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21oliver

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Jun 8, 2010
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Ok im going to bite the bullet. Someone mind explaining the how to's for manually setting up convoys and air transports? All tips and hints are apreciated.

:blink:
 
Convoys:
Turn off auto-creation of supply convoys. Then go to create supply convoy. Pick a source port. Pick a destination port. Scroll down to newly created convoy and add in necessary number of ships for 100% operation.
Air transport supplies:
Have a air wing with air transport in supply. Give it a mission "air supply".
 
Go to your create convoys button and click it.
Turn off auto supply and/or auto resource convoy creation.
You probably want to leave auto maintain on, just watch to make sure the bug in this routine doesn't start making redundant convoys when you are raided by the enemy. A sure sign of this is if you are being raided and your available convoys count plummets. Check your convoys for duplicates and kill the ones carrying nothing.

One option you may want to consider is going into your common/defines.lua file and change the value for SUPPLY_SAME_AREA_DIST_CUTOFF from 10 to a smaller number. This function determines the minimum distance from the main supplier province a convoy can be set up, and changing the value to say 3 makes it very easy to create convoys from one home province to another.

For pre-war supply convoys it is easy. Cancel all existing supply convoys you don't like and choose either your capital if it is a port, or a port in a province adjacent to your capital as your outbound port to take advantage of all capital adjacent provinces having max throughput. This eliminates throughput issues and unneeded supply transfer cost. If those option are not available, choose a port closest to your capital. For the majors, this would mean USA Washington DC, Japan Tokyo, Italy Citavecchia, London Dover, Germany, France and Russia would depend on where the convoy was going to. Note that this may use more convoys than the shortest distance between some outbound ports and the receiving port, but the savings in daily transfer cost more than makes up for using a few extra convoys. There is no limit to the amount of supplies leaving an outbound port, only a limit to how much a port can receive.

I usually kill one and remake it immediately so that I don't leave something out of supply by mistake, but if you do you will soon see the low supply icon pop up and you can correct the error. There is one thing to remember, if a port is receiving supply it can not send out supply. A good example being the US west coast. San Diego is a great place to receive supply as a level 10 port rather than sending supply across country and paying all of those transfer costs, with Los Angeles being a great outbound port for Pacific destinations right nearby. Or you could just build a level one port in Oceanside and use it as your outbound port to eliminate one province of transfer cost.

Resource convoys are even easier, there is no limit to the amount of mineral resources that can enter or leave a port. I usually set them up at start for the safest wartime route and forget about them until war breaks out. Example, for the UK, I just set up every resource convoy running into Liverpool.

Once war breaks out it gets trickier, as you have to factor in convoy exposure. You want to try and set up your convoys to both minimize the risk of air attack and to bunch them together as much as possible to reduce the sea provinces you have to patrol. As an example, the Brits want as much as possible flowing into and from Liverpool to avoid the Channel and Western Approaches, both of which can be easily bombed. Unfortunately it is very difficult to tell the AI NOT to run convoys thru the Med, as the AI will always take the shortest distance between outbound port and destination. And you have absolutely no control over which outbound and destination ports the AI chooses for trade or lend lease convoys.

A quick note about lend lease convoys - there is a bug here. If the destination port of a lend lease convoy is captured or a province controlling a strait is captured that blocks an existing lend lease route, the convoy is not re-routed. It will just sit transferring no IC. You have to manually cancel lend lease and then go back and request it again to set up a new route that works. This usually an issue when Leningrad, Copenhagen, Gibraltar, or Suez falls.

One advantage of manual resource convoys is that you can choose not to run a convoy from a colony or island. A perfect example of this is the island of Nauru. The AI will insist on using 33 convoys to run 1 rare a day from Nauru back to England, running this convoys thru very dangerous areas the UK can't cover. As a player, just say no. You do not lose the mineral production, it will pile up until such time as you create a resource convoy.

One time runs - on that note, you as a player can just let mineral resources pile up overseas, then once a month or so run a convoy home to deliver the goods to your stockpile, then kill the convoy till next month. This will greatly reduce your exposure.

Supply manipulation - now we come to the nitty gritty, dealing with overseas supplies. Every non-contiguous to your capital area is consider "overseas" and will have it's own depot. This can be as small as a single hex island or as large an area as several land connected continents. The larger the area overseas, the more difficult it is to supply. An overseas supply depot is treated by the AI just like your capital meaning that all supply to the overseas area will try to flow from the depot to where it is needed.

The first trick is to keep conquered overseas areas separated. If there are no enemy units and it is not a home or core province the enemy can not place new units there. So don't connect conquered territory just to make the map look pretty. North Africa is a perfect example. If you can avoid connecting the ports, you can have your depots at Tunis, Casablanca, and Alexandria. Connect all of that together and everything is likely to be supplied from Alexandria, which really sucks if you are fighting in Casablanca. India is another good example, in that the UK can't place new units there except via transport so if you are the Axis DON'T connect everything if you don't have to or supply for everyone might have to come from Rangoon. And NEVER connect Indochina to China or China to India by upgrading the infrastructure. You don't want to have to supply ops in India from Shanghai.

