Best support companies for Infantry?
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GBP right (which is one of the best doctrines as a whole, its meta in MP) helps a lot with supply
people overlook it
I dont think or see people overlook it, its been quite strong for a while and I see that reflected in the community.
In the same way I dont think that -10% fully mitigates every instance of bad supply that people might run into, but ofc it helps. In the same way I do think its healthy for the game to be able to go other doctrines and still have options to reduce supply, but this is veering away from OPs question again. The above are what I think are good/worth usually investing into, but in answering OPs question those were my contribution of what I think is worth.
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Support companies (apart from a few, light and heavy flame tanks, field hospitals) are in a pretty solid state right now
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We've had this discussion before. And I'm not sure how I can explain it any better than I have before. But I will try.
Even with doctrines that reduce supply (MA or GBP) and a logistics wizard FM, I will often still be supply capped on significant portions of the front even in Europe. It is a common occurrence in both SP and MP games that offensives can only happen when I pull panzers off the front line, let them get back in supply, SR them to the front and then initiate the offensive (when they re-ORG.) Leaving them on the front will kill supply even further and the panzers will never get enough ORG or fuel to be useful in offensive operations. Supply issues are common enough that LOG is useful.
Consider this supply heat map from a recent game with me as the Soviets. This is January 1942.
That is not the best supply to be in. I can't add more units to most parts of the front. And what am I doing to mitigate supply problems?
The supply consumption of my infantry divisions is only .35 and I'm still supply capped on half the front. I have the boosts from MA, the FM is a Logistics Wizard, the general in charge is lowering supply use, I have the "Transport is the sibling of the Red Army" propaganda in place, and Tier 3 LOG companies. My supply use is basically less than half of the normal base you would expect from this division, and it's still not enough.
Now, those paying attention to the map will note that the loss of Kiev has hobbled supply on one part of the front, but that doesn't change the simple fact that in the situation I'm in right now, I could have a Red Army 3x the size I actually have, but I couldn't use it because I'm supply capped on the front.
Not using LOG would be a waste in this situation regardless of other considerations. I need all of the supply reductions I can find to mitigate the penalties along substantial portions of the front. And we're not even looking at bad fronts like Siberia (against Japan), Finland, or pushing into Iran/Persia. I'm looking at Europe.
And this is against an AI Germany that is fully boosted, so the Germans sure as Hell aren't facing these supply problems.
Yep. This is how I look at it.
Bad supply hurts a ton of things. And since airfields closer to the front also eat into supply, you can put air power in that basket, too. Did I ever tell you about the time I couldn't launch PARA because the PARA were out of supply... at the airfield they were supposed to take off from? They were too close to the front, and the supply issues at the actual front killed the PARA three tiles back.
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If you lose kyiv, you will have no supply on that area unless you build another hub behind the river
Also build a port at the very bottom of the stalin line
@Secret Master your point is solid but at the end of the day you're still limited by ICs (at least, until your front is all tanks and every available airbase filled with planes and the Allies out of fuel). I would much rather sacrifice the marginal extra frontage support logis get me - which translates into how many extra infantry divisions? (not asking facetiously, but actually don't know, since not sure where bonus is multiplicate vs additive) - and turn it into planes/CAS, or tanks.
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Yes. I do understand how supply works.
None of that changes the fact that supply hubs, rails, and ports do not build instantly. Unless you can predict with 100% certainty where battles will take place, where battle lines will be, and the outcome of those battles, you won't be able to predict these situations in advance. You will want the LOG companies and other supply reductions so you can deal with those problems.
I chose this example specifically because it's a great example of an unforeseen outcome. I was filming something for a video and not microing the front properly. This resulted in the loss of Kiev. That normally never happens to me when facing an AI opponent. It's quite embarrassing, really. I should do much better. But that's the situation I'm stuck with, and I have to deal with it. Without LOG and other supply reduction bonuses, my situation would be even worse.
And if anyone doesn't believe me about the time it takes to construct new supply hubs, here's an example:
Even with Transport is the Sibling of the Red Army, it will still be months to build the supply hub to replace the loss of Kiev. I also have the Politburo in place to boost the speed of construction beyond even the maximum IC techs I have in place.
You can argue I'm a terrible player for a whole list of reasons, but you can't say that the time it takes to build a supply hub is one of the reasons I'm a bad player. It's 1942, and I have the best techs in place for building these damn hubs. It will be months before I can fix the supply problems caused by the loss of Kiev. But I have LOG companies in place right now.
For bonus points, this is what supply looked like right before Barbarossa before Kiev fell.
Tooltips tell me I can fit a bit more there, but I'm practically supply capped already:
0.51 supply is basically one more division.
See any panzer formations around there? Nope. Because they draw too much supply. Any planes based in Kiev? Nope. The supply draw would be too much.
This is why LOG is important in a lot of my builds.
Ah, now there's a good question.
In the above screenshots, the Red Army contains 240 infantry divisions that look like this:
I have other divisions, but all of my training cadres are pure INF and do not factor into this discussion because training cadres are on coastal defense or covering VPs from PARA attack.
So, if I remove the LOG companies from the above division, this would happen:
120,000 less manpower, 4800 less support equipment, and 2400 less trucks.
Leaving aside the manpower, that's 19,200 IC cost in support equipment and 6000 IC cost in trucks.
For that cost, I could build more of these planes:
681 more of these planes specifically. That is... significant. War winning? I'm not entirely sure.
