In progress: The Convoy Primer

Hauptmann · 22-08-2007, 12:12

With this post I intend to put together useful information regarding supply and resource convoys and how to manage them manually. I write this for the plain, vanilla HoI2 version, not Doomsday or any other later editions of the game.

I believe however that the information is useful for HoI DD players as well, but I cannot guarantee it. Nor can I guarantee that everything is absolutely airtight and waterproof for HoI2 as I am still learning new things every once in a while. But I hope it will provide a good start.

And this post would not have been possible without the help and assistance of other forum members who recently got me on the right track in this thread in the DD forum.

To improve this guide as much as possible I highly welcome any input, corrections, clarifications etc. from other more informed players than myself. Maybe the guide will over time evolve into a reference we can post in the HoI2 Wiki.

Why not Auto-control?

I play HoI2 on and off since mid-2005 and played quite a few games. And I never bothered a big deal about convoys because overall, it was working quite alright and never got me into bad situations. It was just in my current game as Germany when I discovered some persistent bugs or malfunctions with convoys on auto-control that would not go away after a while which made me dig into the issue.

Let me give a few examples. May other players will see similarities with strange things in their games that they could not figure out.

In my case, the Nice -> Malta auto-convoy would bring in supplies to feed the garrison, but would not bring oil despite me having a naval fleet based in Malta for weeks already. So the ships were running out of oil. Here I continue to be completely clueless what was causing the convoy error. I think it is just a plain dumb bug.

A similar case was in Ceylon where the auto-convoy from India at some point suddenly stopped bringing in oil for the fleets. Here it started out perfectly alright, but some bug/error occurred later.

I guess this was a case where initially oil came in via convoy route A into province A. Please note that province A is not producing any resources (therefore no need to auto-setup a resource convoy).

Then later, I invaded the neighboring province B which does produce a resource (rare materials). So correctly, auto-convoy would set up a resource convoy with a route from province B back to the mainland. However, by default, a resource convoy will transport all resources, including oil. So oil came in via A and was immediately transported out again via B... not exactly the kind of thing you will think of during the game...

At some other point in the game I re-discovered a sizeable stockpile of about 900 rare materials in a Western Africa province that must have been left behind by the former French owners. Auto-convoy never bothered to pick it up and bring it home. A minor thing at my point in the game, but still, it may be important in other situations.

Auto-convoy was also unable to bring in all the energy from the British Isles which is produced at some 280 energies per day. So there continued to be a stockpile of it in Portsmouth despite me having more than sufficient convoys for all game-wide convoy missions. I'll pick up on this case later again.

Another instance where auto-convoy will not work is when there are allied troops stationed in your territory and you do not have any own troops there stationed as well. Again in my game, initially when I took Malta I put only an Italian division there as garrison and continued with the game.

At some later point I discovered that the italians were half-starved off being out of supply from day 1! Apparently the Italian convoy AI will let their soldiers rot thinking it is the German's business to supply them when stationed on German territory. Fair enough, but the German auto-convoy will supply only German troops and does not set up convoy for allies. Here, a possible workaround would be to station at least one German unit besides the allied troops. But it's only a workaround and one has to think of it.

Finally the AI seems incapable to use the convoy pool in an efficient way and will emply considerably more convoys than what are actually needed. It will turn convoys on and off, more or less on a daily basis, instead of allocating a set number of convoys to the route and leave it at that until a major change in circumstances warrant for a change. Like this what happens is that the daily flow of convoyed-in resources will go jo-jo.

From the above example of energy in Portsmouth, I now know that I need exactly 145 convoys to clear the stockpile every day. But auto-convoy will allocate some days zero to it, some days 150, some days 480... all sorts of awkward numbers thereby disrupting other convoys from running and giving me the impression that I have too few convoys to transport everything game-wide. Which is not true: I now know that I need some 500+ convoys overall and have built some 700 by now.

Again, this is usually a minor issue because, overall, the AI will transport pretty much all resources. But still I often wondered why in the top line of the screen my resource numbers would show red one day and green the next day when I was sure that I am daily producing more of the resource than I was using up (the stockpile in the capital kept growing overall). Now with manual control, all resources at home are always in the green, all foreign resource stockpiles get cleared out, and I still have a good number of convoys available either for new routes or the increase of capacity on existing routes or as replacements when enemy action sinks my convoys.

I'm sure these cases are not a comprehensive list of possible convoy quirks and errors. But it shows that there can happen all sorts of more or less disruptive things with auto-convoy which can be avoided when taking manual control. Doing things manually is also less complicated that what you might expect as the AI will still do some useful things by itself

On the other hand if you do not experience any serious issues with auto-control in your games, then there is probably no reason to switch to manual control, if you can live with auto-convoy not running your convoys at the most efficient. I would still recommend that you check your convoy system occasionally to see if all is running well.

(End of part 1)

Weisenwolf · 22-08-2007, 15:31

This looks like it will be useful when finished.

Hauptmann · 23-08-2007, 13:51

Thanks Weisenwolf for the encouragement!

