Thanks for the engagement, perspective and thoughts for the future Arheo, it's greatly appreciated
I very much appreciate the work that's gone into the supply system, and think that it's a great foundation for the future, but that it also has a few rough edges (not least in the UI - I've gone into some detail in a few posts
here). Some thoughts below - by far and away the biggest issue is that the game doesn't tell players what's going on - at one point in the tooltips it refers to a province-based supply ratio that as far as I can see is not visible to the player. That said, discouraging supply hub construction seems counter-productive to the overall design.
I'm not exaggerating when I say 60 minutes into NSB I almost shut down my game to go into the mod files and radically change the supply hub cost. I had to force myself to persist with the confusion of the base game. It's the first HoI4 (or Paradox) expansion I've
ever come close to feeling like that with. Usually my modding is to add flavour, not to deal with what appeared (and still appears) like an system that's design couldn't cope with the UI. Now, to keep things in context, I think the new changes are great, and have heaps of potential
I just think there are some design quirks/holes that when combined with the lack of information provided to the player make it far, far harder to work with than it should be.
The issue with this is that you've made a "build-your-own" system approach to supply network, and you're now trying to stop people building their network (at least the most important parts of it). This leads to some pretty funny results, like me needing to build up a very high level of rail to Murmansk to supply a division one province away from a victory point and a railway - it's obtuse, un-fun and historically implausible. The back-stop of using state supply falls down because even divs in hubs draw state supply before hub supply, leaving very little for those out of range.
The issue being that they don't work well enough, by any stretch, to do so - and they're completely pointless in areas like the Sinkiang border where there's no supply hub for ages.
As best I understand the design (and I need more time with it, so I could be wrong) the lack of railhead means your design still does this, albeit perhaps to a lesser extent.
Fighting over the supply network is very cool - by far the best feature of the expansion, by some margin, even with all of its quirks, hiccups and "who knows what's going on, it would be nice if the game told me" moments
If this is the case (and it's a reasonable case for it to be), I'd suggest reworking the notification system, and dialling back attrition based on supply, but tell players (like it used to pre-NSB) how much attrition is being taken in a way that makes sense so players can make informed decisions. Right now, we get a supply ratio and are left to guess at the meaning. With no indication of what it actually means, how is a player supposed to know whether 90% supply ratio is terrible, or a 30% ratio is cool? Perhaps we need a new supply warning for when it's below 65% (or another number - I'm still far too early to have any idea of the impact of sub-100%) - but the UI is fighting against the notion you're promoting here - it tells people to worry as soon as it drops below 100% (as best I can tell).
We should be told this in-game, not have to hunt in a forum for something that is still incredibly vague in terms of the actually understanding what's going on - what does a red exclamation mark mean beyond "Arheo told me to worry if you see one?"
The issue here is that even if I wanted to update the wiki (and I do, but not until I have much more time with the game), oodles of info isn't available to the player as to how it works. Maybe it's hidden in the game files, but expecting new players or wiki updaters to backward-engineer their gameplay from the files isn't exactly user-friendly.
It would be incredibly helpful if there was some indication as to how far each 'intervention' to increase supply-hub range would supply, before implementation - in my game, I'm busy wildly over-capitalising Murmansk in an attempt to ensure decent supply along the border.