But if I go ahead and rip out those LOG companies, let's see what the pre-Barbarossa supply situation looks like now:
Note that base supply use went from .65 to .94.
The supply situation is measurably worse. Part of this is due to the need for even more rails going from Kiev to Moscow now since existing networks are no longer suitable. But there's also just too many divisions per tile now. And the entire front is now facing supply issues, not just parts of the front like it was with LOG in place:
Compare that with the previous post where I showed the entire front with Tier 3 LOG.
Now, this is where it gets complicated. The supply situation is definitely worse with no LOG. But I did gain aircraft. Is there anything I can do to mitigate supply problems and save even more IC for planes?
A pure INF division with no support companies has comparable supply draw to the division with support companies and LOG. Using this division would put me back in better supply everywhere, and it's much cheaper.
That's a lot more planes I could build. But now we're talking about an entirely different kind of army. This is an old school ORG Wall Pure INF kind of build that many players will remember. This is a perfectly valid approach, but at this point, we are talking about a radically different kind of warfare at the level of divisions. This kind of division will simply not be as effective per width than the division with support companies even if it is cheaper and easier on logistics. Optimizing for stats per width has its own benefits, and this is not a division meant to do that.
So, when I look at data like this, I think to myself that the extra planes I could build may not be worth the loss of LOG unless I'm trying something substantially different. The choice, for me at least, isn't "LOG or no LOG" but something like "Entirely Different Army Plan A versus Entirely Different Army Plan B." An army with support companies and trying to be better at combat power per width should probably be using LOG.
Now, my MP experiences provide some bias here. When I was playing regularly, our MP mod had much harsher weather effects on attrition and made supply more difficult. So, I'm generally averse to fighting constantly in areas where I have constant out of supply icons. Vanilla is a bit more forgiving, but I think my argument still stands. It's just not as harsh to fail at supply in vanilla.
What do you think? Are you not seeing lack of supply problems with some frequency in your offensive actions? Or are they low key enough that you accept them (and the attendant division number reduction) because you are leveraging other aspects of the war to win?
EDIT: In case it isn't obvious, nothing stops you from building more rails and supply hubs to compensate for lack of LOG, but now you are paying a different cost than you were before. And that helps on defense, but not on offense. You can't build rails or supply hubs on tiles you don't control.
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@Secret Master nice, appreciated, so how many infantry per tile do you have to drop to get the supply situation stable again?
and yeah, supply is obviously a big issue in all games, so if you're getting +1 inf/tile for the cost of, what would that be, like 3-4 mils from game start? that actually is probably worth it. 700 is a ton of planes too to be fair.
and yeah, supply is obviously a big issue in all games, so if you're getting +1 inf/tile for the cost of, what would that be, like 3-4 mils from game start? that actually is probably worth it. 700 is a ton of planes too to be fair.
Small question, why haven't you build up the railroad from moscow to kyiv? I have no problems fitting 2 tanks per tile (new build with 70+ tanks), by just building the railroad up before the war starts
In tiles with orange or yellow, we're talking about 3 divisions needing to be moved. In tiles with purple, its 1-2.
However, this comes with two caveats:
1) If you care about the overall capacity of the hubs and not just the tiles, you can't move the divisions just one tile away.
You can see here I moved some divisions around to open up some supply. The tile now has 0.04 unused supply, so the divisions there should be fine. But we are still facing some supply penalties in those tiles:
Because Kiev is over taxed due to railway bottlenecks, even thought the tile has unused supply, the divisions are still not quite at 100% supply. So, in order to fix that problem, the divisions have to be moved to a new supply region (one that isn't on the front since all supply regions on the front are capped anyway).
That meant in order to "fix" Kiev supply region, I have to do this:
Now the divisions in the tile have enough supply on the tip (per tool tip) and the supply region is okay. That meant moving 6 total divisions out of the region completely. (The divisions sitting west of Kiev.)
Supply status is now 100%.
This has significant implications for micro in terms of offense and defense. Tile supply can be fixed by just moving a division back one tile. A division moved back one tile is still close enough to reinforce a tile that is under attack or move up and counter-attack/initiate an offensive. But if I have to move them out of the region, they aren't within easy reinforce distance anymore.
This also means that supply region borders become more important when microing troops around, as being on the wrong tile might hurt everyone else even if its not obvious.
2) 100% supply may not always be your goal. This is probably obvious to you, but for the sake of completeness, I want to point out that what we are really talking about here is "how much bad supply can I tolerate?" That means that when I present data like this, someone will be looking at it and saying "I can accept that supply status." And that's fine. But when we talk about supply reductions, it does move the window of tolerable supply in your favor. If 90% supply status is fine for you, you don't need LOG to get to 100%. But you might want LOG to make it possible to add more divisions at 90% supply status.
For two reasons.
1) I didn't see a need for it as I was within acceptable parameters for supply. So I kept spamming MIC instead of building more railways.
2) I was trying something weird with aircraft for this particular video, so I was focused more on other things.
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Even in MP you build the railways around jan 41, you get them all done by then easily
Its always worth it imo
Note that is just the initial investment, the LOG increase IC and manpower casualties too. For defense I often have tank in forest or city to boost defense line and my tank have good defense and have LOG already.
When in doublt, just have different infantry templates and use them in different cases. Probably LOG for AT-AA infantry.
AT infantry is another way to increase supply efficiency of defender. For the extra supply use of just 1 AT gun, a whole attack/defense of the division now have piercing.
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