(part 2)

General tips

It may sound utterly trivial but I will bring it up nevertheless: You need convoy capacity in order to run convoys. Depending on the nation you're playing and your exansion ambitions later in the game, eventually you will rather have too few than too many convoys.

So it is a sensible idea to start a long production queue very early on, especially for nations that initially are not naval superpower from the start which obviously includes our gaming darling Germany. It is probably a good idea to correpondingly start a line of convoy "escorts" too.

There is nothing wrong to lay down a single production line of 99 units each as soon as you can afford it. Their technology and manpower requirement, even their IC cost if I'm not mistaken, remain static throughout the game which is another reason to mass build them early. Another positive is that once you have built them, unlike regular vessels they cost nothing in supplies or fuel to maintain.

While the production time of convoys and escorts are relatively short, even some 40 days with the various bonuses etc. can become a long time if you suddenly realize that you need more of them. And if your IC grows with all the conquering you might be doing, it will only be construction time that is the limiting factor to new capacity, not the IC and manpower cost.

Also bear in mind that you may lose convoys due to convoy raiding by your enemies.

A convoy pool of 500 will already get you a pretty long way in terms of empire expansion possibilities. 1000 convoys will probably be about as much as you might ever need, especially if you go the more efficient manual control route. I think in a USA game, I eventually had some 1400 on auto-control which was definitely more than enough for everything.

More experienced players may recommend other figures here. But I would think 500 convoys is a good initial figure to aim for initially if major empire expansion is your goal with a non-naval superpower.

Some tips for Auto-control

The more convoys are running, the more likely it becomes that auto-convoy is commiting an error somewhere. I would say if you are running 15 or more convoys, you should look them up every once in a while.

If you are running many convoys (again say above 15), it may be useful if you just cancel/delete all auto-convoys for a day (at any time during the day). At the following midnight the AI will re-establish all necessary convoys from scratch and chances are that it will be somewhat more efficient than before.

As an example, at one point my auto-control was running 24 convoys, and after I did the above reset, only 21 were re-established. So it did find some unnecessary ones to eliminate and probably rearranged a few other things for good.

A reset for a day should not disrupt your troops supply or home resources as the AI is usually good in keeping more supplies at the offshore location than what is immediately needed.

Thanks for the reset tip to player walrus.

(to be continued... Please do not post your comments just yet, so all the parts are concentrated at the top of the thread. If you want to comment or have a suggestion at this time, please send me a PM. Thanks so much.)

22-08-2007, 12:12	#1
Hauptmann First Lieutenant Join Date: May 2005 Location: Zurich, Switzerland Posts: 269	In progress: The Convoy Primer With this post I intend to put together useful information regarding supply and resource convoys and how to manage them manually. I write this for the plain, vanilla HoI2 version, not Doomsday or any other later editions of the game. I believe however that the information is useful for HoI DD players as well, but I cannot guarantee it. Nor can I guarantee that everything is absolutely airtight and waterproof for HoI2 as I am still learning new things every once in a while. But I hope it will provide a good start. And this post would not have been possible without the help and assistance of other forum members who recently got me on the right track in this thread in the DD forum. To improve this guide as much as possible I highly welcome any input, corrections, clarifications etc. from other more informed players than myself. Maybe the guide will over time evolve into a reference we can post in the HoI2 Wiki. Why not Auto-control? I play HoI2 on and off since mid-2005 and played quite a few games. And I never bothered a big deal about convoys because overall, it was working quite alright and never got me into bad situations. It was just in my current game as Germany when I discovered some persistent bugs or malfunctions with convoys on auto-control that would not go away after a while which made me dig into the issue. Let me give a few examples. May other players will see similarities with strange things in their games that they could not figure out. In my case, the Nice -> Malta auto-convoy would bring in supplies to feed the garrison, but would not bring oil despite me having a naval fleet based in Malta for weeks already. So the ships were running out of oil. Here I continue to be completely clueless what was causing the convoy error. I think it is just a plain dumb bug. A similar case was in Ceylon where the auto-convoy from India at some point suddenly stopped bringing in oil for the fleets. Here it started out perfectly alright, but some bug/error occurred later. I guess this was a case where initially oil came in via convoy route A into province A. Please note that province A is not producing any resources (therefore no need to auto-setup a resource convoy). Then later, I invaded the neighboring province B which does produce a resource (rare materials). So correctly, auto-convoy would set up a resource convoy with a route from province B back to the mainland. However, by default, a resource convoy will transport all resources, including oil. So oil came in via A and was immediately transported out again via B... not exactly the kind of thing you will think of during the game... At some other point in the game I re-discovered a sizeable stockpile of about 900 rare materials in a Western Africa province that must have been left behind by the former French owners. Auto-convoy never bothered to pick it up and bring it home. A minor thing at my point in the game, but still, it may be important in other situations. Auto-convoy was also unable to bring in all the energy from the British Isles which is produced at some 280 energies per day. So there continued to be a stockpile of it in Portsmouth despite me having more than sufficient convoys for all game-wide convoy missions. I'll pick up on this case later again. Another instance where auto-convoy will not work is when there are allied troops stationed in your territory and you do not have any own troops there stationed as well. Again in my game, initially when I took Malta I put only an Italian division there as garrison and continued with the game. At some later point I discovered that the italians were half-starved off being out of supply from day 1! Apparently the Italian convoy AI will let their soldiers rot thinking it is the German's business to supply them when stationed on German territory. Fair enough, but the German auto-convoy will supply only German troops and does not set up convoy for allies. Here, a possible workaround would be to station at least one German unit besides the allied troops. But it's only a workaround and one has to think of it. Finally the AI seems incapable to use the convoy pool in an efficient way and will emply considerably more convoys than what are actually needed. It will turn convoys on and off, more or less on a daily basis, instead of allocating a set number of convoys to the route and leave it at that until a major change in circumstances warrant for a change. Like this what happens is that the daily flow of convoyed-in resources will go jo-jo. From the above example of energy in Portsmouth, I now know that I need exactly 145 convoys to clear the stockpile every day. But auto-convoy will allocate some days zero to it, some days 150, some days 480... all sorts of awkward numbers thereby disrupting other convoys from running and giving me the impression that I have too few convoys to transport everything game-wide. Which is not true: I now know that I need some 500+ convoys overall and have built some 700 by now. Again, this is usually a minor issue because, overall, the AI will transport pretty much all resources. But still I often wondered why in the top line of the screen my resource numbers would show red one day and green the next day when I was sure that I am daily producing more of the resource than I was using up (the stockpile in the capital kept growing overall). Now with manual control, all resources at home are always in the green, all foreign resource stockpiles get cleared out, and I still have a good number of convoys available either for new routes or the increase of capacity on existing routes or as replacements when enemy action sinks my convoys. I'm sure these cases are not a comprehensive list of possible convoy quirks and errors. But it shows that there can happen all sorts of more or less disruptive things with auto-convoy which can be avoided when taking manual control. Doing things manually is also less complicated that what you might expect as the AI will still do some useful things by itself On the other hand if you do not experience any serious issues with auto-control in your games, then there is probably no reason to switch to manual control, if you can live with auto-convoy not running your convoys at the most efficient. I would still recommend that you check your convoy system occasionally to see if all is running well. (End of part 1) Last edited by Hauptmann; 23-08-2007 at 13:42.

