Hey all, so as far as infrastructure system improvements in Barbarossa, I had some ideas that seem pretty appealing to me earlier today. Here are my thoughts:
We know that road and railroad infrastructures are both incredibly important from a logistical perspective, however the two different types of infrastructure actually have some fundamentally different properties that I think justifies classifying them separately in-game. Examples below.
Road Infrastructure (basically what infrastructure in-game is now, with some differences)
*State building
*Affects resource production, building speed, etc... Generally has all the properties general infrastructure has in-game now
*Can be built anywhere
*Expensive (with expense scaling on aggregate terrain type)
*Affects unit speed and strategic redeployment speed when using roads instead of railroads, where high values mean quicker movement
*Affects unit attrition where high values reduce vehicular attrition. This should be a mechanic. If, hypthetically, the Soviet Union had an autobahn like Germany did, it isn't unlikely that German equipment losses due to breakdown would've been far less severe because the terrain conditions wouldn't have mattered as much as they did with paved roads.
*Perhaps the number of trucks in reserve could affect the efficiency of road infrastructure?
Railroad Infrastructure
*Provincial building
*Does not affect resource production or building speed
*Cannot be built anywhere, only in specific lines between cities (as they would act as railroad hubs), and only as a whole line (to prevent having to micro-build, which would be annoying)
*Inexpensive
*Affects strategic redeployment movements (i.e. strategic redeployments follow rail lines if it would be faster than redeployment by road)
*Ignores or mitigates the negative effects from multiple poor supply distances between rail hubs (cities), which act as distribution centers (i.e. say your units were several supply distances away from a decent zone, and the zones they passed, and are in, are poor; railways could "bypass" the poor zones and make the effect less detrimental and shifting supply distribution to cities, making supplies disperse from there, rather than always the capital)
*Maximum volume of throughput, depending on railway level; whole line must be upgraded to increase railroad level, not just specific points (has the effect of making longer rail lines more expensive)
*Rendered on map
*Allows distant resources to be used (i.e. in the case of Stalingrad, it was important as far as oil from Baku was transported; if a player manages to capture Stalingrad, and there are no completely connected level 7, or other minimum, road infrastructures or alternative railway routes to the capital, it should also cut off oil supply--specific example)
*Can be damaged and repaired at very specific points (as in province level specific), which will have an effect on strategic redeployments, supply of resources, and railway supply transfer (retreating troops could demolish the railway lines to disrupt advancing troops' logistics, which advancing troops would need to repair), and damage will be indicated on the map
*Railroads have to be in contiguous working order across the whole line between two rail hubs (cities) to be effective or used at all (are you going to unload a train in the middle of a forest because the tracks are broken?)
*Perhaps trains could be added as a production item to utilize the railways? They were, after all, quite an investment. Just a thought.
An overhaul like the above would tend to have the effect of making infrastructure much more visible, in terms of actually seeing, as well as thinking about and managing, in game. In real life, lack of infrastructure was a major problem for the Germans in WW2, and currently I don't think HoI4 does a very good job of simulating that. I understand Paradox's mentality of abstraction, and agree with it in most respects, but there is a point where one can over-abstract and thus lose critical details that should be important. This is one of them.
