I was looking at some of the supply tax modifiers in an attempt to understand the logistics system .
From the wiki some basic concepts of infrastructure and throughput are well illustrated, but what is left out is exactly what impact supply tax has on the actual amount of supply making it to the front.
From this image, we see that the HQ consumes 0.54 supply, but the draw 1 province away is 1.0 supply
This is because I modified supply tax to 0.5 for testing, and is modified by tech levels with -0.06 to sum up as 1.0.
Also, supply tax is only paid once, ie, all supply requests whether it's 1 to 1000 flowing through the province will pay the prevailing province tax. This means that troops in a single line of 10 provinces will all pay the same overall supply tax as the same troops all standing 10 provinces away from the supply center.
Following the supply system, this additional cost is passed on all the way back to the main supply depot.
What is not so clear is that if you spread your units out, naturally there are more "paths" or potential paths that supply flows through, using the adjacent province request. Every potential path that supply flows through briefly will add to the tax. This means while it seems to alleviate the throughput demands at a specific province, ultimately you add demand to the provinces closest to capitals via the invisible supply tax.
Using a simple example of a front 6 provinces wide, 6 provinces away from the capital, this supply tax can be visualised as a triangle of 6 units tall and 6 units wide. The total number of "units" or taxable provinces in the worst case, where every province has it's separate path that only aggregates closest to the capital.
This means that basically we can use the triangle number formula to find what is the potential supply tax that is imposed simply for having a unit at the end of every province (like filling a front)
Where Total provinces = A(B+1)/2 , A is the number of provinces at the front and B is the distance to the capital.
For multiplayer games, most of the fighting happens around the Smolensk gap, and the provinces are on average 20-25 provinces away from Berlin. The Riga to Homel front is around 20 provinces wide. Lets consider this supply arc in isolation.
Plugging this in, we get a total of 22.5*(20+1)/2 = 236.25 taxable provinces at maximum.
Base supply tax = 0.1, Partisan effect on supply tax = 0.1, Mud = 0.25. While it's impossible to do anything about the base/mud factor, it is clear that when even collaboration government gives 1.5 revolt risk is worth suppressing. It gives an additional maximum drain of 35 supply and more importantly, fuel every day, and when weighed against limited stockpiles and infrastructure bottlenecks it might be worth spreading out MP divisions to secure whatever supply lines are flowing. This is especially in light that maximum infra throughput might allow only 200-300 supplies to flow at once in bad infra, so paying anywhere between 10-30% of the throughput in taxes would not bode well for the front especially Germany facing SOV, where the front is long and distant.
It also explains why transport planes have an oversized impact, because skipping a number of provinces for direct supply also means that you avoid paying additional tax to move that supply there, and helping to relieve the congestion by lowering the demand.
HQ brigades that are outside of the units they're controlling also add to the branching of the supply chain. This supply tax might potentially cost more when in enemy territory than the actual supply required for the HQ.
This also causes strange effects like a short, narrow spearhead possibly having less supply issues than a broad front, because of increased supply taxes when troops are spread out even though that sounds counter-intuitive (As long troops are within infra throughput limits).
And lastly, this also illustrates why you would never have a harsh occupation policy within any country that you maintain significant number of troops, because of the harsh taxes that may lead to supply issues.
On a side note for HPP: The minimum revolt risk possible is Military government with 5 revolt risk. Mud has an additional 0.5 tax modifier, and base tax remains the same. Occupied territory in HPP has 33% less throughput than vanilla (Infra impact 3 for HPP vs 4 for vanilla). This makes the supply situation even more challenging when conducting an invasion and quite unbalanced for MP play.
I have observed my supply demands surging thanks to mud in the Soviet theatre in the HPP MP game. From a ledger consumption of around 910 supply and 848 fuel (my whole army which is spread out) I see a daily request of around 14k supply and 12k fuel from the two provinces Lubben and Frankfurt an der Oder facing east. The majority of this is due to supply tax of 0.5 from mud, and should clear up once the muddiness reduces.
Disclaimer, I might be wrong in this analysis, but as I have not found any detailed explanation of how supply tax works other than some descriptions, I'd like to put this up for discussion so we can understand HOI3 better before we put it aside for HOI4 soon
.
