Showcasing WitE2 #3 - Logistics

[governato]

double post!

[loki100]

ORIGINAL: governato


questions for the developers (after tipping my hat for building such an entertaining and complex system) who have access to ongoing test games.

1) is the new implementation of logistics going to stop the infamous 1942 "Panzerball" of GWITE? It should just not be possible
to concentrate several panzer Armies in areas often smaller than 1-200 miles as the best players do for the '42 summer offensive.

2) Similarly will the Soviet player find a good incentive to stop carpeting his front four units deep with weak infantry divisions to stop the Axis breakthroughs?

I saw both tactics are still heavily used by good GWITE players, but in my opinion they are wildly unrealistic, but if a player plays to win they are strangely effective...so can you tell us if they have been tested in current beta games of WITE2?

hard to say for both but:

a) as RedLancer's post indicates, you have a lot of player agency in the logistics system in terms of how you deploy your HQs (esp army and army grp/front) and use your FBD/NKPS. Now done well (& it'll take some practice), you can create a supply rich region.

What WiTE2 tends to do in these mechanics is say 'fine, now here's the cost', so lets say for the sake of eg, the Germans can ship 100 units of supply to the front. They can use these tricks to get say 60 into a given region. Well the rest of the front is going to suffer - not least a lack of replacements.

So that is one cost, second this set up is great for building up an offensive, so your Pzrs hurl themselves east with 40-50 MP and a couple of turns later are running at 20-30. And that carefully built up infrastructure is now too far behind the front (and your HQs may be out of effective command range) to really help and you are shedding a load of trucks to get the supplies. So yes, you can concentrate, you launch a devastating blow and then find you have too much in a given region.

The example in the post is from my current test game. Using these tools I can get three large Soviet Fronts (prob around 1.5m men) to the situation where the armour are at 40-50 MP, Infantry at 14-16 and with their CPP up around 100. That is going to break any line, the issue is can you sustain it (and the time it takes to set up - the game models the long operational pauses that characterised many Soviet operations very well). As an aside, as Red Lancer alluded to, the logistics to sustain a German blitzkrieg operational approach are different to sustain a Soviet deep battle operational approach.

b) defense in depth remains a key tool in any IGO-UGO design. What is different - and we'll show this in the AAR that starts soon, is that in WiTE2 a low morale/exp/TOE formation that gets hit hard (or hit more than once) will often just fragment. There are also different rules for the MP costs around enemy hexes/battles and so on. So a deep line of weak Soviet units can end being little but morsels ready for a series of hasty attacks.

Or, if you want, the key issue we are trying to show in these posts - this is not WiTE1+, its a completely new game that still has some concepts long built into the GG game series.

[VigaBrand]

Thanks for this! [&o]

[governato]

ORIGINAL: loki100

ORIGINAL: governato


questions for the developers (after tipping my hat for building such an entertaining and complex system) who have access to ongoing test games.



2) Similarly will the Soviet player find a good incentive to stop carpeting his front four units deep with weak infantry divisions to stop the Axis breakthroughs?

hard to say for both but:


b) defense in depth remains a key tool in any IGO-UGO design. What is different - and we'll show this in the AAR that starts soon, is that in WiTE2 a low morale/exp/TOE formation that gets hit hard (or hit more than once) will often just fragment. There are also different rules for the MP costs around enemy hexes/battles and so on. So a deep line of weak Soviet units can end being little but morsels ready for a series of hasty attacks.

Or, if you want, the key issue we are trying to show in these posts - this is not WiTE1+, its a completely new game that still has some concepts long built into the GG game series.

It'd be really interesting to hear the designers thoughts when they first picked WITE's hex size/turn size combination. It'a crucial decision...

In numerical simulations (my field of expertise, allow me to nerd out a sec!) one gets 'broad spatial features' (yes carpets and checkerboards in WITE) when the time scale is too large compared to the adopted spatial resolution (WITE hex size!) . A "carpet' is just the player reaction to the inability to react timely to breakthroughs within the limits of the game engine turn scale.

