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I am playing my large campaing covering the entire war. I was wondering, How well soes the auto supply work. I was also wondering will I see convoyes heading to the bases with supply.

ORIGINAL: Lonewolfpj

I am playing my large campaing covering the entire war. I was wondering, How well soes the auto supply work. I was also wondering will I see convoyes heading to the bases with supply.

Using autoconvoys is NOT a good idea! The convoys go everywhere and anywhere, and effects other things in the game, and not in a good way.

how does it work does it just randomly resuply bases with out the a convy of ships, or does it send ships all over the place. Does it mess things up if both sides use it?

JAP AI just sends them half empty to some weird places. And back. And forth again. They burn A LOT of fuel.

Allied AI is an adept of suicide. It runs auto convoys to empty Philippines bases, loves to send them in between Truk and Palau to supply some empty base in PNG. Good for training your Air units though.[:D]

You assign the number of ships and the bases to be resupplied. As an Allied player, it can be useful to keep Hawaii, Midawy and Alaska supplied. It will also work for some of the islands in the South Pacific close to Hawaii. Other than that, don't use it. It will cost you alot of ships as it tends to send them right by Tarawa if trying to supply Australia.

As the Japanese, you have to be very careful as it will drain Tokyo of supply in a heartbeat if you attempt to keep too many bases supplied. You it only for major supply runs and severely limit the number of ships you put in it. One advantage it does have for the Japanese is that it will pick up oil and resources and return them to Tokyo if any are available at the destination.

CS supply is far better, not perfect but far better. Build supply TFs in different cities and select a destination on each land mass you need to supply. They will keep a continuous run between them. Use barges and small AKs to run supplies between islands such as in the Philippines. Be careful though, because they too can drain supply from your industrial bases if you don't watch it.

Chez

You assign the number of ships and the bases to be resupplied. As an Allied player, it can be useful to keep Hawaii, Midawy and Alaska supplied. It will also work for some of the islands in the South Pacific close to Hawaii. Other than that, don't use it. It will cost you alot of ships as it tends to send them right by Tarawa if trying to supply Australia.

You will also find things like OTHER convoys being put into computer control, convoys that are not supposed to be controlled by the AI. If you don't keep strict track of things, you suddenly find ships under attack at places they have no business being - like finding your TF with troops for Australia being reassigned to go to Manilla through the heart of Japanese defenses.

How it is supposed to work is that you go to SFO or Karachi and pick ships to put into auto convoys[H} and then go to the bases you want to supply and check auto convoy on. Then these ships will attempt to supply those bases. But as has been said they are not smart about how they get there. There by getting sunk. So don't use unless they are reasonably close and keep an eye on them.[;)] You can see them on the map

I ran into this same issue not too long ago, and thankfully was told I'd be better off without autoconvoy. I have to agree; though you can use "CS" (constant supply) with some success; I think it works best for supplying rear-area bases where there's not a particularly complicated route involved (SFO to Pearl, for instance). From those bases, I manually form up supply TFs and send them out on resupply missions. Reduces some of the work, without taking all your ships on joyrides.[:)]