Concern about produciton lines and loss of factories

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Dalwin

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Aug 11, 2003
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It was stated in the production line DD that things like strategic bombing or resource shortfalls would impact the production lines with the lowest priority. The upside to this is we avoid the micromanagement of having to specify which factories are in which cities for each production line. The most obvious downside is that the defender rather than the attacker gets to determine what is lost. This latter item, however, is extremely similar to what happens in the old production queue system.

Let's now look at a different cause for factories being taken out of production. I am referring to loss of territory. For sake of example, let's say I am playng Russia and Germany has overrun the western part of my country. I now have several factories fewer than I once had. If these losses go to the lowest priority lines, I will have a number of production lines that cease to exist entirely. This is much worse for the defender than the old system.

With the queue, even though lower priority items would drop to 0% progress for a while, you could either repriortize them or wait for other items to complete and production would be resumed without further penalty.

If entire production lines cease to exist, the only way to resume that production will be to create new lines which start at 10% efficiency.

To avoid this, I strongly suggest that factory losses due to loss of territory be spread out across all the production lines and not taken from the lowest first. This is not only more realistic, but will avoid some obvious playability problems.
 
Not trying to cause trouble, but I'm not sure that the production lines being wiped out and needing to be restarted isn't the 'most realistic'/best option. Say we did have geo-located factories, rather than a pool, so say the UK are building all their Spitfires in Kent, and the Germans invaded Kent and took it, then the UK would need to re-start their Spitfire factory from scratch somewhere else. What we get without the geo-location is the ability to choose what was produced in Kent at the point of the factory being captured, and shut it down then.

Spreading the loss out over all the production lines assumes that in each area with a factory, production is proportionally the same on each item.

I'd be comfortable with both approaches mind. Personally I'd be keenest on geo-located factories, as this adds a new level of strategic thinking to the production and strategic bombing (and even the land combat side of things - if you know the Japanese build all their aircraft in Kyushu, you might try and invade their first - noting that any such knowledge would need to be gathered by intelligence). But if we're not going to have geo-located factories, then it's all fairly woolly, and either of the two options would be a reasonable enough abstraction (although I think, but could be wrong, that the lowest prioritised lines 'dropping off' would be more realistic, given what we know about the systems so far).
 
Not trying to cause trouble, but I'm not sure that the production lines being wiped out and needing to be restarted isn't the 'most realistic'/best option. Say we did have geo-located factories, rather than a pool, so say the UK are building all their Spitfires in Kent, and the Germans invaded Kent and took it, then the UK would need to re-start their Spitfire factory from scratch somewhere else. What we get without the geo-location is the ability to choose what was produced in Kent at the point of the factory being captured, and shut it down then.

Spreading the loss out over all the production lines assumes that in each area with a factory, production is proportionally the same on each item.

I'd be comfortable with both approaches mind. Personally I'd be keenest on geo-located factories, as this adds a new level of strategic thinking to the production and strategic bombing (and even the land combat side of things - if you know the Japanese build all their aircraft in Kyushu, you might try and invade their first - noting that any such knowledge would need to be gathered by intelligence). But if we're not going to have geo-located factories, then it's all fairly woolly, and either of the two options would be a reasonable enough abstraction (although I think, but could be wrong, that the lowest prioritised lines 'dropping off' would be more realistic, given what we know about the systems so far).

Geo-located factories would, without a doubt, be the most realistic method, however Podcat was pretty clear in saying that we were not going to get that.

Once we take that solution out of play it comes down to choosing the lesser of remaining evils. I understand that spreading the damage around has it's own associated loss of realism. I do however think it is both more realistic overall than taking only from the bottom and will be more playable. Starting up new lines from scratch because you lost a few cities will add another large penalty on top of what is incurred by losing the cities themselves.

EDIT: If the system remains bottom only, what I will likely end up doing to counter it is to make sure I have at least two separate lines for everything. So instead of 10 factories making something in one line, I would put 5 each into two lines with one of them much higher in the priority stack than the other. This seems like pointless micromanagement to represent decentralization, but I think it would be necessary to avoid catastrophe.
 