Probably nobody 'd play WITE campaign at half turn weeks (400+ of them), but maybe easier reserve activations with AI assistance would prove realistic and easy to implement? Again something I'd like to hear from the designers perspective!

[ignikharion]

ORIGINAL: loki100

ORIGINAL: governato


questions for the developers (after tipping my hat for building such an entertaining and complex system) who have access to ongoing test games.

1) is the new implementation of logistics going to stop the infamous 1942 "Panzerball" of GWITE? It should just not be possible
to concentrate several panzer Armies in areas often smaller than 1-200 miles as the best players do for the '42 summer offensive.

2) Similarly will the Soviet player find a good incentive to stop carpeting his front four units deep with weak infantry divisions to stop the Axis breakthroughs?

I saw both tactics are still heavily used by good GWITE players, but in my opinion they are wildly unrealistic, but if a player plays to win they are strangely effective...so can you tell us if they have been tested in current beta games of WITE2?

hard to say for both but:

a) as RedLancer's post indicates, you have a lot of player agency in the logistics system in terms of how you deploy your HQs (esp army and army grp/front) and use your FBD/NKPS. Now done well (& it'll take some practice), you can create a supply rich region.

What WiTE2 tends to do in these mechanics is say 'fine, now here's the cost', so lets say for the sake of eg, the Germans can ship 100 units of supply to the front. They can use these tricks to get say 60 into a given region. Well the rest of the front is going to suffer - not least a lack of replacements.

So that is one cost, second this set up is great for building up an offensive, so your Pzrs hurl themselves east with 40-50 MP and a couple of turns later are running at 20-30. And that carefully built up infrastructure is now too far behind the front (and your HQs may be out of effective command range) to really help and you are shedding a load of trucks to get the supplies. So yes, you can concentrate, you launch a devastating blow and then find you have too much in a given region.

The example in the post is from my current test game. Using these tools I can get three large Soviet Fronts (prob around 1.5m men) to the situation where the armour are at 40-50 MP, Infantry at 14-16 and with their CPP up around 100. That is going to break any line, the issue is can you sustain it (and the time it takes to set up - the game models the long operational pauses that characterised many Soviet operations very well). As an aside, as Red Lancer alluded to, the logistics to sustain a German blitzkrieg operational approach are different to sustain a Soviet deep battle operational approach.

b) defense in depth remains a key tool in any IGO-UGO design. What is different - and we'll show this in the AAR that starts soon, is that in WiTE2 a low morale/exp/TOE formation that gets hit hard (or hit more than once) will often just fragment. There are also different rules for the MP costs around enemy hexes/battles and so on. So a deep line of weak Soviet units can end being little but morsels ready for a series of hasty attacks.

Or, if you want, the key issue we are trying to show in these posts - this is not WiTE1+, its a completely new game that still has some concepts long built into the GG game series.

Thank you for the insight.

Panzerballs and soviet ant defense were the reasons i left the game. I mean, wite it is a fine game. But that really annoyed me.

Also, i would like to ask if there are ingame incentives for front defense and early counterattacks as the soviet player (as historical) in order to avoid the infamous sir Rovinsky tactic (aka, run to the hills until winter)

[loki100]

ORIGINAL: ignikharion

...

...

Also, i would like to ask if there are ingame incentives for front defense and early counterattacks as the soviet player (as historical) in order to avoid the infamous sir Rovinsky tactic (aka, run to the hills until winter)

Yes - but we'll discuss that in a later thread and the upcoming AAR posts

[Balou]

ORIGINAL: RedLancer


The factories are located in their historic locations and produce against historic rates. The output of production accumulates in pools for onward distribution.

Is damage thru strategic bombing to the german war industry/production abstracted or can the soviet side actively interfere (eg Ploesti), although I realize that historically it was rather the Western Allies Job.

[loki100]

ORIGINAL: Balou

ORIGINAL: RedLancer


The factories are located in their historic locations and produce against historic rates. The output of production accumulates in pools for onward distribution.

