Smoke and Mirrors supply system (No step back)

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It isn't related to moving closer or further away; it is related to spreading out. In reality this is the way the player uses the system. You don't stack everyone on one tile, you spread out, either over defensive lines or front lines.
That is the part i have a gripe with. Let me visualize it with some screenshots.

Screenshot 1: The army of 264 000 men is standing on the supply hub. On top of the port, and is receiving 8,73 supplies / 20,37 requested = 43%
Screenshot 2: The army has spread around inland, into jungles and hills. And this has increased supply.

Screenshot 3/4: The distance traveled.

Moving the army hundreds of kilometers (in air distance) inland. Has alleviated the supply issue, which the army was suffering from. I find this very unintuitive.
 

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1. Demand based usage was actually something we had for a long time. It was awful for the player, though. Try keeping track of your truck usage when it spikes based on location, passive demand, offensives, defensives, et al. It was impossible to plan for.

2. The army setting was the intended way of using that. Honestly if the answer is simply to turn this on globally, it may be better just to turn off motorization entirely.

3. Yes, on the radar to look into as a possible balance change.
Glad to hear it.

1. I understand that it would be hard to keep track of...but mass motorization so incredibly important to all the theaters of the war I think it should make a comeback, or that we should at least see a major change to the number of trucks required to motorize a hub. One of the Western Allies' big advantages (and the Soviets as Lend-Lease got underway) was the ability to fully motorize the supply chain. It's a bit silly that I can motorize the largest front of the war for the cost of half a dozen 20-width motorized divisions. Maybe this could be made more moddable? It seems to be controlled exclusively by defines now.

2. I like having the army settings, but I think that without the dynamic demand-based usage it's just a no-brainer to turn on motorization globally because it's so cheap and gives such a big benefit. There is no reason to do something like the Germans did and motorize the Panzer divisions while leaving the infantry still mostly using pack animals...

3. Great!

4. (I edited my post on this one) What about provincial and infrastructure debuffs to motorization effectiveness? After all, it's hard to drive a truck though the jungle, or through the rasputitsa...
 
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It isn't related to moving closer or further away; it is related to spreading out. In reality this is the way the player uses the system. You don't stack everyone on one tile, you spread out, either over defensive lines or front lines.
I think this could be solved by allowing supply from to be distributed in a different manner.

Something like allowing supply in the hub province to access 100% of total available supply from that hub...then the neighboring provinces can (in aggregate or individually) access up 80% of supply from that hub...modified by infrastructure, terrain, motorization of course. Then the furthest can access 50% or whatever before you leave that hub's supply range.

As it is, the fact that Singapore can't supply all the divisions when they are in fact closer to the supply hub and can supply them when they are further away is very counterintuitive and a bit silly.
 
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4. (I edited my post on this one) What about provincial and infrastructure debuffs to motorization effectiveness? After all, it's hard to drive a truck though the jungle, or through the rasputitsa...

Terrain already has a large impact on how far supply travels; its a double whammy with motorization which is also impacted by this.
 
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Terrain already has a large impact on how far supply travels; its a double whammy with motorization which is also impacted by this.
That's good to hear. In my playthroughs I haven't noticed any major effects of terrain, though I'm sure it's there. Supply mapmode tooltips are pretty hard to understand - they have already a wall of text that is hard to get immediate info from quick glance, and I don't remember any mention of terrain penalties in it.
 
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Dont even bother man, nothing is going to be improved with the mechanics, this is the final model. There will be some 'bug fixes' coming in a few weeks, and that's literally it, they want it as simple and empty as possible, which is fine for the market they want to appeal for, but any further depth or realism is not likely to be added. And as for defines or moddability.. lol. I have a list i made which has over 150 unmoddable things, and broken defines, missing defines(especially related to navy), and i always thought each update they are for sure fixing this or that or atleast adding modding support, and they never do. It was one of their starting development goals in 2016 for hoi4 to have little to no limits in moddability like previous paradox games, and that promise has slowly disintegrated over the years. Perhaps i can upload what i have documented over the years one of these days on the forum, but everytime i think about writing out a small essay on everything, i get a flash of reality and realize it would all be pointless.
I wrote most of the code for TNO's Toolbox Theory economy system, don't lecture me on what is or isn't moddable :p.

Honestly I do not have much hope for the moddability of this system any more than I do MtG's system, but asking politely before initial patches are finished is the best time to have something added/changed :).