Another way to manipulate supply is to run supply into every overseas port you can. While supply will be drawn from you depot, if the needs are greater than the depot can provide the AI will send supply into other ports to head towards the depot. Once supply lands, then daily demand may draw it instead towards the front where it is needed if the supply is closer than supply sitting at the depot. The AI will try to meet the supply needs from the hex it is required at for every hex, then begin trying to pull supply from adjacent hexes all the way out to a depot/capital. By using this trick you are trying to place supply at a closer range than supply located at the depot.

And another way along this same concept is to delete your supply convoy heading into your overseas depot, and only run convoys into ports close to the front. This will eventually force supply into these ports to meet depot requirements. Once landed, unit demands should reroute the supply towards the front.

Capturing enemy overseas capitals. When you capture an enemy capital (or even an enemy province loaded with supplies and fuel), you get their supplies, fuel, and mineral stockpiles. The minerals should appear at your capital, but the supplies and fuel must crawl one province per day towards a port with a resource convoy heading back to the homeland to eventually reach your capital stockpile. You can however keep these captured goodies in the overseas area by NOT running a resource convoy back home. While you won't get any resources from the overseas area, you will keep all of those supplies/fuel there instead of back at your capital where they would then have to make the long trip back to the overseas area according to the wishes of the AI. In this case, the captured supplies and fuel will head to your depot to await transport.
 
Allow a lot of time for the sea convoys to start sending anything, though even then, they still might be useless. You can't send sea convoys from one part of an occupied island (e.g. Britain) to another. If there are enemy submarines around, you may have to attach escorts to your convoy as well as transport. When selecting ports, check their supply capacities, some have a very low figure and it probably helps to have similar capacities in sending and receiving ports.

Edit: just read the previous supply help thread, read that, it's very useful!!
"the size of the port of origin does not matter - it can serve as many ports as you wish. A level one port can ship-out unlimited supplies (hell, even a damaged port will suffer no ill effects). The choke point is always on the receiving end."

http://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/showthread.php?696917-Need-Help-with-Supply
 
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One little thing to add to Meglok's very comprehensive guide. (Thanks, I'm saving & printing that one)

If you stuff-up North Africa & connect everything, all is not lost. Set supply convoys for the ports nearest your front, Tunis, Tripoli, wherever, working back towards Alexandria but you may not need a convoy actually going in to Alexandria itself. It depends on how big your army is.

I mentioned previously about transport aircraft not needing to drop supplies on your troops, just close to them on the supply route.

Watch the size of the stockpile. And this is true for ANY overseas area of operations. If it gets too big, the AI will shut down your convoys. The worst part of this is that it doesn't actually shut them down. It simply stops loading them with supplies so, they are out there as targets but not actually carrying anything.


And one little gem that I don't think enough people know about. (It took me three years to find this out) When adding or removing transports to convoy routes, using right-click will add/remove ten at a time.

Saves the RSI to the old nose-picker.
 
One option you may want to consider is going into your common/defines.lua file and change the value for SUPPLY_SAME_AREA_DIST_CUTOFF from 10 to a smaller number. This function determines the minimum distance from the main supplier province a convoy can be set up,

Is this check done with sea zones or land provinces?
 
I like to run the supply system on auto until I have a problem then start micro managing it till the crisis is over. The advantage of micromanaging convoys is that you can send the suppies to and from more appropriate ports and you can put a huge number of escorts in any convoys that are getting hit regularly. On auto most the escorts sit idle while your convoys sink.
 
When the stockpile on the landmass goes too high and the supply throttles off on the convoys, switch the resource convoy for the landmass to the stockpile port and switch the transfer from resources to supply/fuel and set it to go to a port in your homeland that has a significant demand in it and supply will ship out to the port every so often and the more demand there is in the port the more will ship and longer it will ship for. Air supplying Forward in the supply line also helps empty the bloated stockpile. Sadly you can't logistically bomb your own stockpile.
 
For my money, the escorts don't do squat.

If you want to protect your convoys from sub's, put real surface ships in the sea zones. CL+2DD or CVE+2DD usually does the trick.
 
For my money, the escorts don't do squat.

If you want to protect your convoys from sub's, put real surface ships in the sea zones. CL+2DD or CVE+2DD usually does the trick.

And the biggest secret of all is to never use "escort convoy" missions. Convoy raiding areas are directly the same as patrol. This means that you can patrol the same area the raiders are in and have more time and chances to spot them rather than the few times the 1 convoy you are escorting passes through the guantlet.
 
Yeah, even putting 3 fleets of CVE+3DDs on escort of ONE convoy ship will not prevent it from getting sunk.

