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Playing a 2-player 1941 Campaign game against a good German player. It's mid-April 1945 and the German lines are almost impregnable except in the far south in Austria. The Red Army forced the surrender of Finland about 6-9 months early and Romania about 2-3 months early. The Soviets even bombed Ploesti near the begging of the war and again once Crimea was recaptured. Yet, the Axis has an abundance of fuel - seemingly never affecting the performance of the Luftwaffe or the Heer.

It strikes me that this weakness in historical reality means that the capture of the Caucasus oil fields is virtually irrelevant, thus affecting gameplay decisions.

This should be rectified at some point, either with this game or a future version.

I have not seen any game where Axis had an abundance of fuel. Its possible the Axis player was very conservative with using aviation in earlier years and conserved a lot of fuel.
Do you have any screenshots showing oil/fuel levels?

2-player game. I'll try to remember to post when I see my opponent's turn. In the meanwhile, here's a relevant thread.
https://forums.matrixgames.com/viewtopi ... s#p5215102

Fuel situation on 6MAY45.

SdKfz is German and stands for EV.

...

with fuel levels that you you should see a rapid decline of Axis pilot quality as pilot training is first to be curtailed with low fuel.
Axis player should not be able to move its panzer divs a lot as they eat fuel very fast.
Axis player should avoid using big bombers like He 177 or large patrol aircraft due to their hunger for fuel. Fuel should be anough for fighters, tac Bombers and limited amount of medium bombers.
Civil consumption should eat a lot of the fuel that's still produced.
The massive fuel buildup on the Soviet side is something that should not happen but there's no real way to increase soviet fuel usage.

this topic has been discussed a bunch of times in the past. but basically one of the devs said something about how very few people would take the Caucasus playing the game so there's no point in working on it. Or something about it's not important. To be fair it's almost impossible to take the Caucasus before the Soviet line disintegrate in 1944 or some.

Oil and fuel in general don't matter in this game. It' very unfortunate. Had the logistic system from WITP makes some kind of come back in this game I feel like the industry side would be so much more enjoyable. I honestly don't think the oil & fuel number in the game mean anything. But I guess the game wouldn't be fun to play with if you don't have anything to run your AFVs. Maybe in WITE3 they can make a new gameplay mechanic where tanks crews could abandon their vehicles and turn into small, useless units

What I can say is that the system "works" if you lower the Pools, the production and increase consumption of Divisions (just to see if it works at all). But it seems like the amount of Production, Military consumption and Civilian consumption need to be in a specific ratio for the system to work.

The thing is that someone, while the whole Axis is "afk", is reducing the Pools by ~-75k. This means that this someone consumes 75k+~85k+~55k=215k per turn.

To put this into perspective:
Had the Axis 100 Tank Divisions and would expend all their fuel each week, it would consume ~500tons x 100 Div = 50k.
Would the Axis fly 5000 Sorties each week and assuming an average Fuel per Sortie of 2ton (Fighters use ~0.33tons) we would only consume 5000 sorties x 2 ton = 10k fuel.
Then there is some fuel supposed to be used for Supply Trucks.
All in all, the numbers actually consumed "on MAP" in these 3 positions to me seem rather miniscule, like the 100 Tank Divisions are an extreme example already.

In whatever way the Supply system may actually work/in which order the Fuel is actually delivered, ...even if a little bit is left in the Pools after civilian consumption, this rest seems likely to meet/exceed the consumption of what your Ground Forces and Air need.
Attached an order of Logistics Phases (it's a while old not sure if some Phases have been moved since then). My assumption is, that after the Civilian Phase (which uses the Fuel from the previous Production [which may only have been consumed/"touched" so far from stuff consumed during Air Phase]), there must be sufficient Fuel inside the Pools left to fully support Ground+Air. So this means somehow the ~-215k consumers (during Axis afk) stop consuming that much when Fuel gets low and Forces will (before also Rumania falls and Pools are drained) have sufficent to fill their Tanks.

If one would now balance it in a way as to have ~85% of Fuel needed for Units each turn, the issue would be that you likely would have no way of stockpiling Fuel in preparation of an offensive, since (I assume) the someones which like to consume ~215k but then reduce that to X would likely increase consumption again.

How did this work in WITE1+WITW?!

What I can say is that the system "works" if you lower the Pools

As has been said, the fuel system is really not part of the game.
I think it would take a lot more than tweaking the pools to make it work. One factor would be the dynamic between the Luftwaffe and the ground forces. Another would be storage. Another is production.
Would it add to the game, yes I think so but it would take extensive development work !