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I'm actually quite interested in how this will be tackled, and never thought about it.

Let's take an example:
USSR building 1941 tanks at bottom of list.
Germany captures one factory in Poland, what happens?

We know that factories keep their efficiency, so do you end up with a new production line of USSR 1941 tanks (but this wouldn't make too much sense because all 1941 tanks are the same)
Does the line automatically get converted to producing German 1941 tanks at the conversion cost of converting from a tank to tank?
Is there a occupied province penalty like HOI3 and HOI2, so this factory will be making 20% less?

Now lets say USSR recaptures this factory, but Germany's bottom production is Infantry packs? Does USSR get a factory producing infantry packs added to its queue?
 
Once we take that solution out of play it comes down to choosing the lesser of remaining evils. I understand that spreading the damage around has it's own associated loss of realism. I do however think it is both more realistic overall than taking only from the bottom and will be more playable. Starting up new lines because you lost a few cities will add another large penalty on top of what is incurred by losing the cities themselves.

I agree that spreading the loss around minimises the impact of the factories that were lost in the province (and you make a good point about having to open up new lines somewhere else), but dispersing the loss would remove choice away from the player, and I'm not convinced it's more realistic (if factories are lost due to province loss, then production lines and all the efficiencies disappear - if we disperse the loss from existing production lines, there's not cost to efficiency that would have been incurred by having to open up new factories elsewhere).

Also - say I'm playing as France and have a bunch of tank production lines and aircraft production lines. I have half my 'land' factories in Lille and half my land factories in Toulouse (exaggerated hypothetical to clarify the argument - I'm not suggesting any sane French player/AI would have their factories set up like this). Now say Germany takes Lille, and half my production lines go. I've got plenty of tanks, but the French airforce is losing planes like it's going out of fashion. It may be more in my interest to just drop the tank lines and keep the aircraft efficiencies, rather than force a 50% loss on the aircraft lines.

Also - assuming that production lines are limited to the number of land factories available, it won't be possible to set up new production lines as soon as old ones are over-run, but will instead need new factories built. In this context, given the player gets to choose which production lines go, a player could choose to in the above example remove 50% of their aircraft and 50% of their tank lines, and get the same effect as spreading it out over their industry, but with player choice thrown into the mix?

Just thoughts, throwing around ideas and the like :). I agree there are issues in any direction, and it'll be a compromise of realism, gameplay systems and gameplay manageability.
 
I'm actually quite interested in how this will be tackled, and never thought about it.

Let's take an example:
USSR building 1941 tanks at bottom of list.
Germany captures one factory in Poland, what happens?

We know that factories keep their efficiency, so do you end up with a new production line of USSR 1941 tanks (but this wouldn't make too much sense because all 1941 tanks are the same)
Does the line automatically get converted to producing German 1941 tanks at the conversion cost of converting from a tank to tank?
Is there a occupied province penalty like HOI3 and HOI2, so this factory will be making 20% less?

Now lets say USSR recaptures this factory, but Germany's bottom production is Infantry packs? Does USSR get a factory producing infantry packs added to its queue?

Indeed, capture and recapture adds another twist. I had thought about this but didn't want to muddy my initial post by making it too convoluted.

Another variation, I capture a city knowing that it is unlikely that I will hold it for long. If factory production (as in tank vs infantry etc.) is maintained through capture, I should reassign these factories to something that I think the enemy needs least and put them on the bottom of my stack, while making sure the items at the bottom are running at minimum efficiency. This sort of front line disruption of production in and of itself is probably realistic, the mechanics of it seem very awkward, however.

Honestly, there are so many awkward situations that revolve around this concept, that I think the idea of specifying which factories are in each city is the only clean solution. Yes this involves some additional micromanagement, but I think in this case it would be worth it.
 
I agree that spreading the loss around minimises the impact of the factories that were lost in the province (and you make a good point about having to open up new lines somewhere else), but dispersing the loss would remove choice away from the player, and I'm not convinced it's more realistic (if factories are lost due to province loss, then production lines and all the efficiencies disappear - if we disperse the loss from existing production lines, there's not cost to efficiency that would have been incurred by having to open up new factories elsewhere).

