Slitherine

When I first saw this game, I thought that this game could do something I'd been waiting to see in wargaming for quite some time, but never really found in its ability to handle land, sea, and air campaigns simultaneously, and show how one operation impacts the others. Unfortunately, in this game, especially playing through the likes of the Japanese Pacific Campaign, there's this bizarre segregation, where naval and land battles are wholly divorced from one another.

Consider Guadalcanal - once you win a single naval battle, then the naval component of the Guadalcanal Campaign is done forever. In reality, Ironbottom Sound was the Stalingrad of the Pacific Theater. Over the course of a year, the IJN tried again and again to land supplies to their land forces, but increasingly relied upon night-time dashes of their destroyers on "Tokyo Express" runs, or even using special cargo submarines to supply the IJA as they tried to keep hold of Guadalcanal. Rather than a single naval victory deciding the order of the day, it was a long, continuous slog on both sides to try to keep landing their supply ships (or destroyers and submarines) without the enemy being able to prey upon their crucial supplies. It's entirely short-selling the naval component of land warfare on islands to ignore this.

Logistics technically "exists" in this game, but it's practically meaningless in nearly every scenario outside of screwing your paratroopers over. Even battles (aside from the Marines campaign) where you are supposed to be launching an amphibious landing don't let you launch an amphibious landing, they just start you out with landed forces and enough towns under your control that you will never, ever need to worry about supply the whole mission! Why even bother coding rules you didn't want to use?!

Now, there's talk of expanding this game into being a full WW2 experience, but even so, how can you really represent, say, the North Africa campaign without the supply shortages Rommel faced? Most games just represent it as a given that Rommel's supply ships never arrived, but that's not necessary in a game like this if some fairly moderate changes to the rules of logistics are made to turn supply into something less static and more strategic. If supply comes from having to actually get supply ships across the Mediterranean, rather than just assuming any random town in the world has infinite supplies of food, ammo, and gasoline, then the game becomes a much more strategic one, especially if the player has to balance what resources they spend shoring up each front.

In the game Unity of Command, they actually represent supply not through a maximum number of units that a supply source can supply, but as a number of tiles that the supply source can reach. Supply "moves" across the map, and large supply sources are essentially just supply units with a lot more MP than smaller supply sources. (Railroads being special in that they can travel across a continuous line of rail for free if the supply source starts on the railroad. A 5 supply source on a railroad can travel 5 tiles away from any point of that railroad, so long as the railroad remains under that side's control.) Supply cannot travel across enemy-controlled territory, so a huge part of the strategy in the game revolves around cutting off supply by simply punching through enemy lines and sending a mechanized unit around to squat on the enemy railroads until the rest of the enemy army starves. The Soviet side also gets "partisan" special commands that essentially exist as a way to claim a tile of enemy territory as your own territory just to screw with enemy supply lines.

Essentially, rather than having one single "supply" being produced by ships and towns, there would be three components to supply:

Supply Production
Supply Reserve
Logistics Pool

Supply production is basically what we have right now - what a town produces in a turn.

Supply reserve is a stockpile of excess supply. Reserve can be pre-existing, allowing for a scenario where forces have less supply production than they are expected to command, forcing a swift advance to try to claim more towns to boost their supply production before that initial stockpile dwindles.

Using this, areas may have a supply reserve without an actual means of producing supplies. The most obvious would be in supply ships, which would have a limited number of supplies so that they could only provide supplies for a few turns. (Supply ships would be assumed to have some logistics pool of their own.) Towns may produce supplies, but war could consume supplies far faster than a town could produce, especially after the town is reduced by combat. (In fact, non-strategic bomber combat could scare civilians away, reducing production unless towns are taken bloodlessly.)

Supply ships, for example, might have, say, 400 supply, and a logistics pool of 20 or 40 when in a port. This means that after 20 turns, or 10 in a port, they have unloaded all their supplies, and need to return to the edge of the map to restore their supply reserve before they can be useful for anything other than an auxiliary logistics pool.