You are not wrong in saying that a good portion of the modding community is unhappy with opaqueness or inaccessibility of hardcoded systems released in the past few DLCs though - and as things stand right now this system is not very moddable at all. My hope in being active in this thread is to have some things exposed to modders in the next few patches. Often we receive a powerful new tool (like scripted GUI) in the same update that a new system over which we have little control via defines and almost none ingame via effects/triggers/modifiers is added.

Sadly, the documentation for effects/triggers/modifiers has not been updated in 1.11.1, so I expect we will start going through focus trees and ideas files to check what has been added over the next few weeks. :\
 
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You will notice I tend to stop responding to threads when people lack manners. There is really no reason that constructive criticism has to be delivered with bile.

I'm very sorry if my post came across like that - it definitely wasn't intended as such - I think very highly of everyone I've had anything to do with Paradox, you included. I can be a bit blunt when I'm tired though, but it absolutely isn't meant as a personal attack or a slight on the devs. Everything is intended as constructive feedback, and if it isn't feel free to send some bile my way if it helps :)

3. Yes, on the radar to look into as a possible balance change.

Great news :)

No need to respond at all, but sharing this in case it helps - in terms of highlighting the inconsistencies in the UI - the situation below means I really need to let some of my divisions suffer - I shouldn't give the Finns an open border - but this means I'll have a permanent "bad supply" notification for that theatre - which means I could well miss some situations of bad supply that I'd really like to know about. I can "theater design" may way around this, the more theatres I have, the more other notifications I miss (the ones that pop up below the theatre list). If there's any scope to look into the way the UI handles out-of-supply, given out-of-supply isn't as worrying a state any more, and is quite likely to be necessary to do in a few "red exclamation mark" situations, that may help make the game easier to understand.

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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.
 
it feels weird tho, that a seaside supply hub costs only 3k ic, 15% of a normal supply hub... it just runs under a weird name called "ports". also, i ve always used hundreds of transports to supply my barbarossa. so i guess, that will be easier now...
That's not a real comparison. Look at the tool tip for the port.

It has a limited supply capacity. Where with normal supply nodes you can increase capacity by upgrading rail (fairly cheap), the only way to increase port hub capacity is by building additional port levels. That gets expensive real fast ;)
 
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Fighting in North Africa, it's extremely difficult to maintain good supply. I was building a large railroad network from the port in Alexandria to the border, and the best I could do was 90% with about 11 garrison units and one cavalry. Looking at the issue, it appears the rails to the front don't actually do much without the supply depot. Despite putting Alexandria to extreme motorized, the hub couldn't reach

Maybe this is a silly suggestion, but maybe rails could enhance the range of a hub? Basically carting supplies to the end of the line and unloading for further transport after.
That's the exact function of a supply hub. Think of the hub as a logistics center, the WW 2 equivalent of a modern day container terminal. Supplies are delivered with bulk transport (trains, convoys), stored locally, and then distributed to their target destination. Not every hole-in-the-wall along the railway line can handle this.

Besides, north africa should be a supply hell. It was in real life.
 
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It seems that the lack of information on how supply exactly functions and affects units, possibly combined with lower quality divisions as templates, doctrines, and tanks have all been changed, has created an environment where nobody knows why things aren't feeling right for them and they don't have a way to fix it.

Nobody is accustomed to units being in low supply because prior to this update that was essentially suicide, so when its seen now its very scary. That means a player's first reaction is to fix supply because they expect their units to be suffering immensely. Yet penalties are different and difficult to figure out in game, particularly as its difficult to figure out if the situation is getting worse. This creates more incentive to fix supply ASAP. Players go to form a plan, but with the new mechanics players (me) don't know if I need to be upgrading railways, building a new hub, motorizing a hub, or concentrating my forces to take one.

Lots of great feedback, I think the suggestions put forth by COM and Axe are particularly good.
I will say when you have someone like Axe, a very smart guy who knows the game and the period, in great depth, say he is confused by the current system. I hope this is causing the fire alarm off in the HOI IV teams meetings. Watching the streams of the influencers, you guys had make a video, all of them were having massive problems figuring out the supply. Now some of it is just documentation, But I do think it is deeper than that.


As I quick fix, I'd suggest that railroads act as a limited supply distribution point, with a smaller radius than hub. This is both intuitive to players, and realistic. Railroads siding exists in large part to facilitate the loading and unloading of cargo.

