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Hi everyone, long time viewer first time poster.
The short of it: An idea to intuitively model the flow of industrial capacity (an abstraction of the flow of the resources that IC actually uses) internally within countries.
Major benefits (I'll explain these later):
1: Way more realistic representation of the difficulties of putting geographically separated IC to work on combined projects and the losses of efficiency faced by this.
2: Intuitive way to discourage unrealistically spreading out factory placement to avoid concentrated bombing. Making whether to concentrate or spread out a tough pros and cons choice.
So there has been lots of talk about the new supply system, which got me to thinking about the other side of the coin, and that is supply prior to the units actually being constructed.
"Now Slyvena" you say "Why would we waste time modeling the flow of industrial capacity within a country? How would that add to the game in any way, and its a really weird abstraction anyway"
"Well" I say, for most countries that are small enough that all of their borders are close enough together it doesn't really matter. But for large majors like the USA and Russia which have large east to west holdings or countries with significant land holdings across seas like the UK and Japan an important consideration was not only their total industrial capacity, but where that capacity existed within their territory.
If you fail to model this you have weird stuff happen like all of the IC capacity of EAST Russian factories being able to be put to work on constructing units in WEST Russia like the factories were next door.
If only there was an intuitive abstraction for the difficulties faced IRL by these countries in putting their IC to work that wouldn't take horrible amounts of coding or processing power... I present my idea.
The Idea: When you begin building units you need to select where they will be constructed. If there is enough IC in the state (group of provinces) you chose then construction goes ahead as normal. But if you try to build more than the state has current capacity, then that capacity has to come from other states, with a drop off in efficiency entailed with it. All of a sudden when building you need to consider whether using IC from mainland Japan to build tanks in Manchuria is the best use of that IC or whether it would be better suited to something else.
Here is the best part, you can connect the calculations in the drop off in IC efficiency directly to the supply conditions of the states it needs to be 'sent' through. The better the supply conditions the less drop off in efficiency. So USA would find it easier to put their separate coasts IC to use on the other coast than Russia would find to send their resources through the extremely low infrastructure midlands.
Benefits I foresee:
1: Choices on when and where to build become so much more meaningful, I've already mentioned a few, but here are some other choices that become more meaningful.
- As a major with many off-shore colonies (cough UK), is it worth trying to ship all that IC to build units on your mainland knowing that you will lose a lot of efficiency doing that, or is it better to try and build the units where the IC is located around the world?
- If I spread my factories out all over my country, then I'm going to have to build my units all over my country if I don't want to lose efficiency. If I want to be able to build all of my units close to my enemy efficiently... then I need to have my factories relatively closer. (Heres looking at you UK, no building lots of factories in Africa to use to build units on mainland UK without any downside to this, you can't teleport IC in real life.)
(You too Russia, no building factories in the middle of freaking nowhere where no bombers will ever reach them, if you build them there then you'll have to ship the IC to where you want units or build the units there and have them move themselves. )
- Seizing part of your enemies factories if you know they are the only factories nearby is now a realistic way to cripple their ability to build units to counter you efficiently (think Germany invading Russia for example, seize most of the IC of west Russia and watch them suffer trying to put their eastern IC to work on countering you.)
- I think the biggest upside of a system like this that I can think off is that a situation like this will never happen again
" I am slowly losing in this part of the world, hold on while I instantly put all of my combined IC around the world to work building units right there and overpower the enemy." "Ah great, crushed them, now I'll just go back to what I was doing before"
2: No new mapmodes etc to model this, it ties in perfectly with supply and states as is.
Some HOI games have had a horrible system of only being able to build units on land provinces connected to your capital, yuck. This would model things far more intuitively.
P.S. I don't really want this as one of my actual points but I'll put it down here, for those of us that love map painting. Once you have conquered a significant portion of the world, a system like this would reduce the 'snowball effect' of once you become big enough no one being able to oppose you in any way.
I present this humble idea to be critiqued and/or torn apart.