Also - say I'm playing as France and have a bunch of tank production lines and aircraft production lines. I have half my 'land' factories in Lille and half my land factories in Toulouse (exaggerated hypothetical to clarify the argument - I'm not suggesting any sane French player/AI would have their factories set up like this). Now say Germany takes Lille, and half my production lines go. I've got plenty of tanks, but the French airforce is losing planes like it's going out of fashion. It may be more in my interest to just drop the tank lines and keep the aircraft efficiencies, rather than force a 50% loss on the aircraft lines.

Also - assuming that production lines are limited to the number of land factories available, it won't be possible to set up new production lines as soon as old ones are over-run, but will instead need new factories built. In this context, given the player gets to choose which production lines go, a player could choose to in the above example remove 50% of their aircraft and 50% of their tank lines, and get the same effect as spreading it out over their industry, but with player choice thrown into the mix?

Just thoughts, throwing around ideas and the like :). I agree there are issues in any direction, and it'll be a compromise of realism, gameplay systems and gameplay manageability.

Actually you would not need to wait for new factories to be built to start the new line, and in practice probably would not do so. You'd shuffle a few around from remaining lines.
 
Those 'what happens if you capture factories' questions are making my head spin :).

Actually you would not need to wait for new factories to be built to start the new line, and in practice probably would not do so. You'd shuffle a few around from remaining lines.

Aye, but given we don't have any new lines, wouldn't that just be choosing which of the remaining lines were closed, and then we can choose to distribute it across our production lines equally or not as we prefer - so say we have 50 tank lines and 50 plane lines, and we lose 10 lines worth of factories, then we can choose to remove five of each, 10 of one, or a combination of both.

Another thought - if you don't have the pro-rata reduction, then what does the game engine do - say 11 lines have been lost out of 100, does it stop the game and force the player to manually remove lines, does it just rip the 11 least prioritised lines from the bottom of the queue (and induce rage from anyone that forgot to re-order their queue and just lost their finely-tuned super-heavy bicycle production lines), or does it pro-rata them out across the two pools of 50 lines, and how does it deal with rounding (which won't be too big a deal with two lines, but if you had 20 different production lines, and lost 2 lines worth of factories, how do you pro-rata out which 2 lines go?)

After thinking through all this, I'm not sure geo-locating would actually be more micro!
 
Those 'what happens if you capture factories' questions are making my head spin :).



Aye, but given we don't have any new lines, wouldn't that just be choosing which of the remaining lines were closed, and then we can choose to distribute it across our production lines equally or not as we prefer - so say we have 50 tank lines and 50 plane lines, and we lose 10 lines worth of factories, then we can choose to remove five of each, 10 of one, or a combination of both.

Another thought - if you don't have the pro-rata reduction, then what does the game engine do - say 11 lines have been lost out of 100, does it stop the game and force the player to manually remove lines, does it just rip the 11 least prioritised lines from the bottom of the queue (and induce rage from anyone that forgot to re-order their queue and just lost their finely-tuned super-heavy bicycle production lines), or does it pro-rata them out across the two pools of 50 lines, and how does it deal with rounding (which won't be too big a deal with two lines, but if you had 20 different production lines, and lost 2 lines worth of factories, how do you pro-rata out which 2 lines go?)

After thinking through all this, I'm not sure geo-locating would actually be more micro!

I think the idea of having the game pause so the player can choose can be immediately thrown out of contention. This would have a horrible affect on game flow, especially in multiplayer. The system itself has to decide what is lost by some method or another.

I see three possible methods (again assuming that we don't specify city locations for all factories)

a.) Bottom line takes all losses. Once it is exhausted, next lowest and so on.
b.) A random line is chosen for each factory loss based on total number of factories, i.e. a line with 10 factories would be twice as likely to take a hit as one with 5.
c.) Losses are spread as evenly as possible across all lines with fractions being resolved either by favoring the lowest priority line or the largest one (though many will tie at the 15 limit).