Logistics pool, meanwhile, is how much supply a single town, ship, or other supply point can give out in a single turn. This is, basically, the number of trucks that can deliver supplies. Even having a ton of supplies in reserve is pointless without the means of distributing the supply to the troops. For every point of supply that a unit needs, at least one point of supply pool needs to be dedicated to them for that turn.

Logistics pool has a range. Basically, supply pool has MP as though they are trucks. If a unit is within one turn's movement from that supply point, they consume only one logistics point per supply point they need. If a unit is two turn's movement from the nearest supply, they consume two logistics per point of supply, and so on. Effectively, it is a route that takes two turns to cover, so to maintain continuous supply, two convoys need to be running continuously, with one going and the other one coming back. This scales up to the limits of how much you can abuse your supply. (So a 3-supply infantry unit that is 3 turns away from supply consumes 9 logistics pool and 3 supply reserve per turn.)

Every town and ship can have a supply production and logistics pool that is a different value. Supply ships, which have an inferred logistics pool attached to them, might be useful even after dumping all their supplies just because they can lend their logistics pool to nearby towns that are stretched thin on supplies.

Visually, this can be represented on the logistics overlay with green/yellow/red color-coding of different areas for how much of a logistics draw it will take to supply each of those units.

In addition, new units could be added in the form of a "logistics corps" unit. Basically just trucks (or horse wagons for mountainous terrain), they would be a non-combat unit that exists to be a mobile supply of logistics pool. A logistics corps unit has its own radius of tiles it can "reach in one turn", and if within the radius of a town's "within one day" for their logistic's pool, creates an area of the map that is also "within one day". To go back to the color-coding idea, if a town has a radius of 4 tiles that are "green" and therefore only cost 1 logistics per supply, and out to 8 tiles is "yellow", or costs 2 logistics per supply, then placing a logistics corps unit on the fourth tile away from the town will create another radius of "green" tiles around that logistics corps unit, as it lends its logistical support to the supply chain. Additional logistics corps units can be chained together however many tiles as necessary to "bridge" an army to the towns that supply them.

Logistics corps units can also add to the logistics pool. If a large army is in an area, to the point that the nearby towns cannot supply them, multiple logistics corps units might need to be pooled in the area to boost the local logistics pool. If both a chain is needed, and logistics pool boosting is needed, players might need to make a chain two or three logistics units "thick".

Logistics corps, however, would also still be units on the board, and therefore, vulnerable to attack from all the usual suspects. Players could then choose to take their recon, fighter, or tactical bombers out against the supply train of enemy logistics corps rather than fight the enemy, directly. In cases where the enemy are too hardened, or air defenses are too tight, this may be a viable way for even weaker recon units to contribute, even if only to force an enemy unit or two to hunt your recon down and tell it to stop bothering them.

On land, this presents obvious strategic concerns, but it would also finally open up a use for naval combat in campaigns. If the local towns are insufficient for one or even both sides to stay supplied, then missions can be based around the idea that players need to constantly re-supply their forces with supply ships or destroyers on the Tokyo Express. Currently, submarines are useless because their historic role as hunters of the enemy merchant-marine are largely not present in a game that has no reason for players to do anything but bundle their navy up into a single powerful ball. Making players have to constantly cycle supply ships in and out to keep their forces supplied means players will need to do what the real militaries actually did - create supply convoys that needed to be protected from enemy attack. Forcing both the player and opponent to split their naval forces means that even a weaker opponent can resort to guerilla tactics against the enemy, sending out submarines to lie in wait along the paths of transports, where their slow speed isn't as much of a liability. If a battle is an 80-turn-long land crawl across an island where both sides need constant supply from sea, then crawling a few submarines around the island to intercept a hopefully poorly-guarded supply convoy makes sense in a way that doesn't in the current game where a couple submarines are just going to just lag behind the rest of the fleet and contribute nothing.

