Matrix Games Forums

Does anyone know what impact increasing the Load Costs of Support Device would have?

Currently in most iterations of the game that I am aware of a support device has a load cost of 20.

What happens when the load cost is increased to say 50?

#1 - Units would require more shipping....
#2 - They are then more expensive to produce for the Japanese...
#3 - More personnel are reported as present...

Are any of these bad things?

Would they become more resilient to damage from bombardments or ground combat?

They might not be air mobile anymore.  They probably wouldn't load on subs either.

Load cost will report directly as manpower in the unit. Thus, if a unit had 100 support squads, it would get 2000 men from them. Increasing that to 50 would mean it gains 3000 men. Unit report sizes will inflate 250%.

Load cost = production cost in armaments points (typically). This is a bad thing in general - but could be compensated for by increasing armaments plants. That would in turn demand more HI points for armaments - but that might be a good thing. WITP is using about 10% of the Japanese armaments plants (see Korea for example, where we have US Army intelligence maps indicating vast numbers of plants absent in the game). Such things integrate and should be carefully thought through and tested.

I use load cost to indicate animals and men, and make motorized support only 10 instead of 20 - because in IJA in particular and US Army as well - motorized units are easier to lift than pack units or draft units are. Presumably 1 support = 1 motorized support in code effects - so making load cost less for motorized seems like an elegant solution. Load cost also = tons. I consider a unit together with support during lift. Thus, for airborne, the true weight of a heavy weapon is the weapon squad plus one support squad - what you have to move to make the weapon effective. And, possibly surprisingly for some, an airborne unit should have NON motorized support because they use pack support - not vehicle support. So in RHS you have to move 20 to get each support squad instead of 10 for a motorized support squad.

There is a peculiar abstraction in WITP - load cost = men and = weight (or shipping tonnage). It may be for small weapons that we should be using squad size instead of weapon weight.