Is damage thru strategic bombing to the german war industry/production abstracted or can the soviet side actively interfere (eg Ploesti), although I realize that historically it was rather the Western Allies Job.

both, we'll discuss the Theatre and Event system in the next post but that models the Allied strategic bombing. Apart from a lack of assets there is nothing to stop the Soviet player joining in (just I'd rather have B-17s/24s for the job not Il-4s)

[No idea]

One question regarding supply through ports. What has been done about it? In WITE I had a game where lots of my soviet units (two whole fronts) were cut, but I still had one of those little ports at the sea of Azov on my hands, and they were getting full supply through that little port (I must add that the Stalino area and its industry was in that pocket also). It seemed ridiculous to me. How has supply through ports been changed?

[821Bobo]

You dont have unlimited supply via ports. How much you get depends from port size.

[loki100]

ORIGINAL: 821Bobo

You dont have unlimited supply via ports. How much you get depends from port size.

and also how many transport ships you have in that sea area. Oh and its possible to effectively close off a port via naval air operations

[MechFO]

By far the best logistics system in any game to date.

How did you arrive at basic parameters like how many trucks should be used for transporting freight x number of hexes or how much freight can fit on a double rail line?

[wpurdom]

My apologies to loki100: I also posted this in his AAR where this is probably OT.

I confess I tried to get an answer to this on another thread, and got 2 answers which weren't answers to my question. So I want to try my luck with different phrasing.

Is there any differential in German RR repair as to either time or place?
Historically, the RR destruction was more miss than hit in the first couple of weeks of the campaign and the Germans got their first trains through to Minsk and Riga very early.

In WITE1 this is modelled by having a region where repair is faster (the Baltic states, basically).

In TOAW Barbarossa scenarios this is modelled by leaving some or all RR hexes intact after conquest in early turns, varying by scenario modeller.

Is there anything like either of these mechanisms in WITE2?

[Joel Billings]

70% of the Baltic rail hexes are captured undamaged in the first 3 turns of the game.

[Joel Billings]

ORIGINAL: MechFO

By far the best logistics system in any game to date.

How did you arrive at basic parameters like how many trucks should be used for transporting freight x number of hexes or how much freight can fit on a double rail line?

Gary developed the system. He had studied the Allied logistics in France 44 for WitW so he had a basic understanding of some of the issues (like tonnage arriving in ports, etc.). Some Eastern Front info we got from sources posted by testers (like rail line capacity and how Soviets ran one way rail lines to increase capacity for key areas, giving us some justification for super depots). However, I have to admit that there are some serious abstractions in the game and a lot of the numbers are things that developed over time in testing to get us the results we were looking for.

[fritzfarlig]

[quote]ORIGINAL: wodin

THe importance of Logistics becomes obvious after reading quote below..



"Amateurs talk about tactics, but professionals study logistics."
- Gen. Robert H. Barrow, USMC (Commandant of the Marine Corps) noted in 1980

I really like this quote (O:

[Hanny]

ORIGINAL: wodin

THe importance of Logistics becomes obvious after reading quotes

I see this list every so often, here’s two more for you.

Plans are worthless, planning is is essential.
Proper planning prevents piss poor performance.

[OccatorPilot]

This logistics system looks amazing. Me and my friends usually play other games, but when I saw this I had to pre-order

[Repsol]

Have i understod this correct. A railyard depot may only have two possible levels of damage due to the railyard being bombed...
Either fully functional or functional at a mere 10 percent of its capacity.

If i have two prio 4 depots along the same rail line one after the other will the second depot recieve any freight if the first one has recieved up to its capacity ? or will the first prio 4 depot halt any further deliveries along that line ?

[loki100]

ORIGINAL: Repsol

Have i understod this correct. A railyard depot may only have two possible levels of damage due to the railyard being bombed...
Either fully functional or functional at a mere 10 percent of its capacity.

If i have two prio 4 depots along the same rail line one after the other will the second depot recieve any freight if the first one has recieved up to its capacity ? or will the first prio 4 depot halt any further deliveries along that line ?

1 - no, it can 100 states from 0% functioning to 100% functional

2 - it depends,.if there is sufficient rail capacity then both may fill up to their operating capacity (& you can increase that with HQ placement). What they won't do is to transfer freight between them but both can separately claim freight from lower priority depots back towards the relevant NSS