For that matter, even at sea, ships could be changed to having supply reserves such that they do not need constant resupply, but do need occasional resupply. Historically, carriers in particular, were nearly inseparable from their oilers. This, again, could present reasons to split a fleet, to have oilers run back and forth, or make torpedoes have limited supply without transferal of ammunition from a supply ship. In the current game, there's no reason outside of being forced to complete two objectives at the same time to ever split your own fleet, but that's what historically happened all the time, and it results in draining out some of the strategic depth of play to make it all one big "stack mash".

Creating missions where players need to at least maintain a stalemate in the naval battle surrounding the land to actually advance further in land battles creates the sort of multi-faceted battlefront that adds the sort of strategic depth this game could sorely stand to deepen. As it stands, the campaigns are mostly just exercises in keeping your core units intact while driving forwards against units that are increasingly less capable of withstanding you if you do well enough to maintain a solid core.

It seems to me You just looking for a completely different game than the Order of Battle.

kondi754 wrote:It seems to me You just looking for a completely different game than the Order of Battle.

Indeed some of those statements put me in the mind of DC: Barbarossa. Or Grigsby.

- BNC

Seems like an over complication to a game that was meant to be an intermediate level game,Try decisive campaigns or indeed a Gary Grigsby game if you require that level of detail..Keeping it simple works well

It is up to the scenario designer where to put supply locations and how much supply is generated. This can also be handled using triggers/events.
Villages/towns/cities does not have any built-in supply.

My little pet wish is to lower supply flowing through difficult terrain like jungle & mountains. This would make ownership of roads more important and make it easier to cut enemy supply.
And I would like to see recon planes behave like other air units and maybe force naval vessels to draw supply from a port.
Other than this supply works fairly well in the game.

This really IS simple stuff. Under most circumstances, it should require little more than moving a few logistics corps units around. The problem is there's a whole mechanic in the game that exists for literally no purpose but to REMOVE tactics from the game, as all supply does is make flanking tactics more than one or two tiles into enemy territory suicidal. (As well as necessitating new rules for paratroopers because they're basically suicide squads.)

This is a relatively simple change that would add vastly more depth to the game, and without it, this game really is just Advance Wars.

Erik wrote:It is up to the scenario designer where to put supply locations and how much supply is generated. This can also be handled using triggers/events.
Villages/towns/cities does not have any built-in supply.

My little pet wish is to lower supply flowing through difficult terrain like jungle & mountains. This would make ownership of roads more important and make it easier to cut enemy supply.
And I would like to see recon planes behave like other air units and maybe force naval vessels to draw supply from a port.
Other than this supply works fairly well in the game.

It's precisely this need to actually have to run through mountains to actually cut off supply (a whole army can be fed by trucks across a narrow band going straight over Mt. Everest) that annoys me the most. Cutting off enemy supply is nearly impossible, which in turn just helps ensure what a total joke things like Forced Labor are.

But even if there were lower supply generated by towns, that wouldn't create the scenario that I want, which is a scenario where the Guadalcanal Campaign is actually determined by how many supply convoys reach the troops (where the Japanese historically gave up when it became infeasible to continue sustaining the losses they were taking landing their supplies) rather than any decisive engagement on the ground, or the situation where the North Africa campaign hinges upon Axis supply transports keeping the Afrika Korps supplied.

I just don't see any way you can say you're making a game about World War 2 where supply convoys don't matter. There is an entire real, meaningful dimension of warfare this game just ignores, and being told that if I want it, this isn't the game for me... well, then maybe it isn't, but I don't think you guys are doing the developers any favors saying this game is to bare-bones basic to handle the simplest things.