That mission does NOT do what is says on the tin. All your ships do is patrol along the convoy rout while your transport ships do their own thing. At a different speed, in a different location and frequently in opposite directions. (Yeah, I know merchants are abstracted but that's the effect)

It's far better to park a bunch baby CTFs [CVE+2/3DD] in the region(s) being attacked. I don't even set them to patrol these regions most of the time as it's so frustrating to watch them following enemy contacts around without actually making contact.

I build a lot of CVEs by the way. Far more than CVs.
 
I personally don't even care about defense most of the time, I just build a few more convoys than usual if I'm fighting in an area where a strong enemy navy is. If you keep them busy enough they won't have fleets to raid with.
 
For my money, the escorts don't do squat.

If you want to protect your convoys from sub's, put real surface ships in the sea zones. CL+2DD or CVE+2DD usually does the trick.

Having escorts in your convoys reduces the org of their subs and forces then to return to port where you can blow them apart with port strikes. This is a very effective way of dealing with subs. Escorts alone aren't worth much. But there's no more effective way of killing subs than ports strikes, and no better way of getting subs to return to port than escorts.
 
I never build escorts i always build tons of convoys, to cover the situation. ty guys-

Escorts are the worst waste of IC in the game, for both players and AI nations. I have modded the scripts for all majors to reduce the building ratio of convoys to escorts down to 20:1 so that AI nations don't waste IC. It is a lot cheaper to just build more convoys and the US, UK, Italy, and Japan will now send out naval forces to hunt down subs raiding convoys if they have any forces left.
 
Questions along these lines... pardon the pun.

As the US, I've built gobs of transport wings to deal with supply. I'll often assign them a few provs to drop in. Like 3 to supply divs in. I've always wondered if giving them multiple provs reduced their effectiveness. But... what it sounds like on this thread is... if I assign it one provs past the main depot, supplies should hit the 3 provs first on there way back to the depot, is that a fair assumption?

Now, in an area like north Germany where I control severel provs but, the russians control Germany to the east, the UK contols the Netherlands and Belgium in free.... and Luxembourg puppeted by the UK... supplies shouldn't flow to my puppet paris. So, with my convoy port in whilhelmshaven.... whatever... will supplies dropped south of there flow back north to the port.

Lastly, I occupy Hungary and Romania. Romania is ok because I have a port but Hungary is land locked. So... I've set 3 transport wings to shuttle supplies to Budapest from a huge stockpile in Venice and one to drop in the northern provs where I have troops defending. So... will supplies in Romania eventually trickle up to Hungary? Also, I control the UK contols split with a large stockpile. I've sicked them on Bulgaria. I've based some air transports there to snag supplies for Romania. Are they actually getting supplies from there or are my wings flying empty. I also wanna have a sit down with Winston (via the console) and change control of the provs from the provs next to and north of split up to Hungary to US control. Would supplies move along those provs to Hungary?

I'm eventually going to face nearly a million Russians north of Hungary and east of Romania. As any good command would sweat....I'm sweating supplies! Armies run on supplies. I know Russia is going to have major supply issues but... I want enough to try and move north to cut off there west German forces. They have mostly inf and I have a lot of mec. Mec and armored are gonna guzzle petrol.
 
But... what it sounds like on this thread is... if I assign it one provs past the main depot, supplies should hit the 3 provs first on there way back to the depot, is that a fair assumption?

Yes, but you should assign the air supply mission according to a region. Air supply doesn't seem to work on a single province target. All supply will then migrate back to the depot.

So, with my convoy port in whilhelmshaven.... whatever... will supplies dropped south of there flow back north to the port.

Yes.

Romania is ok because I have a port but Hungary is land locked. So... I've set 3 transport wings to shuttle supplies to Budapest from a huge stockpile in Venice and one to drop in the northern provs where I have troops defending

How is Hungary landlocked? It has a common border with Romania, and via that border it will receive supply. It's very possible Budapest could be the depot. No matter, a supply draw will be established for those units in Hungary, and these supplies will migrate one province/day to feed your units. Air supply is just extra - and probably not a bad idea.

I've based some air transports there to snag supplies for Romania. Are they actually getting supplies from there or are my wings flying empty.

Wings do not fly empty, so if you see them flying they are providing supply.

I also wanna have a sit down with Winston (via the console) and change control of the provs from the provs next to and north of split up to Hungary to US control. Would supplies move along those provs to Hungary?

As long as they have a draw, sure. The supply system doesn't know you stole those provinces.

Mec and armored are gonna guzzle petrol

Yes, especially if they are five-brigade divisions. Logistics wizards are mandatory in those divisions. A skill-level six or seven leader at Army Group is a must. One good thing: provinces can move equal amounts of supply and fuel simultaneously.

BTW: Patton would frown on your intended attack plans. To paraphrase, he would advise you "...hold him by the teeth and kick him in the ass." You're trying to shove a fist down your enemy's throat while giving him the chance to dodge. I doubt you have the manpower to pull this off, but good luck. It will be interesting to see what happens.