I get where you're coming from, but explain to me how HOI3 or HOI2 was about logistics? Both games had a supply system, HOI2 was understandable because it was simple, while HOI3 had a "system" which didn't reflect much at all. It was a god unto itself.
Try invading anywhere without capturing port in time, advance in China or Russia without taking the high-infra *rail lines*, invade anywhere with a lot of supply-hungry divisions or dump as many troops as you have to Russia, India or China and tell me how good it will go.
In HOI3, the logistic was, as I said, important, and it was easy to get it very wrong, but it was quite straight-forward so it was also easy to not make mistakes there after a few games, you should *get a feel* how much forces you can supply on a particular theater.
There are quite a bit of strategy concerning how ports factor into your invasions into France, Russia, and China. For example taking Leningrad and using it`s port to supply your forces in Russia did make a *lot* of difference. Same with Japan, you kind of needed those coastal ports to supply your forces deep into China. Buy yes, it was quite straight-forward, and you learned quickly to get things right on the spot.
I'm not knocking the influence of proper doctrine, I like that this is the emphasis. Germany did a lot with obsolete tanks because they knew how to use them, same with Finland. As for the ability to just roll up with proper infantry and win, that's also fine, but it's something that the base game sort of hides from the player. The game is set up to encourage the frills. I want more interesting decisions even if just building infantry.
Mainly it's about giving the minors more interesting decisions.
I doubt it "hides" anything. I`ll give you that tech tree is often not very clear on what is important and what is not, but, again, the issue is not that the importance is misplaced, but that the *important basics* are straight-forward, after you play a game or two with particular country.
For example, I recently played as France, for the first time, and I was quite pleasantly surprised how much the very narrow and packed front that France fights make the build of army logic different from, say Italy, that has similar IC and LS.
For one, I quickly learned the dramatic importance of air superiority, that I usually under-estimated playing as Germany, Italy or Japan, that kind of naturally get it, playing against AI.
A game is about giving players interesting decisions and deciding what you want to use for a logistical backbone is important. Do you build trucks to make your infantry more robust and help their mobility and reorg or do you use that production line for tanks? It's a classic quality vs. quantity debate.
Again, the decision would usually be quite straight-forward, you will learn it once, and will almost always get it right the next time you play it.
That's actually where I'm coming from. "Basic logistics" seems to be getting the "basic treatment." It's abstracted, it's going to be Chinese divisions having equivalent capacities to American ones because... it's just basic logistics.
Yes, that was one place where HOI3 was not good, modeling how higher-grade equipment such as heavy artillery was much harder to make for under-developed nations.
A supply system shouldn't require specialized learning. It should be manageable with a few heuristics that are native to strategy gamers. For example, "Supply travels on rails" is one of those things known to every strategy gamer since the days of cardboard hexagons. So why not use that?
Capture high infrastructure lines of provinces.
Capture large ports.
Ensure you don`t over-load network with too many forces.
I`m pretty sure that the game already uses that.
I was reacting to higrosco saying that the composition of the logistical backbone of the division would have an easily optomizeable min/max number that every player would figure out super quickly. I was agreeing with the point you make here that there are so many different divisions from different countries in different roles that there wouldn't be an optimum number, just tradeoffs based on what the intended role of the division was.
There would be an optimum number for a country. Unless you would have to make radically different decisions about your own logistics based on what the enemy strategy is, but I really fail to see in which cases it would happen, maybe the only case is if SU would lose it`s oil producing regions and would have to cut down on mechanization of the army, but again I see no real choice there, that can`t be modeled under the "infantry with horse drawn support vs motorized infantry with motorized support" that is already present in game.