There are dedicated supply ships and most regular naval vessels provide supply when they are next to the coast. So simulating Guadalcanal is quite possible in my opinion. The stock scenario is limited to the action around Henderson field.
Take a look at my 1v1 Watchtower custom scenario which covers the whole campaign including the naval battles.
You can find it here if you're interested:

[http://www.slitherine.com/forum/viewtop ... =64991/url]

by WraithMagus » 29 Sep 2016 16:23
I just don't see any way you can say you're making a game about World War 2 where supply convoys don't matter. There is an entire real, meaningful dimension of warfare this game just ignores, and being told that if I want it, this isn't the game for me... well, then maybe it isn't, but I don't think you guys are doing the developers any favors saying this game is to bare-bones basic to handle the simplest things.

I love this game, I sat on it for hours, and for me it's great and I don't want such changes that you suggest.
Besides, maybe this game is simple but not easy. (Of course I try to play at the highest possible level of difficulty for me)
Strength lies in simplicity.

In my opinion there are a few things to improve, but certainly not the things you write about.
I don't mind if developers will approve your proposals and will create a completely new game, which will be called differently and in which you can play.

I think you will really love the upcoming Unity of Command II (and so will I).

kondi754 wrote:

by WraithMagus » 29 Sep 2016 16:23
I just don't see any way you can say you're making a game about World War 2 where supply convoys don't matter. There is an entire real, meaningful dimension of warfare this game just ignores, and being told that if I want it, this isn't the game for me... well, then maybe it isn't, but I don't think you guys are doing the developers any favors saying this game is to bare-bones basic to handle the simplest things.

I love this game, I sat on it for hours, and for me it's great and I don't want such changes that you suggest.
Besides, maybe this game is simple but not easy. (Of course I try to play at the highest possible level of difficulty for me)
Strength lies in simplicity.

In my opinion there are a few things to improve, but certainly not the things you write about.
I don't mind if developers will approve your proposals and will create a completely new game, which will be called differently and in which you can play.

I agree with you Pal!!!

Erik wrote:There are dedicated supply ships and most regular naval vessels provide supply when they are next to the coast. So simulating Guadalcanal is quite possible in my opinion. The stock scenario is limited to the action around Henderson field.
Take a look at my 1v1 Watchtower custom scenario which covers the whole campaign including the naval battles.
You can find it here if you're interested:

[http://www.slitherine.com/forum/viewtop ... =64991/url]

No, there is nothing like what I am talking about in the game, because supply ships have infinite supply, and can sit firmly ensconced in friendly territory surrounded by their whole navy that moves as a single unit. There is never a reason for supply ships to make multiple trips, because the game just doesn't simulate that. Submarines are, therefore, essentially useless because commerce raiding is likewise not a part of this game.

It's hypothetically possible to kludge into the game with tons of secondary objectives for making supply ships reach designated areas, then return off-map for bonuses, but that is a very complicated and manually-intensive kludge to program, and should be something far more universal in this game.

For that matter, the only reason to take towns at all in most land battles is often because you need to do so for objectives or resource bounties. Otherwise, you might as well bypass towns entirely, since the supply any town you didn't already start with gives has no impact upon the outcome of a battle.

Supply (and for that matter, submarines) are wastes of code, because the game is built in such a way that any attempt to cut off enemy units from supply will invariably be more time-consuming and costly as the enemy counter-attacks than simply directly charging at them. In fact, thanks to the AI being overzealous in their attempts to meaninglessly cut off your supply, there are many people on the Steam forums saying the best strategy is to let your units get cut off from supply, because getting cut off is meaningless, and it lures enemies out of their entrenched hidey-holes. It's a mechanic that only is relevant when exploiting it to break game AI. This is an abject design failure.

All of this just makes me think most of you just aren't understanding the system I'm talking about, since you're treating it like it's somehow complicated when it's honestly dead simple, and should have been part of the game from the start. Here, I'll draw a picture to help those who have trouble visualizing:


(Please ignore some of the errors, the bottom-right hexes were under a menu, and I didn't spend too long thinking about MP costs. I basically just wanted to draw this as rapidly as possible.)

