Smoke and Mirrors supply system (No step back)

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Novat

Second Lieutenant
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Nov 17, 2016
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It's just smoke and mirrors. It took me a few minutes to see past the façade.

As you can see in the screenshot provided. Logistics elements does not actually move supplies from where they are produced, to where they are needed. Supply depots themselves spawn the supplies, on the sole condition that there is a railway and/or port connecting it to the nations capitol.

Ideally, the system would extract supply from victory points, cities and population centers. DETRACT from the available supply from whence it is procured, then move it to different parts of your nation via the available methods of Boat, Train and Truck. But this is not what they did.

What they did was plot down supply depots, made sure it looked reasonable. Then called it a day.
Case in point:

Screen 1: Constructing additional supply depots in the UK, will increase available supply.
Screen 2: This is just wonky. The air field within the New Guinea province. Is able to supply the 6.8 million men garrison, having no contact with the port. In fact, it does not have any contact with any source of supply.
Screen 3/4: Matrouh tiles have more supply than London
Screen 5: Not sure what is going on here. There is no supply depot in the inaccessible North Darfur province

Not screenshot. If you were to block the eastern Med sea. The whole theatre will be unable to receive any supplies from London. Even if you construct ports which can be accessed from the red sea, and connect them to the rail network, the game will simply refuse to recognize it as a valid path to the capitol.

I assume the air drop bug was always present in the game. But previous versions did not allow air dropping supplies from the same province you are trying to deliver to. The change to a tile based supply system, necessitated that this be switched on. Likely, the switch that allows this was simply flipped. It also does not work if there is literally no supply at all, 0.00, because then the airplanes will be stuck at 0.00% efficiency and cannot even begin to supply themselves with supplies from the airport they just took off from.

Truck usage is set to 0/25/50 per logistics depot. It doesn't matter how far the trucks have to go, how much supply is available, how much supply is requested or any other factors. It's nothing, 25 or 50. It's just odd that you can support the entire eastern front with fewer than 1000 trucks. When in reality, Germany fielded tens of thousands of trucks throughout the war while at the same time heavily relying on horse transports. It's hard to just write down proposals for in game, but it needs to increase by a factor of 5 to 15 for full 100% coverage on every single province. This is just a balance comment, the system appears to function as intended.

Screenshot 6: The Brittish air force is able to supply it's 456 Battleships in the port of Cairo using a fleet of transport aircraft. These are admittedly connected to the... very same port that they themselves supply. So presumably the cargo is offloaded at the port, transported by rail to the air port then flown over the Battleships and dropped on the decks.

Screenshot 7: This is how Alexandra is supplied January 1st 1936.

Screenshot 8: It's looking bleak for Germany and Paulus. Luckily for the 9 million encircled 6th Army. Goering's Luftwaffe will put a Turkey on every table.
 

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It's incredible, almost like their entire beta team was too busy testing Estonias new focus tree in singleplayer, instead of bugtesting the only relevant and exciting thing in this update, (for me and largely the entire MP community), which was railroads and a proper supply system. What a complete letdown, i lost almost all my will to update my mod or even continue playing this game anywhere near the extent i used to. In photo number 2 is what multiple people realized within just a couple hours of testing(and the developers couldnt??), where just a handful of transport planes can supply an army of 7 million men on the other side of the world from literally nothing, as there is no port or anywhere importing supplies within range of the planes. Fundamentally it's a problem of there actually being no supply good which i expected there to be, (take the fuel system for example), and as a result nothing is actually being moved by rail, by boat, or from depots to airfields to transport planes in this case, it's all spawned from thin air. Likewise naval ports have absolutely no function now, you can use a level 1 port and depots to have the same supply as your capital state. Some of this is moddable, but like numerous other undeveloped and poorly executed things in hoi4, it's now hard coded. So you can't fix how supplies are a complete abstraction, and that they are spawned from thin air and not actually transported, leading to many game breaking things as the photos you posted without the ability to fix it as modders.
 
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I am long way from understanding all of the supply system, but two of your examples seem to be based on the same misunderstanding:

Screen 1: Constructing additional supply depots in the UK, will increase available supply.
I think the construction increases *potential* supply. Since there are no units in any of those provinces, none of that supply is being 'consumed'. Although 'consumed' is not the best word for this, because supply is not a national stockpile like Equipment is. It seems to work more like Command Power: you have a (per-province) capacity that is allocated.

Screen 5: Not sure what is going on here. There is no supply depot in the inaccessible North Darfur province
You don't need a supply hub in every province! They are hubs, at the centre of a hub-and-spoke system (so it's very unhelpful when you call them "depots" instead of "hubs"). Supply is distributed from supply hubs to surrounding provinces (with the radius depending on whether you are using horses or trucks) so if we are talking about the province I think we are, it's supplied by the hub to its northeast. Unless you are making a more complex point that has woodshed me?

