[Jim D Burns]

ORIGINAL: erstad

Jim, the Home Islands need 35K resource beyond what is produced "locally" (the difference between my number and LY's is that I am including Sakhalin in the "home islands" for this purpose).

The entire on-map resource stockpile through the entire empire at start is about 7M. (About 20 days worth). Even if every last point is moved to Japan, that's only 200 days worth of operation. Not nearly enough to last for "44 and 45" (and presumably 46). Granted some additional resources will be captured in the DEI but transporting them will be problemmatic due to the distance.

Yeah, my bad. I was looking at the figure for "Stockpiled resource reach in days" of 1426 days and took it on faith that it was looking at just stockpiled numbers. Instead that reach includes the production potential of the resource centers as well I think. I should have looked a little more closely at the numbers, sorry everyone for stirring the pot.

Jim

[Jim D Burns]

ORIGINAL: Zebedee
So with a total Home Island usage of c.270k resources per day that means adding in another 2.7 million shipping to create a functioning network. Over 3 million tons of capacity in total for a network which will allow you to build up a day's stockpile every day.

You don't have to deliver daily deliveries thanks to the resource stockpile that starts on map. So don't look at daily demands, instead you should try and tailor your supply net around weekly or monthly shipments based on the amount of resources produced in that time period at a location. So for example let's look at the Manchukuo and Korea figure of roughly 20k produced resources per day.

If you can set it up so a convoy can pick up, deliver and return all within a week (just an example, may take a little longer), all you need do is make sure that convoy has enough lift to carry one week's worth of Manchukuo/Korea resource production. So no extra lift needs to be built into the chain for anything other than battle losses and routine repairs.

So simply create a convoy with 140,000 capacity and you're good to go until you need to swap it out with another fleet with 140,000 capacity for routine repairs on the first fleet. If the route takes two weeks to make the same round trip, your convoy would need a capacity of 280,000.

The true limiting factor will be the ability to load and unload such a large fleet in a timely fashion, so I suspect Japan will be building up key ports ASAP for the first year or so. So early on it actually may be more efficient to use more, smaller AKs, than fewer large AKs for most of your resource hauling, since they load faster at the smaller ports.

Later once you've got some large ports built, you'll be able to swap those out with the large capacity ships and send the small AKs to the front line areas.

So forget trying to build your fleets around a daily capacity figure. Just tailor them to be able to lift all of the production at a given site and the home island demands will be met. Getting your supply net set up and functioning as soon as possible is the critical factor for Japan.

With a cushion of just 20 days or so built into the stockpiles, the longer it takes for resource convoys to start arriving the harder it will be to guarantee your industry keeps humming along. Until you've got a solid supply net in place, I wouldn't expand a single HI factory, or you risk crashing your economy.

I'd first get the net up and then try and build the home island stockpiles up to a point greater than just 20 days excess before trying to expand anything that would cause a greater demand on resources. Once you've got the DEI resources flowing in, you should be able to make some significant increases. But that could be 6 months or a year into the game before those regular convoys start to arrive.

Jim

[Zebedee]

Hi Jim,

good points, well made. My post was intended solely to address the idea that Japan would be able to create massive stockpiles on the Home Islands within the first two years and so avoid needing to haul resources in the latter two years.

Agree very much that the port limitations will be a critical factor. It exposes the Japan Merchant marine to the allied submarine forces for the entire duration of the war as there is no way that the Japanese player can escort every convoy, all the time, in an adequate way. Must give credit to the AE team for their work on this aspect even as my head spins with figuring out convoy timetables

Just on a more general note, I'm leaning towards the idea of expanding industry in the 'colonies' and keeping that of the Home Islands within the limits of what is actually needed. May be a difficult balance to achieve, but I think that may be one answer to part of the conundrum.

[Jim D Burns]

ORIGINAL: Zebedee
Just on a more general note, I'm leaning towards the idea of expanding industry in the 'colonies' and keeping that of the Home Islands within the limits of what is actually needed. May be a difficult balance to achieve, but I think that may be one answer to part of the conundrum.