You've said I don't worry about your units in a yellow supply situation. I suppose in a very fluid situation, that's probably ok. But in a static situation that seems like awful advice. If I'm gearing up for an offense or countering my opponent's build-up. I'm going to be sending more troops to an area and yellow, supply, will turn into a red situation with rather big penalities. I'd like to plan ahead, (that's sort of the whole point of the game.) So when I see a yellow situation I want to know how to correct that.

Finally, let me ask a specific question. You increased the output of Mil factories by 5%. Does that mean you expect players to spend 5% percent of German Civ, and Mil factories, building, tracks, hubs, and trains. For the invasion of Poland, and France? or is higher if so how much? Similarly for Russia/Germany and Barborsa what do you think is a reasonable amount to spend?
 
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You've said I don't worry about your units in a yellow supply situation. I suppose in a very fluid situation, that's probably ok. But in a static situation that seems like awful advice. If I'm gearing up for an offense or countering my opponent's build-up. I'm going to be sending more troops to an area and yellow, supply, will turn into a red situation with rather big penalities. I'd like to plan ahead, (that's sort of the whole point of the game.) So when I see a yellow situation I want to know how to correct that.
yellow (and red) means you've parked too many divisions in that province. With the new system, the old ways of doom stacking your front lines are over. Just park some divisions (which you use as reserve anyway) in a province behind the lines. You'll notice your supply issues will be less.

That's what I did when invading the USSR as germany. Not everything was at the front line all the time. I periodically pulled out my tanks to a nearby node behind the lines to ease the supply situation. That, and increasing rail levels. Had no troubles at all reaching the urals
 
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1. Demand based usage was actually something we had for a long time. It was awful for the player, though. Try keeping track of your truck usage when it spikes based on location, passive demand, offensives, defensives, et al. It was impossible to plan for.
I'm curious how this looked in development builds, and how awful it was. There is something to be said for wanting it to not feel bad, but also some players probably want to deal with the frustrating challenges of logistics that existed in history as well. Maybe making it more moddable is an answer to this, like some others have mentioned.
That's the exact function of a supply hub. Think of the hub as a logistics center, the WW 2 equivalent of a modern day container terminal. Supplies are delivered with bulk transport (trains, convoys), stored locally, and then distributed to their target destination. Not every hole-in-the-wall along the railway line can handle this.

Besides, north africa should be a supply hell. It was in real life.

Alterantively, you can just build level 1 ports across the coast to instantly solve all supply problems, which takes only about a month per port. Yes, ports will not provide supply if they have no convoy route. HOWEVER, if the port is connected to another port by a railway, it works just like a normal supply hub and doesn't care about convoys anymore. See that in this screenshot I have the Eastern Med blocked off but the two ports on the Egyptian border are still providing supplies to the entire Italian army.

I expect we will see the African coast looking like this eventually in every MP game, with the entire coast garrisoned to prevent invasions and massive armies on the frontlines fully supplied.

1637832479982.png
 
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1. Demand based usage was actually something we had for a long time. It was awful for the player, though. Try keeping track of your truck usage when it spikes based on location, passive demand, offensives, defensives, et al. It was impossible to plan for.
Was a system with a set truck allocation ever considered to fix the demand based usage? Like saying you will allocate X trucks to supply, that then gets split among the hubs based on the hub's supply use and priority.

I do hope Demand based usage will return (if a good solution is found that adresses the problems you mentioned), and am keen on seeing fuel and/or manpower possibly make an appearance in the supply as well, as it would improve the balance overall and would make modders happy haha (the update in general had some really nice modding tools however motorization specifically is pretty hardcoded, so any change there would be welcome :3)
 
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I will say when you have someone like Axe, a very smart guy who knows the game and the period, in great depth, say he is confused by the current system. I hope this is causing the fire alarm off in the HOI IV teams meetings.

That's very kind of you, but I'm not that bright (I can be downright thick at times) and my knowledge is a long way from perfect :). I don't think it's a "fire alarm" level issue, but I do think there's a lot of capacity to make it much easier for people to know what's going on at the very least, and there may (I can say with confidence I think there's room for better information surfacing at this point - I haven't played it long enough to have a strong view on mechanical changes) be potential improvements to how the system works.

Reflecting more on the issues I've had with it early (I'm three hours in now - still a bit early for late) is that the system doesn't provide enough in-game info as to what's going on, or how to solve problems (or how bad problems might be) - and at the same time throws up a bunch of alerts at players, which implicitly suggests something should be done. It does suggest building hubs and railway tracks (as well as motorising the hub, which was possibly the first button I pressed in the game) but neither motorisation or an extra layer of railway tracks seemed to do the trick, and there's no way of knowing whether it's possible to get the supply I want by building a super-railway to Murmansk (I'll test it at some stage, but I started playing NSB with an eye to just playing NSB).