Towns have supply production just the same as before, but also a logistics pool value. If the supply production and logistics pool values are the same for a resource point like that town, then everything works the same as already exists within the game so long as you stay in those "green areas". The "yellow areas", which includes that northernmost infantry, however, would consume twice as much logistics pool, because they are far enough away that they stretch the supply lines. (We'll ignore that they are "cut off" for now.) What areas are "green", and what are "yellow" depend upon terrain; Difficult terrain slows supply lines, and roads speed them. The cargo truck there is a fill-in for a Logistics Corps unit, and extends the "green" area. The Southeastern infantry is still in the "green logistics area" because the logistics corps can keep their local area supplied.

To again presume that town has, say, 15 supply and 15 logistics, this means that the two Eastern infantry cost their standard 3 supply and 3 logistics, while the Northern infantry costs 3 supply and 6 logistics per turn. Logistics pools might be greater or smaller based upon arbitrary scenario design, but basically, you have a bottleneck in one or both of supply or logistics, and if logistics is your bottleneck, then units being spread out into the "yellow" or "red" (or an even broader spectrum of) logistics zones means a unit starts costing twice, triple, or more of what they normally cost to supply.

Again, the game would play basically the same, except that supply lines would actually be "part of the topography" of the battle map, and require some actual thought be put into them. Essentially, if you stretch your supply lines enough, you can stretch them to a breaking point. This is hardly rocket science.

I understand that this scheme is for me. Are you sure that I didn't understand before?
As I wrote earlier, I think it is pointless - I grant you that at the beginning of scenario maybe it makes sense, but the more you play the more you occupy towns and villages and the whole "logistics map" give you nothing because all the units are in "supply and logistics zone" or "supply ships zone".
Or maybe you want to play with different categories of cities - some cities have "supply points" and "logistics points", others have only "logistics points" or "supply points"?
On the other hand, if the logistics and supply "zones" are too small then you will use a lot of logistics corps and the game will become incomprehensible. There will be chaos on the map.
In my country there is a saying: Better idea is the enemy of the good idea
At the end I write you something - I don't think in any game of WW II supply convoys have to be. There are plenty of great games have nothing on logistics (i.e. Panzer Corps, Battle Academy).
I really understand that you defend your idea and would advise you to create your own game.

One of the big challenges with systems such as the one suggested is making it easy for the player to see what the current state of play is, and why.

Supply has such as big impact that it has to be immediately obvious, at a glance, not only what your current supply situation is, but also what it would be if you made a particular move. Supply systems that are affected by terrain were discussed internally when the game was being developed, but making these systems intuitive and manageable is a big challenge (one which probably can't be solved without compromising the playability of the game to a certain extent).

We talked (internally) about supply zones that grew to fill territory slowly, so that units could 'race ahead of supply', and so that cutting off an area of supply would take time to reconnect. This supply would 'grow' more slowly across harsh terrain types (so it would be possible to supply a huge area over a small mountain pass or through thick jungle, but only if the mountain pass had been in your possession for a number of turns).

Supply ships do not provide infinite supply, they generate 20 supply if I remember correctly.
The supply generated diminishes as the supply ship loses strength points. Attacking supply ships is one of the few useful roles for subs.

Also, attacking land supply centers with strategic bombers will lower supply from that hex.

Hitting the space bar will display the supply generated from all map locations and supply (and other)ships.
I would like to add some functionality to the spacebar, shadow the hexes where there is no (or low) supply. This could be useful if the supply rules were enhanced, ie no tracking of supply through jungle, mountain, swamp, rivers, destroyed bridges etc.
I think this would make it easy for the player to check the supply conditions on the map.

Having supply weaken as a function of distance and terrain isn't a terrible idea IMO

Myrddraal wrote:One of the big challenges with systems such as the one suggested is making it easy for the player to see what the current state of play is, and why.