Agree, though you risk losing that capacity a lot sooner, so there is a trade off that may not make it worth the effort. Defending the home islands and any capacity increases made there is easy when compared to trying to defend the colonies from attack.

Another possible help may be to actually shut down some home island capacity early on, thus preserving the limited stockpiles there until you have a dependable and functioning supply net in place.

Figuring out if this can be done without severely hurting production is a study in progress of course, but I think it would be better to limit your production options for the short term rather than risk totally crashing your economy while you scramble to get a functioning supply net in place.

Jim

[Zebedee]

Certainly agree with you and sval that Home Island industry may well need turning off and on until things are running 'smoothly'.

Expanding industry in Manchuoko/Korea might be safe until SU entry into the war, unless the Allied player is willing to support a Chinese bomber campaign which of course will create headaches for him as well as dispersing some of those 4E from other theatres; the natural approach to that idea would be to launch a campaign to push the Chinese as far away as possible from Manchuria/Korea. Other areas are less desirable for the reasons you set out though. Although more locally produced supply might offer cost/benefit results to justify it given the fuel situation for Japan.

But back to basics first. Unload/load speeds of ports in relation to their resource surplus and oil/fuel productions in order to create a functioning Japanese basic economy. Fun, fun

[Mynok]

Those huge convoys from Witp are going to be a thing of the past in AE. I expect there will be weekly or biweekly convoys out of Singapore not monthly huge ones.

[Tophat1815]

ORIGINAL: Mynok


Those huge convoys from Witp are going to be a thing of the past in AE. I expect there will be weekly or biweekly convoys out of Singapore not monthly huge ones.

I fully agree with you. Takes quite awhile to load a huge convoy,then where does it unload at?

[Mike Solli]

Hi guys.  A few notes on all of this.  Based on the Japanese fleet of 7 Dec 41 (no conversions beyond what currently exists), the total capacity of all AK/AP/TK/AO/Minecraft/AMCs is:
 
Troop capacity:  ~400,000
Cargo capacity:  ~3,000,000
Liquid capacity:  ~600,000
 
I think there will be sufficient capacity for resources, but TKs will be stressed.  The TKs themselves carry only 414,000.  AOs will have to support a lot (I'm thinking the 8k AOs) and TKs will have to be accelerated.
 
Also note that the daily ship load rate is increased in ports where there are refineries, oil production facilities and resource production facilities (pgs. 126-127):
 
"» Refineries and oil production facilities at a port increase the load
rate and daily maximum limits for fuel and oil respectively. Increase
is equal to one half of daily production in rate, full daily production
in limit. If both refineries and oil production are present, the amount
of oil used by the refinery is deducted from the increases.

» Resource production facilities at a port similarly increase
the load rate and daily limit for resource loading."

[Local Yokel]

Thanks, Mike, for doing something I had planned to get round to. I feared there might be a shortage of tanker bottoms, so traffic management of these seems likely to be critical. Still tempted to sacrifice a bit of capacity to convert some of those Type N-TL's to fast oilers though...

I have been doing some work on port and cargo handling limits intended to take account of the manual extract you cite, but that raised a query that I put into a new thread a couple of days ago, and which seems to have got buried in the deluge. In case anyone knows the answer, I'll re-post part of my question here:

'What happens with resources? Is the extent of the increase in resource loading rate that results from the presence of locally produced resources reduced if heavy or light industry centres are also present that consume some of those resources? And if so, what is the extent to which the increase in resource loading rate is consequently truncated?'

I've been constructing a spreadsheet that attempts to show what I take to be the impact of these enhancements, though I'm not sure whether it I've done so accurately. If someone would care to take a look and tell me if I've got it wrong, I would appreciate it. I'm attaching it here as an Excel .xls file with a .txt extension. Even if my 'load rate enhancement' calculations are wrong this may be of some help as a planning tool. If I have got it right, there are some quite surprising effects on the loading capability of some ports.

[erstad]

ORIGINAL: Local Yokel

'What happens with resources? Is the extent of the increase in resource loading rate that results from the presence of locally produced resources reduced if heavy or light industry centres are also present that consume some of those resources? And if so, what is the extent to which the increase in resource loading rate is consequently truncated?'

