Sabotage or how to love the The Big Bang!
At a certain point into the game you'll receive a message regarding Partisans and Saboteurs. Like thus.
It is as it says. From here on in there will be intermittent attempts to blow your facilities (ports, shipyards and airbases, not just factories) to kingdom come.
(This has nothing to do with the occasional partisan attempt against your trains and rolling stock as that's a seperate part of the mod)
To avoid this you need to have a garrison in place (in the same hex) of, ideally, 100 riflemen. Anything less and you run a proportional risk of having your facility destroyed. Eg. if you had only 70 rifleman then you would have a 30% chance of destruction.
How often are these attempts made? Not often. In fact the base chance is deliberately set at a point where, by the time it arrives, you'll have probably forgotten about it and will have unguarded facilities. The frequency increases once you start capturing cities with Foreign People in them. Now while you may be a culturally aware warmonger of a sensitive disposition all those foreigners that are swarming around the streets of your recently conquered city don't much like you.
There is a random roll each turn to see if the event activates (eg. saboteurs and partisans sneak out of the woods). The threshold is set at a very low point adjusted upwards +1% for every foreign city you have captured and +4% for every foreign capital (they
really don't like you). As you conquer more land you can expect a higher frequency (it's capped at a reasonable level to prevent silly behaviour).
If an event activates then each of your relevant facilities are checked in turn. A random 1d100 roll is made vs. the size of the garrison as mentioned above. With a 100 rifleman garrison you are bulletproof, anything less and you are running a risk. There's a report that tells you all the details.
So that's the game mechanic. Why is it there and why is it designed that way?
Designer Notes
Historically any military conflict that has involved one side invading another's homeland has resulted in significant numbers of the invaders troops being tied down protecting infrastructure. The Roman Empire, the Union invading the South during the ACW and the Germans in Russia are all good examples.
My aim was to provide some means of reflecting the difficulty of holding conquered ground. I played around with randomly generating actual partisan units or destroying sections of a player's rail network. Both of these approaches served to provide a good simulation but they weren't much fun game wise. 'Whack a Mole' comes to mind.
The advantage of the system as it is currently designed is that it involves minimal micromanagement while doing a reasonable job of representing the need for standing garrisons to protect your infrastructure.
Where it falls apart a little bit is where a player thinks that this is a lot of armed soldiers to protect a factory.
Jeez, the tractor factory down the road is watched over by a night guard and a dog.
However the individual factory or shipyard, etc. that they are protecting isn't just that single facility. It is a whole range of related industrial, military facilities and associated transport links. The soldiers aren't down the road at the tractor factory standing shoulder to shoulder with guns pointing outwards. They are scattered over different parts of town and in the nearby countryside protecting bridges, rail interchanges and stuff like power grids.
Why the 100 soldiers? I needed an arbitary number of men and decided on this number of riflemen. They're the grunts that do the hard yards including standing in the rain at midnight down at Charlies Rubber Gasket Making plant, without which your Tank factory will grind to a halt.
One hundred turned out to be a good number because it translated to an equivalent random 1d100 roll. I originally scaled it with map sizes but found that this wasn't necessary as the system turned out to be
'self levelling'. For example on a small map you are going to build a lot fewer facilities than on a much larger one but the proportion of soldiers needed as garrisons is roughly the same as on the larger one.
Believe it or not I did some calculations on this. Works out close enough.
Then there is the question of whether, if the bad guys manage to sneak in and plant the bombs, what effect should there be? Orginally the facilities were only damaged. Didn't work. You hardly noticed it. Why bother?
It wasn't
meaningful. It didn't hurt. Same with the garrison size. Under one hundred men and it was just a nuisance. With one hundred and, potentially destroyed facilities, it matters. It requires you to make trade-off decisions. Start building lots of facilities willy nilly and you'll soon run short of manpower. Ignore garrisons and you'll run out of facilities.
In the end all of the above turned out to be secondary to the most important consideration of all. The AI. The standard ATG AI builds heaps of factories. Don't tell anyone but they are mostly decoration. Nor has the AI got much of a clue about what to do with them.
Try turning off the Fog of war and watching what happens at an artillery factory. Endless streams of units (provided it's not an 'AI ghost factory') consisting of nothing but artillery units. Usually mixed artillery units. Heading off to the frontline to get slaughtered.
Compare this to a player building an artillery factory. He will produce whatever is required to carry out his goals and will ensure that artillery SFT's are well protected and provided with adequate transport when and if required. I'm being a bit harsh on the AI here as it's not quite that bad but in terms of factory utilisation it is where the little boat was. Behind.
Basically factories are a huge free kick to the player. In any game if you can manage to fend off the AI's initial swarm tactics you'll soon find yourself ramping up your industrial capacity in line with your resource base. The Enhanced Resource option aims to slow you down here but you'll still be able to enventually build so many factories that you'll one day be fielding an overwhelming force.
You're not beating the AI through superior tactics and strategy (you might but they aren't usually the key deciders), you are overwhelming them with your industrial might.
It's even worse than this because all those spawned AI factories that you capture only serve to accelerate the process.
The sabotage game mechanic covers all the bases mentioned above but it's overiding purpose is to put a limit on the number of factories and facilities that the player can build (or capture). Without this the AI, not matter how enhanced, hasn't got a hope.
Personally I also like the fact that facilities have become more important and more of a nuanced decision. Before I just built heaps of them whenever I could. Building facilities are now no longer a no-brainer decision.
I'm open to alternative views and suggestions but, 'cause I made the mod, I get to have a lot of votes on the matter and may take a fair bit of persuading.
Cheers,
Lancer