From the wiki some basic concepts of infrastructure and throughput are well illustrated, but what is left out is exactly what impact supply tax has on the actual amount of supply making it to the front.
From this image, we see that the HQ consumes 0.54 supply, but the draw 1 province away is 1.0 supply
This is because I modified supply tax to 0.5 for testing, and is modified by tech levels with -0.06 to sum up as 1.0.
Also, supply tax is only paid once, ie, all supply requests whether it's 1 to 1000 flowing through the province will pay the prevailing province tax. This means that troops in a single line of 10 provinces will all pay the same overall supply tax as the same troops all standing 10 provinces away from the supply center.
Following the supply system, this additional cost is passed on all the way back to the main supply depot.
What is not so clear is that if you spread your units out, naturally there are more "paths" or potential paths that supply flows through, using the adjacent province request. Every potential path that supply flows through briefly will add to the tax. This means while it seems to alleviate the throughput demands at a specific province, ultimately you add demand to the provinces closest to capitals via the invisible supply tax.
Using a simple example of a front 6 provinces wide, 6 provinces away from the capital, this supply tax can be visualised as a triangle of 6 units tall and 6 units wide. The total number of "units" or taxable provinces in the worst case, where every province has it's separate path that only aggregates closest to the capital.
This means that basically we can use the triangle number formula to find what is the potential supply tax that is imposed simply for having a unit at the end of every province (like filling a front)
Where Total provinces = A(B+1)/2 , A is the number of provinces at the front and B is the distance to the capital.
For multiplayer games, most of the fighting happens around the Smolensk gap, and the provinces are on average 20-25 provinces away from Berlin. The Riga to Homel front is around 20 provinces wide. Lets consider this supply arc in isolation.
Plugging this in, we get a total of 22.5*(20+1)/2 = 236.25 taxable provinces at maximum.
Base supply tax = 0.1, Partisan effect on supply tax = 0.1, Mud = 0.25. While it's impossible to do anything about the base/mud factor, it is clear that when even collaboration government gives 1.5 revolt risk is worth suppressing. It gives an additional maximum drain of 35 supply and more importantly, fuel every day, and when weighed against limited stockpiles and infrastructure bottlenecks it might be worth spreading out MP divisions to secure whatever supply lines are flowing. This is especially in light that maximum infra throughput might allow only 200-300 supplies to flow at once in bad infra, so paying anywhere between 10-30% of the throughput in taxes would not bode well for the front especially Germany facing SOV, where the front is long and distant.
It also explains why transport planes have an oversized impact, because skipping a number of provinces for direct supply also means that you avoid paying additional tax to move that supply there, and helping to relieve the congestion by lowering the demand.
HQ brigades that are outside of the units they're controlling also add to the branching of the supply chain. This supply tax might potentially cost more when in enemy territory than the actual supply required for the HQ.
This also causes strange effects like a short, narrow spearhead possibly having less supply issues than a broad front, because of increased supply taxes when troops are spread out even though that sounds counter-intuitive (As long troops are within infra throughput limits).
And lastly, this also illustrates why you would never have a harsh occupation policy within any country that you maintain significant number of troops, because of the harsh taxes that may lead to supply issues.
On a side note for HPP: The minimum revolt risk possible is Military government with 5 revolt risk. Mud has an additional 0.5 tax modifier, and base tax remains the same. Occupied territory in HPP has 33% less throughput than vanilla (Infra impact 3 for HPP vs 4 for vanilla). This makes the supply situation even more challenging when conducting an invasion and quite unbalanced for MP play.
I have observed my supply demands surging thanks to mud in the Soviet theatre in the HPP MP game. From a ledger consumption of around 910 supply and 848 fuel (my whole army which is spread out) I see a daily request of around 14k supply and 12k fuel from the two provinces Lubben and Frankfurt an der Oder facing east. The majority of this is due to supply tax of 0.5 from mud, and should clear up once the muddiness reduces.
Disclaimer, I might be wrong in this analysis, but as I have not found any detailed explanation of how supply tax works other than some descriptions, I'd like to put this up for discussion so we can understand HOI3 better before we put it aside for HOI4 soon
.