You might have found a genuine bug with the air supplies thing though, so think about posting a proper Bug Report.
 
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I think the construction increases *potential* supply. Since there are no units in any of those provinces, none of that supply is being 'consumed'.
Actually he is correct. I made a similar post about this. Construction of a hub adds supply to the nearby province. Not potential supply, just supply. It does not matter if there are units there or not. Each province gets an injection of supplies from the hub. Hub is the de-facto supply factory. Its never carried anywhere. The train rails only provide a pipeline that allows the hub to magically create those supplies, limited by the track size. But nothing is deduced at any point. If you had units all over the way to the end hub, the production at the very end of the rail track would be exactly the same as if there was no drain on the supply at any point.

Now, I don't think this is a big problem, because actually making those hubs is very cost ineffective in so many provinces, so in the end, I think the new supply system, mostly, does what it should, but it does use some simplifications that are not explained well and are counter intuitive.
 
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I am long way from understanding all of the supply system, but two of your examples seem to be based on the same misunderstanding:


I think the construction increases *potential* supply. Since there are no units in any of those provinces, none of that supply is being 'consumed'. Although 'consumed' is not the best word for this, because supply is not a national stockpile like Equipment is. It seems to work more like Command Power: you have a (per-province) capacity that is allocated.


You don't need a supply hub in every province! They are hubs, at the centre of a hub-and-spoke system (so it's very unhelpful when you call them "depots" instead of "hubs"). Supply is distributed from supply hubs to surrounding provinces (with the radius depending on whether you are using horses or trucks) so if we are talking about the province I think we are, it's supplied by the hub to its northeast. Unless you are making a more complex point that has woodshed me?

You might have found a genuine bug with the air supplies thing though, so think about posting a proper Bug Report.
Nothing is distributed or transported, it's spawned from thin air from depots. Go take an hour or two testing in singleplayer and actually see for yourself how it works using console, it's genuinely depressing. Railroads only function is to allow depots to be built, from which supply is 'activated' / 'spawned' whatever you want to call it, certainly not how anyone expected or wanted the supply system to be like where supply is transported and stored in depots/hubs and distributed with vehicles/horses realistically. I actually got excited (along with my friends) months ago looking at screenshots in dev diaries thinking one of their interns or devs loaded up War in the East 2 and decided to copy over their supply system after seeing how incredible yet straightforward it is, but at release i can barely say we got a a quarter of it in terms of functionality.
 
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Nothing is distributed or transported, it's spawned from thin air from depots. Go take an hour or two testing in singleplayer and actually see for yourself how it works using console, it's genuinely depressing. Railroads only function is to allow depots to be built, from which supply is 'activated' / 'spawned' whatever you want to call it, certainly not how anyone expected or wanted the supply system to be like. I actually got excited (along with my friends) months ago looking at screenshots in dev diaries thinking one of their interns or devs loaded up War in the East 2 and decided to copy over their supply system after seeing how incredible yet straightforward it is, but at release i can barely say we got a a quarter of it in terms of functionality.

basically it's a system where supplies are abstracted, what matters is the network. Supply production could be added, to act like fuel, but is it really needed ? The current system needs to be tweaked and debugged and made easier to understand, sure
 
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Hub and depot is getting into the minutia. You clearly understood what i meant.

I will concede that there could be a tangible increase in available supply in one tile. But London being a major supply hub in and of itself, should only see very minor improvements from adding hubs to the nearby tiles. Something like a 2-5% increase per hub next to it. Not like the 400%+ currently achievable. But this is London, lets take another example.

Screenshotted:
In the first screenshot, you can see a reasonable supply setup for North Africa for the UK and the Allies. Doesn't matter if you disagree with the placement of the hub. Anyway, at that location, in clear weather it provides 8,09 supply directly on top of the tile it is placed.

On the second screenshot, i have simply added another hub. The very same hub now has 12,97 supply.

I'm not sure how you can explain, how adding a supply hub in the way of the first hub. Down a rail track of the very same level, could possibly increase available supply on the front line tile.
 

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Nothing is distributed or transported, it's spawned from thin air from depots. Go take an hour or two testing in singleplayer and actually see for yourself how it works using console, it's genuinely depressing. Railroads only function is to allow depots to be built, from which supply is 'activated' / 'spawned' whatever you want to call it, certainly not how anyone expected or wanted the supply system to be like. I actually got excited (along with my friends) months ago looking at screenshots in dev diaries thinking one of their interns or devs loaded up War in the East 2 and decided to copy over their supply system after seeing how incredible yet straightforward it is, but at release i can barely say we got a a quarter of it in terms of functionality.
Try that again, but this time without enough trains in your stockpile. And then see how it affects your supply throughput.