I am actually starting to favor option B, the random method.

As far as what happens to captured factories, I think simplest would be to (once whatever delay for repairs was complete) treat them exactly like newly constructed factories and add them to some line with minimum efficiency. I realize there are historical precedents that would argue against this such as the tank works in Czechoslovakia, but I think it is simplest and best as a game mechanic.

I am also starting to think that in the long run the micro involved in assigning a specific location to each factory will be smaller than that required to deal with some of the other aspects we are discussing. Add to that the extra realism and I think improved immersion and you know what I would really like to see happen. It is not as if your first turn would involve a 40 minute session of factory assignment since they would have already been assigned to something in the initial setup of the scenario. You only have to reassign them as you make changes. Unfortunately the hardest part of this would be programming the interface to allow it in the least awkward fasion.
 
I see three possible methods (again assuming that we don't specify city locations for all factories)

a.) Bottom line takes all losses. Once it is exhausted, next lowest and so on.
b.) A random line is chosen for each factory loss based on total number of factories, i.e. a line with 10 factories would be twice as likely to take a hit as one with 5.
c.) Losses are spread as evenly as possible across all lines with fractions being resolved either by favoring the lowest priority line or the largest one (though many will tie at the 15 limit).

I am actually starting to favor option B, the random method.

Aye, I like B a lot as well, although there is a risk you might lose a 1-line specialist factory doing something-or-other (Navs as Germany, say? Although if Germany is still producing Navs at the point it's losing factories something funny is going on), but overall any of them would work well enough. Totally agree that giving specific factories to specific locations is probably the easiest way to go about it though (and I don't think would be too hard to manage from a UI perspective - just bring up a table with fields for factory 'blocks' by province (total available lines by province, listed by province) with a button that allows you to split off lines from the main block if you want to split them up, or aggregate them back when you don't. If you make it accessible through the province as well, it'd be easy to get to when you just wanted to check what was being produced in that province. And it would add a tasty new role for intelligence (not to mention an incentive to move production around if someone cottoned on where all the Spitfires were being made, for example) :).

Either way, I'm sure the game will be fine, but I totally agree that I think it'd work best if each factory had an actual physical location (from a naval perspective, someone linked the King George V's service history the other day, and I had a gander at it, and it was something of an effort to escort it from where it was built to Scapa Flow, so that it couldn't be bombed/subbed on the way - that'd make for more interesting gameplay having that kind of thing accounted for, particularly for ships in the European theatre).

As for capturing factories, what if a bunch of paratroops drops into the Ruhr, and is ejected a day/week later? If one division could flip control in a province for a few hours, and in the process reset all the factory line efficiencies back to minimum, it could add in an exploit/griefing mechanism in MP. Just a thought, not sure if a worry or not.
 
Wasn't it said in an old DD that efficiency is saved in the factory IC itself? (found it) I wonder how that will work and what level of control a player will have over it when manually reallocating. If one cancels a high efficiency line, will the factories get re-shuffled to try and get an assumed best combination for all? I can sense a lot of potential frustration in this and although not a bad idea in itself, i don't see how it would work well with random loss allocation if re-shuffling is in the picture.

I do think prod. lines with a location would have made sense, but still have some issues with factory distribution.
 
I'm assuming that there will be a lot less total factories in HOI4 than in 3, but far from certain about that. If the US has 600+ effective IC as in HOI3, that's a LOT of potential lines, even with a lot of factories per line, and I'm not sure if there's a limit on how many lines you can have or how many factories you can put in the same line.

I don't want to see a major reduction, though, primarily for how it would affect the smaller countries. Picture only having 5 factories, two of which are producing your basic INF gear, and two producing supplies, which leaves ONE factory to toggle between everything else at 10% efficiency. Not exactly "friendly" to smaller countries.
 
I'm assuming that there will be a lot less total factories in HOI4 than in 3, but far from certain about that. If the US has 600+ effective IC as in HOI3, that's a LOT of potential lines, even with a lot of factories per line, and I'm not sure if there's a limit on how many lines you can have or how many factories you can put in the same line.