22-08-2007, 15:31	#2
Weisenwolf Captain Join Date: Jan 2007 Posts: 405	This looks like it will be useful when finished. __________________ 'In the absence of orders, go find something and kill it' Rommel 'There is every possiblity that any facts alluded to in this post are incorrect' Weisenwolf 2007

23-08-2007, 13:51	#3
Hauptmann First Lieutenant Join Date: May 2005 Location: Zurich, Switzerland Posts: 269	Thanks Weisenwolf for the encouragement! (part 2) General tips It may sound utterly trivial but I will bring it up nevertheless: You need convoy capacity in order to run convoys. Depending on the nation you're playing and your exansion ambitions later in the game, eventually you will rather have too few than too many convoys. So it is a sensible idea to start a long production queue very early on, especially for nations that initially are not naval superpower from the start which obviously includes our gaming darling Germany. It is probably a good idea to correpondingly start a line of convoy "escorts" too. There is nothing wrong to lay down a single production line of 99 units each as soon as you can afford it. Their technology and manpower requirement, even their IC cost if I'm not mistaken, remain static throughout the game which is another reason to mass build them early. Another positive is that once you have built them, unlike regular vessels they cost nothing in supplies or fuel to maintain. While the production time of convoys and escorts are relatively short, even some 40 days with the various bonuses etc. can become a long time if you suddenly realize that you need more of them. And if your IC grows with all the conquering you might be doing, it will only be construction time that is the limiting factor to new capacity, not the IC and manpower cost. Also bear in mind that you may lose convoys due to convoy raiding by your enemies. A convoy pool of 500 will already get you a pretty long way in terms of empire expansion possibilities. 1000 convoys will probably be about as much as you might ever need, especially if you go the more efficient manual control route. I think in a USA game, I eventually had some 1400 on auto-control which was definitely more than enough for everything. More experienced players may recommend other figures here. But I would think 500 convoys is a good initial figure to aim for initially if major empire expansion is your goal with a non-naval superpower. Some tips for Auto-control The more convoys are running, the more likely it becomes that auto-convoy is commiting an error somewhere. I would say if you are running 15 or more convoys, you should look them up every once in a while. If you are running many convoys (again say above 15), it may be useful if you just cancel/delete all auto-convoys for a day (at any time during the day). At the following midnight the AI will re-establish all necessary convoys from scratch and chances are that it will be somewhat more efficient than before. As an example, at one point my auto-control was running 24 convoys, and after I did the above reset, only 21 were re-established. So it did find some unnecessary ones to eliminate and probably rearranged a few other things for good. A reset for a day should not disrupt your troops supply or home resources as the AI is usually good in keeping more supplies at the offshore location than what is immediately needed. Thanks for the reset tip to player walrus. (to be continued... Please do not post your comments just yet, so all the parts are concentrated at the top of the thread. If you want to comment or have a suggestion at this time, please send me a PM. Thanks so much.)