Supply has such as big impact that it has to be immediately obvious, at a glance, not only what your current supply situation is, but also what it would be if you made a particular move. Supply systems that are affected by terrain were discussed internally when the game was being developed, but making these systems intuitive and manageable is a big challenge (one which probably can't be solved without compromising the playability of the game to a certain extent).

We talked (internally) about supply zones that grew to fill territory slowly, so that units could 'race ahead of supply', and so that cutting off an area of supply would take time to reconnect. This supply would 'grow' more slowly across harsh terrain types (so it would be possible to supply a huge area over a small mountain pass or through thick jungle, but only if the mountain pass had been in your possession for a number of turns).

It's for that reason I tried to talk about it in GUI terms of green, yellow, and red zones. Having zones of double or triple costs that are color-coded make things fairly immediately obvious. Having zones that can be extended through pushing a special logistics-extending unit to the edge of the current green zone should also be fairly simple to learn. For showing the player the effects of a move, then when logistics units are selected, you could probably set up a transparent "ghost" of what the supply in the area will look like when moving to a given hex.

Having development of supply lines can work, but I think it would make more sense to the player to have destructible improvements like bridges that need to be repaired to represent supply roadblocks. If things are out of a player's control, they lose their strategic value. If a player has the ability to send their engineers or logistics corps to repair one bridge in a turn, and have to choose which one to repair, it is a choice, but if it just means you need to wait a couple turns for the supply to passively build itself, it isn't necessarily anything but a speed limit, and may reinforce the "full frontal assault" problem we already have since it may make attempts at high-mobility flanking attacks even less possible than they already are.

The idea of having a small supply of logistics corps units is that it's a discrete number of units on the board that are moved as per normal rules that can represent where the concentration of logistics on the battlefield are. To go back to Unity of Command for a moment, one of their special abilities is the ability to add to the supply range of a supply point every turn, but where you had to choose which supply point to upgrade. Since each supply point was functionally the range from that point where you could stage operations, this was basically the choice of which front you wanted to push along. Using logistics corps to stretch supply lines and engineers (as well as logistics corps?) to have to repair/build logistics-related improvements like clear-cutting paths through jungle, ad hoc ports, or deploying bridges should have the net effect of providing an abstracted and simplified way of representing how each side is concentrating their logistical resources.

The one thing I would want that I admit would be rather complex is adding in different overlapping ranges of supply/logitsics from different supply points in the same area. Currently, supply magically teleports to any unit in a contiguous zone, even if a whole mountain range separates the unit from supply, which means only total supply within a whole contiguous controlled land zone matters. Placing a maximum range on supply points would require showing when one town is cut off from meaningfully adding supply. Unity of Command handles this by simply making supply a number that goes down per MP cost of each tile, with only the highest number being relevant. While it means a loss in fidelity, it would probably be best to simply represent supply and logistics as continuous so long as "green supply" can be maintained, although some extra rules could still be added to prevent an unstoppable accumulation of supply from building up. To borrow from the concept of building up your logistics infrastructure, above, you might create a situation where supply and logistics pools are only shared if a "supply line" is actually built. This would necessitate a minor new interface, but would basically allow you to add the supply and logistics of a distant supply point (I.E. town) to a supply point closer to the action at a cost of reducing the logistics pool of that supply point. That way, you might have a string of towns where each successive town back is contributing less logistics, but they are still contributing supply to the town or logistics corps on the front. (This could be represented by simply drawing arrows to show where each supply point feeds to another, and along what route, which may be vulnerable to commandos.) This would also still give the player the ability to un-designate a supply line and reclaim that logistics for the town itself if the location of the front lines shift. Adding in a one or two turn delay would keep players cautious about reflexively pushing all supplies to one front.

