Base Construction

[mogami]

Greetings, Without getting too carried away. I think routines that automaticly move supply down a road/railroad should graphicly represent such movement and allow it to be a target for enemy inderdiction (air mission inderdiction could be a choice. Bombers would fly to hex and bomb road/railroad damaging them and if any supply was in hex destroy a portion. Fighter sweeps would also be good at this-(I want to catch a train)

[mdiehl]

I like the production idea Mogami but it's hard to see how it works at the map scale. Any given hex might have a large number of bridges, depending on where in the PTO it is located.

I'd like to see all forms of construction contingent upon the size of the engineering unit *and* its degree of mechanization and industrial sophistication.

[mogami]

Greetings. For any one hex the program would generate a "bridge" factor. This would incorperate the number of rivers size of rivers and give a "bridge value" This would detirmine how much supply required to build/repair a bridge and how much damage they could absorb before being closed to traffic.
So many small bridges or 1 large bridge. It is still an abstract system but it does account for natural barriers. (tunnels would use a like method)

[mdiehl]

Simple, but elegant. A very interesting suggestion. And it leads to other neat ideas. There could be an airstrike vulnerability associated with your bridge.road.rail factors. A one road track with lots of bridges would be more vulnerable than a spiderweb of hard-packed roads with no bridges.

[Jeremy Pritchard]

Originally posted by Mogami
Greetings. For any one hex the program would generate a "bridge" factor. This would incorperate the number of rivers size of rivers and give a "bridge value" This would detirmine how much supply required to build/repair a bridge and how much damage they could absorb before being closed to traffic.
So many small bridges or 1 large bridge. It is still an abstract system but it does account for natural barriers. (tunnels would use a like method)

If you check my post above, it follows a similar 'proposal'. However, in almost any road/rail hex you will find places of possible obstruction (bridges, tunnels [which are very difficult to knock out]). I don't feel that this value needs to vary from hex to hex. There may be some major rivers to cross in one hex, while others have only smaller rivers, but I think this individual inclusion of 'each hex being special' may be too much micro-inclusion. Giving every hex an 'equal' transport factor will probably be the best/easiest way in going about this.

A hex may have a 0-100% rating, which 100 is most efficient, 0 is that the road/rail offers nothing to the transfer of supply/troops. Most will start fairly high, and the rating will directly coincide with the abililty to move troops/supply accross. If it is at 80%, then troops move at 80% of their regular road/rail speed, and 80% of the supplies get through.

An argument might be "if a bridge is knocked out, then shouldn't transportation be 0?". Yes, and no. All militaries had sufficient engineering ability to create 'temporary' crossings (pontoon bridges, ferry boats, etc...) which will not be quite as efficient as the bridge, but still allow for supply/troops to move. In rear areas, these emergency crossings can be completed by troops with minimal skill, and assume that 'rail guards', or 'local small garrisons' not modeled in the game are the ones who keep this maintenance up. When a region gets to '0', that means that all modes of transportation (including pontoon bridges, ferry boats) have been destroyed, requiring more then 'local' forces to reconstruct.

[mogami]

Hi, thats what I like about threads where each poster can feed off the prior and enlarge an Idea (it's why I post in the first place)

[Jeremy Pritchard]

Originally posted by Mogami
Hi, thats what I like about threads where each poster can feed off the prior and enlarge an Idea (it's why I post in the first place)

Exactly. I could see the addition of certain 'special' hexes, where a major river is crossed, that the destruction of one bridge will severely hamper supply/troop movement, but I see that to be more the exception then the rule. This might give both the air attacker and AA defender a better idea where to attack/defend, where the 'weak links' of the transportation system are.

To expand on one of my posts above, do you think it is possible to destroy transportation in a hex so that it is down to 0? Should this represent transportation along the special road/rail or all transportation?

[mogami]

Hi I can see rail traffic to zero (but then the rail right-of -way would allow wheeled traffic to pass.) And I agree a blown bridge should only reduce traffic not stop it totally. (there might even be a "ford" or "ferry" hex value)


With items that had no prior system in a game how involved does the programmer need to go before such items are included in a logical and workable manner?