I ran some tests. You seem to get the whole resource loading bonus even though some is used locally.

I put together a spreadsheet too, it's actually posted in the tech support forum but there's a link from a war room thread. I've got to go back to work now but I'll compare ours later tonight (or you can compare).

The one error I know I have is I did some more testing and resource loading/unloading is NOT helped by naval support [:(]

And you're absolutely right, the resource center bonus is critical in thinking about some of the cargo routes.

One other note is the manual says loading and unloading are the same, either the manual lies or there is a bug. The unloading doesn't get one of the two bonuses, I think it was the increase to daily port limit (I posted that somewhere, didn't get a response, maybe time to bump that). Whichever it was my spreadsheet modeled the game engine, not the manual, so you can check the formulas to replace my faulty memory.

Main limit of my spreadheet is that it didn't model docking limits, but usually the daily load is a bigger issue than docking. At least the way I'm running my convoys.

[Local Yokel]

Great! I'll track it down and take a look.

[Local Yokel]

ORIGINAL: erstad

I ran some tests. You seem to get the whole resource loading bonus even though some is used locally.

I put together a spreadsheet too, it's actually posted in the tech support forum but there's a link from a war room thread. I've got to go back to work now but I'll compare ours later tonight (or you can compare).

The one error I know I have is I did some more testing and resource loading/unloading is NOT helped by naval support [:(]

And you're absolutely right, the resource center bonus is critical in thinking about some of the cargo routes.

One other note is the manual says loading and unloading are the same, either the manual lies or there is a bug. The unloading doesn't get one of the two bonuses, I think it was the increase to daily port limit (I posted that somewhere, didn't get a response, maybe time to bump that). Whichever it was my spreadsheet modeled the game engine, not the manual, so you can check the formulas to replace my faulty memory.

Main limit of my spreadheet is that it didn't model docking limits, but usually the daily load is a bigger issue than docking. At least the way I'm running my convoys.

Ok, have now taken a look, and I think we are on the same track, except that I have factored in a reduction in ship loading rates on the assumption that local industry would consume resources and thus reduce the bonus in the load/unload rate.

I simply assumed that ship loading and unloading rates were the same because the manual said so! - haven't done your testing of what happens in practice.

If what has been lost is a ship loading or unloading rate bonus, rather than an increase in a port's daily handling capacity, then that's quite serious. There can be a world of difference between the basic per-ship load/unload rate and the corresponding rates as supplemented by the bonus. If that isn't WAD the I should like to see it corrected. I'm less worried about a loss of a port's daily handling capacity bonus because I think that would have less impact than a loss of bonus rates on individual ship loading/unloading.

If we are getting the full ship load/unload rate bonus unaffected by local consumption then again, although that sounds good, it's a gain that would be more than offset by loss of either the load or unload rate bonus per ship .

Loss of loading/unloading assistance from Naval Support is also something that perhaps the devs could take a look at. It could make a significant difference to cargo handling in several major Japanese ports where there are static base forces with a sizeable Nav. Support contingent. Otherwise I'm less concerned about that, as I would plan to ship out my units with Nav Support to boost performance of the forward ports.

Think I may need to do a modified spreadsheet design and do some in-game testing of my own!

[Zebedee]

ORIGINAL: Mike Solli

Hi guys.  A few notes on all of this.  Based on the Japanese fleet of 7 Dec 41 (no conversions beyond what currently exists), the total capacity of all AK/AP/TK/AO/Minecraft/AMCs is:

Troop capacity:  ~400,000
Cargo capacity:  ~3,000,000
Liquid capacity:  ~600,000

I think there will be sufficient capacity for resources, but TKs will be stressed.  The TKs themselves carry only 414,000.  AOs will have to support a lot (I'm thinking the 8k AOs) and TKs will have to be accelerated.

Thanks Mike. I'm assuming the liquid capacity you've worked out includes the liquid capacity of those AKs able to carry it?

I'm also presuming there's no way of loading both liquid and solids at the same time, meaning such AKs will be penalised by an extra day in port loading?