Wary of Semper Fi

[dilk]

The problem I find with supply is that its not really a problem and unrealistic.

For example you don't have fuel in HOI3 what you have is electric tanks that must be plugged into a grid, if you outpace the electricians you will have no power, if you strategically deploy to a province where the grid has been removed you have no power.

I believe that for supply to work and to become a really important part of the game play you need basically ports inland. That certain areas such as cities become essential cogs in the supply system, they should always be supplied and have the capability to build up supplies. One way of doing this is to have them behave like ports and have an ability to re- base armies to a city much like a fleet.

Cities, ports and airports should be major distribution points for all supplies. If I tried to imagine a simplified but realistic system I would see the capital as the main reservoir and supplies flowing out to fill up the regional reservoirs (based in ports, airports and urban centres)

It is from these Supply Dumps that units within range get supplied this rate of supply is modified by the infrastructure, you can push a unit beyond its supply range but increase the penalties until it can get no supplies whatsoever, winter could half the range of Supply dumps.

Of course you may then be able to make it more brutal and less forgiving for example if you quickly shift your armies from a victory in Poland to the French border you will simply not have enough supplies to attack immediately. You would need to re-base your armies to cities like Dresden or Cologne only then would supplies from the east start shifting to the west in large numbers. We must have already some system that can calculate the range of HQ so perhaps this could be adjusted to calculate a range for supply.

In the end I would like a supply system that was tougher and more realistic and became part of the game play its not really at the moment.

Now that I have done the hard work go off and make it so Paradox.

good point.
in that case cities like stalingrade would get a real strategical relevance.

 

[bz249]

The largest invasion undertaken during the war was Barbarossa, with 145 German divisions and a handful of other allied troops. Their supply problems were legendary. The US government decided early on that they couldn't supply more than 100 divisions, and that's split between two fronts. Even with that, there were still supply issues.

The idea that there should be 2-300 divisions x2 floating around France is just retarded. Supply would be impossible. Which brings up the most common reason people meet supply walls - they build an army that is far too big for the job it needs to do. I can mass 300 divisions on the Soviet border and just roll all over it, but I can hardly expect to get much further without serious supply issues. Also, my out of supply divisions would be wise to not move further beyond the range of supply if they ever want to eat again. They've already moved beyond it, what makes them think it will catch up to them if they keep moving? Thus why they sit and don't attack.

Semper Fi will be awesome, no doubt. I will enjoy it immensely.

The time is 1940, the French campaign

2x140 divisions with more than 3million men each were fighting each other a war of maneuver. The later 1944 campaign involved even more men and they did not stop at the Rhein because they had no ammo and fuel to move anymore. Or do they? So IRL it was possible to supply that many men there.

 

[unmerged(14719)]

If that's what you want you can have it at any time. Open up common/defines and increase the supply throughput value.

/facepalm

While I don't speak for all gamers of Hoi3 in general, I believe that some or not most of us do not want to 'mod' the damn game so we can play 'it' 'our' 'way'. I believe that quite a few of us 'want' to play it ' as is '.

Arcade mode is plain silly.

For the billionth time already if paradox hasn't understood, the problem about supply is not that we as wargamers don't get it. I think 99.9% of us know about the conditions of supply. It's because the User Interface, the damn feedback and the damn logic is incredibly broken.

There is no logic behind why a unit is out of supply, because the logic behind the whole supply issue is seriously flawed. It makes no sense why (for example) the month of may 1937, 1424hrs, rainy, temperature of 21 degrees, wind speed 2kph the central supply depot is in Shanghai and 7 months, 3 days and 13 hours later, that central supply depot is now in Hamhung.

1. Firstly, it will be nice for some bloody documentation about Supply.
2. Secondly it will be incredibly nice to explain, heck at least a goddamn pop up message that tells you where the damn central supply depot is. Next, at least tell us why the damn central supply depot has moved....and most importantly why it has moved!

For a wargame that prides itself on it's ambition, Hoi3 is an incredible step backwards. Alot of it is due to the weakness of depending on a heavily modified EU engine and perhaps the refusal to acknowledge the supply issue other than cryptic statements.

I'm not looking forward to Semper Fi essentially because I don't think it has anything to do with the Pacific theater. Like I've mentioned previously. For an expansion which is squarely centered on the Pacific theater, I find it terribly distressing to consistently see screenshots of the Western Theater of operations in the development diary.

 

[Darkrenown]

/facepalm

While I don't speak for all gamers of Hoi3 in general, I believe that some or not most of us do not want to 'mod' the damn game so we can play 'it' 'our' 'way'. I believe that quite a few of us 'want' to play it ' as is '.

If the game was changed to the way you want it people who like it the way it is now would be screwed. You can have the change you want by changing one number in a text file, it would take you ~5 seconds. If that's too much effort then you can't want it that badly.

 

[telesien]

1) While 'deeper' in gameplay than HOI2, the HOI3 stock events are just plain broken/non existent. So from a 'history lesson' point of view HOI2 wins. nevermind less unit specific artwork.

The problem is not in the number of events/decisions, but in their effects. I still shake my head in disbelieve when I look at the effects of SCW interventions...

 

[unmerged(146061)]

Every significantly sized army in every major period of warfare in modern history (no doubt ancient too) that I can think of has had logistical issues at some (read: MANY) point(s). There's simply too many unknowns, too much carnage, and too many people shooting back at you for things not to go wrong.