So the system throws a whole lot of alerts at a SOV player, without clear ways to fix it, and without enough information in tooltips to really know what's going on (terrain and weather impacts supply, but I'm yet to see anything in-game that tells me how, although perhaps I've missed tooltipping when it was in a supply-influencing condition?) After a couple of days (granted work days, so we're not talking the kind of hours that some people have been putting in) I've got a better feel for the general system, and I've still got no idea how to deal with the supply situation on the Finnish border (or whether I should be dealing with it at all?)

I did look at the tutorial video (which was actually a little misleading, and not nearly detailed enough to actually help me solve any issues - it was a good 'once over' though, with perhaps a tiny bit of editing for the misleading bits) and hit the wiki (which was the old system, so no use at all). I then came to the forums, where I got a bit more information, but for a system as complex as this, I think it would have been really helpful to maybe make an effort to have the wiki updated for it, at least in the absence of the tooltips providing a much clearer idea in-game of what the various impacts (terrain, weather, distance) were, and how to fix them. I'm still largely clueless as to a number of key factors, but I'll remedy that by looking at the game files soon (but I don't think looking at the game files should be required to know how to play the game generally).


As an aside, I did find that for the red exclamation mark divisions that there's an attrition indicator - which suggests that perhaps for "low supply, but not red exclamation mark" that they're not taking attrition (so it is in there - it's just not turning up for divisions I expected it to). I jumped to conclusions that this wasn't in there, because of how much else seemed to be missing in terms of information I was looking for in the tooltips, and because it doesn't turn up for "red but not exclamation mark red" divisions. Apologies to the devs for missing that early on.
 
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Here's a more clear example of showing how level 1 ports work with blocked access and railways. You can see that the railway stops after the first three ports I built into Egyptian territory, and the last two ports are not connected to the railway, have no convoy route, and grant no supplies. But the existence of the railway makes them act like a regular supply hub and they grant their full supply (though only 15 instead of 20), but for only 3k IC instead of 20k.

Edit: that 15 might actually be from a level 1 railway bottleneck and not from the port level. I will update with a bigger railway.
Edit 2: It is absolutely based on railway bottleneck and not the fact that it is a port and not a supply hub.

Conclusion: ports are OP.

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A part I don't understand, if we already have equipment tracked on division level (infantry eq, tanks, radios, support eq, arty etc...), why didn't the devs just added a few more types of "equipment" to track (like munitions), and made them slowly deplete based on the amount of fighting and attrition.

Then you would have a much more natural representation of logistical system. It is produced in factories, goes to hubs, divisions requisition it from hubs. Then level of motorization and access to railroads/port just affects the speed of replenishment. If the transport situation is good, units are replenished quickly and can continue the offensive. If it is poor, it takes a long time.

Instead, they created an arbitrary system of supply weight, which doesn't really do a great job of approximating it.

Wehrmacht didn't really have troubles getting supplies deep into Russia, they had the problem of doing it in a reasonable time frame, so that they could continue the offensive before Soviets reorganize and get new troops and weapons into the fight.
It was more a matter of speed then quantity.
Right now, if total number of divisions are over supply limit in an ares, they will permanently be debuffed, supposing to represent logistical problems. They will stay under-equipped even if they were within supply network for years.
 
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1. Demand based usage was actually something we had for a long time. It was awful for the player, though. Try keeping track of your truck usage when it spikes based on location, passive demand, offensives, defensives, et al. It was impossible to plan for.
I think it makes sense to add a new equipment type for logistics vehicles separate from troop carriers. This would be realistic anyway. But then also allows some really cool effects:

* Allies realistically lend-leasing logistics vehicles to the Soviets to radically increase their combat effectiveness
* Germany having a realistic struggle to build enough to fight effectively on the eastern front. Protecting log vehicles from partisans/bombers would be engaging.
* Minors rely on their faction leaders for logistic network a bit more, making them feel like minors rather than small majors
 
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Conclusion: ports are OP
I think ports are literally OP in real life though. This feels right.

e.g., modern day:

"the total volume of containers imported and exported between China and EU by sea and land transport was 62% and 7%"

"At present, the Sino-European shipping freight rate is $0.15/(FEU km) (40-foot equivalent unit), while the current average price of rail transport is $0.6/(FEU km), which is approximately a four-times gap"

 
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