ideas of trains, troop Transports and other thoughts

[unmerged(86511)]

After spending a few hundred hours of my life playing Hearts of Iron 2, I would like to throw a couple of thoughts out for consideration on the squeal.

I like the concept of infrastructure but what about having railway lines for moving troops and supplies? When the soviets decided to move troops from Siberia to their Western Front they were put on trains and arrived in about two weeks, if my memory serves. Last time I moved troops from Siberia over to the German front it took about 6 months for the infantry to walk there. Can we have railway lines that the troops can use to speed up transportation? Railways would also provide another element of strategy. Some town would be crossroads and have greater strategic importance when capturing and these could be targets for planes as well. Maybe make trains function something like convoys do now.

Back in the 80's I played a game called Command HQ, which is probably the first real time strategy game of this kind. One of things that game did, which few games like this have done since, is allowed troops to move across water without worrying about transports. This makes the game go by a lot faster and requires a lot less micromanaging. While I know having enough transports to get troops from one place to another is an important tactical consideration, is there a way you can automate or simplify the process of loading, unloading and getting transports where they need to be to load troops?
One reason I would like the simplification is right now I feel like I am stepping down from the commander in chief to a quartermaster when I have to find transports, send them to where the troops need to be loaded, load them, move to them where they need to go. As an idea for a compromise, given that convoys and escorts are created for supplies, could these be used to ferry troops around? This would really simplify moving troops while still providing a finite availability of craft.
Last thought I had is adding some technology for amphibious assaults, such as ducks and other types of landing craft. The army and marines had lots of toys for these kind of operations.
Great game, love it, can't wait to play the next one!

Slate

 

[unmerged(45464)]

Not the first one to suggest trains and 6 months to get to the front? Are you making them walk? Use strategic redeployment and it should only take a few weeks.

 

[Lazy_Boy]

Looks like after hundreds of hours of Hoi2 someone is unaware of strategic redeployment.

There does need to be an underlying rail network to determine supply flow and possible redeployment. Redeploying units should appear on map as super fast moving units along rail routes with no org. Infrastructure just doesn't cut it when the war in Russia relied on so few rail lines. Also annoys me to no end to have the AI redeploy dozens of divisions into the middle of nowhere.

 

[potski]

In HOI2 western/northern Europe (Germany, France, UK, etc.) infra is 100% in nearly every province. Heading east, Poland is generally at 80%, while most of the Soviet Union in Europe (west of the Urals) is 60%. A few areas are 40% (such as the Pripet Marshes) while Moscow, Leningrad and Kiev are 80%.

In Siberia (east of the Urals) most of the Soviet Union is 40%. Nevertheless, there are a line of provinces that can be traced through Siberia that is 60%. Indeed it is possible to follow a line from Moscow all the way to the Pacific Ocean, which goes through the provinces of:
Kazan (8th largest city in Russia)
Kubyshev (now Samara, 7th)
Molotov (now Perm, 12th)
Sverdlovsk (now Yekaterinburg, 4th)
Chelyabinsk (10th)
Omsk (6th)
Novosibirsk (3rd)
Irkutsk (23rd)
Vladivostok (25th)

The modern populations of these cities range from 600,000 (Vladivostok) to 1.4 million (Novosibirsk). They lie along the routes of the Trans-Siberian Railway and the Siberian Route, the great historic trade route linking European Russia with China, often known as the “Tea Road” for the quantities of tea carried from China to Europe along it. Several of these cities also lie on major navigable rivers.

Although classed as 60% infra in HOI2 some of these provinces in Siberia cover massive areas of 30-100,000 sq.km.

We know that nearly every HOI2 province will be replaced by between 5 and 10 provinces in HOI3. In these areas of Siberia, the provinces might be “medium” (see Johan’s explanation of the different province sizes in Dev Diary 1), so they will be bigger than in Europe, but nevertheless, still easily small enough for Novosibirsk to be covered by 10 or even more provinces.

It is unthinkable that all of these HOI3 provinces would be 60% infra – much of the area is still uncultivated wilderness. Nevertheless, it is also possible that the city of Novosibirsk itself and some of the other provinces in the area might have an infra as high as 80%. As well as being on the route of the Trans-Siberian Railway, the city is on the very wide River Ob, and is the start of the Turkestan–Siberia Railway linking the city to Central Asia.

So the high number of provinces in HOI3 will allow far more distinction between levels of infra in certain areas. It seems to me obvious that it should provide a number of very high infra corridors of provinces, following the historical routes of major rivers, roads and railways. If the logistics system is to make sense, then supplies should follow these corridors.

IMHO there doesn’t need to be any specific representation of roads and railways in HOI2. Not least because even with "small" provinces in Europe and other high infra areas, the number of railway lines and roads that existed in each of the provinces couldn't be represented on the map in any meaningful way. When we have such an abstract economic model, with no aircraft and tank factories, or shipyards, no steel works or oil refineries, then I don't see a problem with abstracting the transport systems.

We can easily imagine that supplies and units moving by strategic redeployment are moving over railways, and for that reason, I think I would limit SR to starting and ending only in provinces linked by high infra, FE 60% and over.

And I would make the throughput of supplies not be based on the infra in a linear way: a 40% infra province (which we can assume to lack railways) should not be able to transport half of the supplies of an 80% infra province, perhaps only a quarter? And a 100% infra province (with a mainline [double track] railway, with large stations, marshalling yards, etc.) should probably be able to transport twice as much supplies as an 80% province.