The short of it: An idea to intuitively model the flow of industrial capacity (an abstraction of the flow of the resources that IC actually uses) internally within countries.
Major benefits (I'll explain these later):
1: Way more realistic representation of the difficulties of putting geographically separated IC to work on combined projects and the losses of efficiency faced by this.
2: Intuitive way to discourage unrealistically spreading out factory placement to avoid concentrated bombing. Making whether to concentrate or spread out a tough pros and cons choice.
So there has been lots of talk about the new supply system, which got me to thinking about the other side of the coin, and that is supply prior to the units actually being constructed.
"Now Slyvena" you say "Why would we waste time modeling the flow of industrial capacity within a country? How would that add to the game in any way, and its a really weird abstraction anyway"
"Well" I say, for most countries that are small enough that all of their borders are close enough together it doesn't really matter. But for large majors like the USA and Russia which have large east to west holdings or countries with significant land holdings across seas like the UK and Japan an important consideration was not only their total industrial capacity, but where that capacity existed within their territory.
If you fail to model this you have weird stuff happen like all of the IC capacity of EAST Russian factories being able to be put to work on constructing units in WEST Russia like the factories were next door.
If only there was an intuitive abstraction for the difficulties faced IRL by these countries in putting their IC to work that wouldn't take horrible amounts of coding or processing power... I present my idea.
The Idea: When you begin building units you need to select where they will be constructed. If there is enough IC in the state (group of provinces) you chose then construction goes ahead as normal. But if you try to build more than the state has current capacity, then that capacity has to come from other states, with a drop off in efficiency entailed with it. All of a sudden when building you need to consider whether using IC from mainland Japan to build tanks in Manchuria is the best use of that IC or whether it would be better suited to something else.
Here is the best part, you can connect the calculations in the drop off in IC efficiency directly to the supply conditions of the states it needs to be 'sent' through. The better the supply conditions the less drop off in efficiency. So USA would find it easier to put their separate coasts IC to use on the other coast than Russia would find to send their resources through the extremely low infrastructure midlands.
Benefits I foresee:
1: Choices on when and where to build become so much more meaningful, I've already mentioned a few, but here are some other choices that become more meaningful.
- As a major with many off-shore colonies (cough UK), is it worth trying to ship all that IC to build units on your mainland knowing that you will lose a lot of efficiency doing that, or is it better to try and build the units where the IC is located around the world?
- If I spread my factories out all over my country, then I'm going to have to build my units all over my country if I don't want to lose efficiency. If I want to be able to build all of my units close to my enemy efficiently... then I need to have my factories relatively closer. (Heres looking at you UK, no building lots of factories in Africa to use to build units on mainland UK without any downside to this, you can't teleport IC in real life.)
(You too Russia, no building factories in the middle of freaking nowhere where no bombers will ever reach them, if you build them there then you'll have to ship the IC to where you want units or build the units there and have them move themselves. )
- Seizing part of your enemies factories if you know they are the only factories nearby is now a realistic way to cripple their ability to build units to counter you efficiently (think Germany invading Russia for example, seize most of the IC of west Russia and watch them suffer trying to put their eastern IC to work on countering you.)
- I think the biggest upside of a system like this that I can think off is that a situation like this will never happen again
" I am slowly losing in this part of the world, hold on while I instantly put all of my combined IC around the world to work building units right there and overpower the enemy." "Ah great, crushed them, now I'll just go back to what I was doing before"
2: No new mapmodes etc to model this, it ties in perfectly with supply and states as is.
Some HOI games have had a horrible system of only being able to build units on land provinces connected to your capital, yuck. This would model things far more intuitively.
P.S. I don't really want this as one of my actual points but I'll put it down here, for those of us that love map painting. Once you have conquered a significant portion of the world, a system like this would reduce the 'snowball effect' of once you become big enough no one being able to oppose you in any way.
I present this humble idea to be critiqued and/or torn apart.
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