I don't want to see a major reduction, though, primarily for how it would affect the smaller countries. Picture only having 5 factories, two of which are producing your basic INF gear, and two producing supplies, which leaves ONE factory to toggle between everything else at 10% efficiency. Not exactly "friendly" to smaller countries.

I agree that we will probably have fewer factories than we had IC, though only playtesting will show what balance is best there.

As far as the obvious risk to minors that you point out (which is still a problem even if the number is not reduced), this again comes down to balancing. The efficiency loss effect is exaggerated for minors since they tend to not be able to keep permanent lines running in some cases. You finish one expensive item then convert all or most of those factories to something else. This can easily be offset in balancing. If the overall reduction were, for example, such that there were 30% fewer factories than IC in HOI3, you could reduce minors by only 10% to compensate.

This has a potentially bigger drawback, however, in what happens to those extra factories when captured. This is probably the main reason why some minors in some HOI versions were given a block of off map IC. You could give them reasonable levels of production without exaggerating the gain from capturing them.
 
I agree that we will probably have fewer factories than we had IC, though only playtesting will show what balance is best there.

As far as the obvious risk to minors that you point out (which is still a problem even if the number is not reduced), this again comes down to balancing. The efficiency loss effect is exaggerated for minors since they tend to not be able to keep permanent lines running in some cases. You finish one expensive item then convert all or most of those factories to something else. This can easily be offset in balancing. If the overall reduction were, for example, such that there were 30% fewer factories than IC in HOI3, you could reduce minors by only 10% to compensate.

This has a potentially bigger drawback, however, in what happens to those extra factories when captured. This is probably the main reason why some minors in some HOI versions were given a block of off map IC. You could give them reasonable levels of production without exaggerating the gain from capturing them.

I disagree, I thin that reducing minors production is a good thing. Countries like Bulgaria should not be able to conquer half of Europe. Barely any minors actually developed and created there own tanks/planes/ etc. If they did they developed only 1 section, like Czechoslovakia had great tanks, but not very much else. It should be MUCH harder to have a serious army as a minor on your own without buying equipment.

I imagine that countries like Bulgaria will have about 4 factories, and 2 of them will pretty much have to be dedicated to Consumer goods and 2 could be to military. When war comes they could convert 1 consumer (50%) of their consumer production to military. That is pretty realistic of what a minor like Bulgaria could have in military.

I envision Germany/UK/France having about 30-50ish factories at the beginning in 1936, with Germany getting to about 100 factories after Denmark/Belguim/Netherlands/France in 1940. This would be about a 5 to 1 ratio conversion of IC to factories in HOI3.
 
I disagree, I thin that reducing minors production is a good thing. Countries like Bulgaria should not be able to conquer half of Europe. Barely any minors actually developed and created there own tanks/planes/ etc. If they did they developed only 1 section, like Czechoslovakia had great tanks, but not very much else. It should be MUCH harder to have a serious army as a minor on your own without buying equipment.

I imagine that countries like Bulgaria will have about 4 factories, and 2 of them will pretty much have to be dedicated to Consumer goods and 2 could be to military. When war comes they could convert 1 consumer (50%) of their consumer production to military. That is pretty realistic of what a minor like Bulgaria could have in military.

I envision Germany/UK/France having about 30-50ish factories at the beginning in 1936, with Germany getting to about 100 factories after Denmark/Belguim/Netherlands/France in 1940. This would be about a 5 to 1 ratio conversion of IC to factories in HOI3.

I think much of that depends on how the system for trading works out. If it works out for countries like Bulgaria to be able to get equipment from their major power allies then their main concerns for fielding units become manpower, training, and perhaps supply. Most of us are likely assuming that majors sending their hand-me-downs to their minor allies will be common in game. If this ends up being true, you are likely correct on minors limited need for own production.

Keep in mind that many players enjoy playing minors. We don't want doing so to be too boring. I am not suggesting that Bulgaria should be able to establish a Pan-Balkan Hegemony, but they should not have zero options for course of action either.