For that matter, currently, either all units in a contiguous area are supplied, partly supplied, or unsupplied. In the case of partial supply, I'd like to see some sort of ability to mark some units for supply priority, such that you could say a tank is a priority, and the infantry near it are, by implication, not. If there is a supply shock, the tank would always be supplied first, and the infantry would get whatever is left over. In extreme cases, even outright "deactivating" a unit (cutting off all but minimal supply even when available) to skimp upon supply might be desirable if and when we have rules of a supply stockpile where consumption outstrips production.

I also do want to go back and re-emphasize that there are battles that simply cannot play out realistically without having some method of representing naval supply lines that require more than a single trip. North Africa and Guadalcanal are probably the most important, but there is no reason to limit oneself to those, especially when the Marines campaign is honestly the best campaign in the game so far specifically because it actually offers real, meaningful choices in terms of where to land your troops, rather than just being handed a front and being forced to move forward along the only path(s) that allows you to achieve your objectives within the timeframe of the mission. Making supply ships run out of supply after a few turns to unload means defending a corridor for your supply ships to pass through, rather than simply balling up in a single task force that can take on all comers (so long as they come a couple ships at a time like the current AI inexplicably does).

We'd need actual night battle rules to complete the picture, especially for the Pacific Theater, since a large portion of what made the Pacific Theater was the inconclusiveness of surface battles due to the change in what areas of sea were safe based upon the day/night cycle, (the IJN retreating from crippled ships out of fear that dawn would bring airpower if they stayed to finish the USN ships off.) To have mechanics that actually demand you stretch your forces out along an area of sea to protect supply ships would at least begin to break up these naval "fortress" situations, and provide the space to have meaningful land and naval combat in the same map.

Erik wrote:Supply ships do not provide infinite supply, they generate 20 supply if I remember correctly.
The supply generated diminishes as the supply ship loses strength points. Attacking supply ships is one of the few useful roles for subs.

Also, attacking land supply centers with strategic bombers will lower supply from that hex.

Hitting the space bar will display the supply generated from all map locations and supply (and other)ships.
I would like to add some functionality to the spacebar, shadow the hexes where there is no (or low) supply. This could be useful if the supply rules were enhanced, ie no tracking of supply through jungle, mountain, swamp, rivers, destroyed bridges etc.
I think this would make it easy for the player to check the supply conditions on the map.

Supply ships provide 20/40 supply for an infinite period of time. That is, once they are on a port, there is essentially no reason to ever move them again.

Attacking supply ships might be a useful role for subs... if there were ever scenarios with enemy supply ships... AND it weren't going to be easier to just use surface ships or aircraft. (In fact, I'd also suggest submarines have special pre-deployment areas that are generally much larger, although that's more for another thread. Victory at Sea, for example, lets you deploy submarines basically anywhere in the water to reflect sailing secretly in front of the fleet, and also to compensate for their low speed.)

Strategic bombing in the current game is also functionally useless in essentially all current in-game scenarios. Strategic bombing would only be useful in a situation where enemy supply consumption is only barely met, but in basically any scenario in the current game, supply consumption is MASSIVELY outstripped by production. Cities are nearly always on the only roads through jungles or around mountains, making cutting them off from outside supply far more costly than simply ramming through the front door. Even without that, any city with serious defense usually has 10 or 20 more supply production than consumption, and the really large cities tend to have multiple supply points with 50 or more excess supply AND AA defenses.

Strategic bombing is also an all-or-nothing prospect. Either I do enough damage to knock out supply, or I'm wasting my time. Hence, I need to basically make a decision between having lots of tactical bombers that are generally useful, or strategic bombers that are less useful in combat, and only good for this one strategy which is generally impossible thanks to scenario design. Oh, and if you're playing Rising Sun, guess what, only carrier planes can even be deployed on several missions! Since a major part of the game is developing a powerful core force, putting the fairly major resources it would take to pursue such a strategy that only would even be feasible in one or two maps is an inherently losing strategy.