Combine this with the new mission bombers can execute (logistical strike, which targets trains), and you'll find that the supply is far less free than you think ;)
 
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basically it's a system where supplies are abstracted, what matters is the network. Supply production could be added, to act like fuel, but is it really needed ? The current system needs to be tweaked and debugged and made easier to understand, sure
Transportation was advertised, transportation was not delivered.

''In our new system, supply flows from the capital (the total amount available depends on your total industrial base) through railways, where the level of the railway acts as a bottleneck. To transport more, you need a higher level railway (or a bigger port if it goes over water) so the railways are the current bottlenecks in a way. Depending on how much supply is transported you need a certain amount of trains for the rails to perform. Trains are a new equipment type that we will dig into in a future diary (well actually, several types ;P)''

In the delivered system. Supply flows from the supply depots, with a simple ''can reach capitol on/off'' check.
 
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Transportation was advertised, transportation was not delivered.

''In our new system, supply flows from the capital (the total amount available depends on your total industrial base) through railways, where the level of the railway acts as a bottleneck. To transport more, you need a higher level railway (or a bigger port if it goes over water) so the railways are the current bottlenecks in a way. Depending on how much supply is transported you need a certain amount of trains for the rails to perform. Trains are a new equipment type that we will dig into in a future diary (well actually, several types ;P)''

In the delivered system. Supply flows from the supply depots, with a simple ''can reach capitol on/off'' check.
but the amount of supplies is capped by the railway level, no ?
 
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Try that again, but this time without enough trains in your stockpile. And then see how it affects your supply throughput.

Combine this with the new mission bombers can execute (logistical strike, which targets trains), and you'll find that the supply is far less free than you think ;)
The name of the thread is smoke and mirrors supply system. I am not disputing the importance of trains existing.
What i am saying is that the trains operate in accordance to Soviet command economy principles, where the trains drive around without actually loading or offloading any cargo.
 
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but the amount of supplies is capped by the railway level, no ?
I don't think you understand me.
Trains, supply hubs and trucks does indeed increase the available supply. But it is created out of thin air.

Look at the screenshot. I can ADD supply to the North African desert WITHOUT detracting supply from anywhere else. Supply: Food, water, candy, cigarettes, bandages, bullets and toilet paper is not procured from the Cities, Victory points and population then TRANSPORTED to the North African desert.

Supply hubs are constructed, line of travel to capitol is checked. Then it is SPAWNED.
@Tullaris

Edit: Realize the screen made it hard to see. That is 837 inf battalions, sucking up 49 supply. Without London or any other mainland province having it's supply detracted.
 

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I don't think you understand me.
Trains, supply hubs and trucks does indeed increase the available supply. But it is created out of thin air.

Look at the screenshot. I can ADD supply to the North African desert WITHOUT detracting supply from anywhere else. Supply: Food, water, candy, cigarettes, bandages, bullets and toilet paper is not procured from the Cities, Victory points and population then TRANSPORTED to the North African desert.

Supply hubs are constructed, line of travel to capitol is checked. Then it is SPAWNED.
@Tullaris

it's not spawned, or created out of thin air : you have built more expensive supply hubs connected to your network, thus more supply capacity thus more supplies to your troops.

the system is fine.
 
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No, they produce supplies, the rail connection to the capital merely determines how much supply they produce.
It's not actually transported from the capital via rails, but OP expected it to work this way and I did too.
And before someone argues that such an accurate system was not feasible I want to remind him that HOI3 had such a system, which clearly traced supplies from the capital to the frontlines.
Exactly. I'm not asking for a Rube Goldberg Machine or something like Transport Tycoon here.

Another issue with locating valid ports in screenshot:
Bottom left you can see eastern Med has been blocked for shipping.
Bottom right you can see a secondary port has been constructed, with a railway set up to move shipping via the Red sea into Egypt.

The troops are receiving 0 supplies from the capitol, as the game refuses to recognize the backup port as a valid port.
 

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No, they produce supplies, the rail connection to the capital merely determines how much supply they produce.
It's not actually transported from the capital via rails, but OP expected it to work this way and I did too.
And before someone argues that such an accurate system was not feasible I want to remind him that HOI3 had such a system, which clearly traced supplies from the capital to the frontlines.
HOI3 logistic is computationally expensive. And it doesn't really work as intended either ( a lot of broken stuff going on).
 
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