Sensational work Team HoI4
Thanks for all your hard work and best of luck stomping on these bugs
I'll give the beta a look a bit later today and see if anything crops up.
One concern (and, as always - these are thoughts in case they help - it's your game, and a great game, and I'll play it regardless) this change:
...particularly with no UX changes, is kind-of doubling down on the inconsistency between the UX and the mechanics when it comes to supply (and also makes it harder to build up ports in new areas). I think focussing on the "rigid supply network" design approach (which is what this is) without expanding how far the supply gets to, is locking in future challenges in the future unnecessarily. I could be wrong of course - just mentioning it in the spirit of helping - while I think the fundamentals of the supply system are great, some of the settings as to its implementation don't seem coherent from a design perspective, both within the system itself and in the way the system interacts with other systems.
I suspect this is intended to solve the "port on every province in Libya" situation - but if supply range is expanded a bit then there wouldn't be the same gameplay incentive to do this - and from a historical plausibility perspective putting a port in every province
should lead to improved supply. The reason it wasn't done wasn't that the capacity wasn't there - it was because a port at Tobruk could adequately support an attack on Benghazi, and Benghazi could adequately support and attack on Tobruk (and then a smaller port at Mersa Matruh, just on the Egyptian side of the border - it's not in HoI4 yet and didn't really matter until now, but the game would benefit from plonking it in now).
Ie - raising port costs is doubling down on mechanics that take the game further away from historical plausibility, and the gameplay mechanics further away from player-controlled. It's an atrocious pun, but I can't help myself - you're pushing for a design based around railroading of what was a far more flexible-in-practice-historically approach to logistics networks (expanding the existing network is cheap, but changing the structure of the network outside of ports was prohibitively expensive, and now ports are more expensive too - both to degrees that are not historically plausible).
This then interacts with a UX system that warns players not to be off the fixed network - but sometimes this is necessary, leaving "permanent supply alerts" in place, which means it's much harder for players to notice when a supply issue they can influence has cropped up.
It's your game of course - and I'm not for a second suggesting it's unplayable - but the system as designed now is in some ways less flexible (not all ways - in others it's substantially more flexible - but where it counts as to the overall structure it's far more "fixed") than the one it replaced, and I'm yet to see any evidence to suggest that the UX isn't noticeably more confusing (at least in some ways unnecessarily). It's no skin off my nose, as I'm quite comfortable modding in changes to the cost of ports, and expect to be able to tweak the supply falloff curve and terrain costs to get something that works a bit better with the UX and is a bit more historically plausible - but I can't help but feel you're making your life harder than it needs be here.
Hahaha, love it