kondi754 wrote:I understand that this scheme is for me. Are you sure that I didn't understand before?
As I wrote earlier, I think it is pointless - I grant you that at the beginning of scenario maybe it makes sense, but the more you play the more you occupy towns and villages and the whole "logistics map" give you nothing because all the units are in "supply and logistics zone" or "supply ships zone".
Or maybe you want to play with different categories of cities - some cities have "supply points" and "logistics points", others have only "logistics points" or "supply points"?
On the other hand, if the logistics and supply "zones" are too small then you will use a lot of logistics corps and the game will become incomprehensible. There will be chaos on the map.
In my country there is a saying: Better idea is the enemy of the good idea
At the end I write you something - I don't think in any game of WW II supply convoys have to be. There are plenty of great games have nothing on logistics (i.e. Panzer Corps, Battle Academy).
I really understand that you defend your idea and would advise you to create your own game.

First, "create your own game" is a terrible argument trotted out to deflect literally any criticism no matter how valid. If it's so easy to make a game, why are you playing someone else's game to start with?

Anyway, it shouldn't be something that only matters at the beginning of a scenario if the scenario is built to actually do something with these rules. Again, in a scenario like Guadalcanal or North Africa, the supply generated in the towns occupied, especially by Axis forces, should not nearly cover their full needs, forcing reliance upon supply ships coming in convoys across the Med. The point of these rules being that a single supply convoy getting through providing sufficient supply only for a few turns, and requires each convoy survive the trip to maintain supply. This sort of scenario is basically impossible outside of extreme kludging with scenario scripts at the moment.

Beyond that, the rest of what you say seems to indicate you really don't understand what I'm saying... And if I liked Panzer Corps or Battle Academy that much, why would I bother playing this game if it won't even try to offer more?

WraithMagus wrote:
I just don't see any way you can say you're making a game about World War 2 where supply convoys don't matter.

Earlier, you wrote that each game from the period of World War II, should assume the impact of supply and logistics. I wrote you there are great games (BA, PzC) that do not fall into the area of supply and logistics.
I don't analyze your feelings, refer only what you write
Sorry, maybe my English is not perfect but it seems to me that I understood what you wrote and drew.
I don't agree to the changes proposed by you, since it most likely will reduce playability. OOB is a great game at the tactical level, and you will by all means want to move it to the strategic level (operating).
Give examples of Guadalcanal and North Africa, but your changes would only make sense at dramatically increasing the map where action could be taken by sea-air forces against enemy convoys. OOB in my opinion there is no such ambitions, and the people who play it want to play the scenario within a few hours rather than several days.
When I wrote you to create your own game I meant you convince developers your idea to create a new game based on OOB. Just enough!

Some of your comments on supply/subs/strategic bombers are complaints about scenario design, not the game system as such.
Many valid comments, but ie deploying subs and setting suitable supply levels (land locations or supply ships) are up to the scenario designer.

I would encourage you to open the editor, load a scenario that you are not happy about supply-wise, edit and test it. Most of the stuff in the editor is easy to grasp and changing supply locations/levels will only take you a few minutes.
Personally I have as much fun creating scenarios as playing them

Unread postby Erik » 12 Oct 2016 07:21
Some of your comments on supply/subs/strategic bombers are complaints about scenario design, not the game system as such.
Many valid comments, but ie deploying subs and setting suitable supply levels (land locations or supply ships) are up to the scenario designer.

I would encourage you to open the editor, load a scenario that you are not happy about supply-wise, edit and test it. Most of the stuff in the editor is easy to grasp and changing supply locations/levels will only take you a few minutes.
Personally I have as much fun creating scenarios as playing them

+1
I totally agree .
You can also "create" your own game in this way.

Also, the game system punish you quite hard when your units get low on supply. When they are totally cut off, the units are almost useless with only 1 movement hex pr turn and basically no attack capability. I think infantry are too severely hit, they would still forage the land and march on with some restricted mobility. Motorized units are fair game,

Lastly, playing a scenario with units on low/no supply is simply not much fun. Can be very frustrating (been there, done that).