WW2 examples: The Desert War (ok not 10 infra.. got me there), the liberation of France/Rhineland campaign, Operation Barbarossa, (the entire) Second Sino-Japanese conflict, Guadalcanal, the Battle of the Atlantic, Battle for Narvik.. These are just a few, but when studied, all highlight how important, and furthermore, how difficult supplying a large armed force really is.

Transportation in the early 40s wasn't anything like what we have today, with 70mph interstates, bullet trains, massive jet airliner fleets, etc. It was slow. Cumbersome. Required a lot of manpower.

If you believe that having infra maxed out, with ports maxed out, and sufficient transports mean your army should be able to break this golden rule, then why don't you just accept that what you *want* really is arcade mode?

They're giving you a feature that gives you exactly what you want, reliable and constant supply.

I haver never complained about the fact that I every now and then encounter serious supply problems. That is basically is it should be. But the remaining problem with the supply system is that there are cases where the supply system gives u serious and unsurmountable supply problems when there really shouldnt be such problems. These are mainly related to supply routing, province ownership issues, lack of possibility to organize temporary supply during invasions (30 days supply/transport planes is not enough to this) They have been reported several times by me and others.

If u dont belive that there is something wrong with the supply system, try 1944 scenario as the Allies and pay careful attntion to their supply situation. Realistic or not realistic?

 

[Poh]

There is no logic behind why a unit is out of supply, because the logic behind the whole supply issue is seriously flawed. It makes no sense why (for example) the month of may 1937, 1424hrs, rainy, temperature of 21 degrees, wind speed 2kph the central supply depot is in Shanghai and 7 months, 3 days and 13 hours later, that central supply depot is now in Hamhung.

1. Firstly, it will be nice for some bloody documentation about Supply.
2. Secondly it will be incredibly nice to explain, heck at least a goddamn pop up message that tells you where the damn central supply depot is. Next, at least tell us why the damn central supply depot has moved....and most importantly why it has moved!

Why do you even care where the supply depot is? the only reason it matters is because it shut the convoys down at different levels of supply in different ports. Given that that doesnt happen anymore the placement of the supply depot is essentially only a matter of which province you might want to protect and in which direction the supply once unloaded at a port take the first day before beginning to move towards the units that need it.

 

[unmerged(146061)]

The time is 1940, the French campaign

2x140 divisions with more than 3million men each were fighting each other a war of maneuver. The later 1944 campaign involved even more men and they did not stop at the Rhein because they had no ammo and fuel to move anymore. Or do they? So IRL it was possible to supply that many men there.

I think one allied problem when they advanced through France was that there was no port big enough close enough to the front before they were able to capture (and repair) the port of Antwerpen. The supplies that the allied troops used came of course from USA and Britain, not from French factories. Before and after the Normandy invasion the Allies bombed the French railway system heavily to damage the German logistics. But when they liberated France, well, they had first to repair the railways. That took some time.

 

[Acesandeights]

Patience is better than any money-back-guarantee.

+1

Well said and fits perfectly with the issue at hand. I suggest the OP just wait a bit before purchasing. Simple as.

 

[bz249]

I think one allied problem when they advanced through France was that there was no port big enough close enough to the front before they were able to capture (and repair) the port of Antwerpen. The supplies that the allied troops used came of course from USA and Britain, not from French factories. Before and after the Normandy invasion the Allies bombed the French railway system heavily to damage the German logistics. But when they liberated France, well, they had first to repair the railways. That took some time.

Of course when the infrastructure is damaged that should cause supply problems. But when you have a perfectly intact Western European level infrastructure supplying millions of men can not be a serious issue (there can be issues like advancing too fast) since the whole WWI and two rather intensive mobile campaign was fought there. So IMHO any sane sized army should be able to fight in France without supply problems. The Eastern front, China or the desert campaign is whole different kind of cake. There occasional supply problems should be the norm (although the game shall be a little more consistent when and why a certain unit is in supply or out of supply... and reaching a total standstill at the Volga-Dvina line with fully intact divisions, well that is strange to me)

 

[Daelyn75]

Three weeks, in game its forever! Apples and oranges. This does not prove your point. They stopped to resupply and refit. It wasn't along the entire front. In game though the entire front would be out of supplies and no single unit could move. Its just not the same.

Prove what point? I never had any that this was to back up. You must be thinking of someone else.

 

[Daelyn75]

With this post I do actually have a point of view. I don't so much think that the supply system is completely inacurate, because the out of supply units probably would mirror somewhat how often it actually happened, however the in game effects I think are taken to the extreme. In fact out of, or low supply units in the game are probably less than actually what happened, especially after reading cougar's posts.

The problem that I see it is that a unit is either in or out of supply, and there is no middle ground. If Johan wants to simulate the supply system more accurately then he should have his team put in a lowering grade of organization because of low supply, but still have the unit function and move/fight. Have a low supply or out of supply icon on the unit then, but just don't have the unit completely stop . . . In this way then the German invasion of the Soviet union would be slightly more realistic when it comes to supply, because the Germans continued to push forward when they were on low supply until the basically ground to a halt, and not just stop when one day they were 100% supplied, and the next nothing.

Well, one thing I do disagree with is having all divisions in one province out of supply for three or more months which happened to my Japanese divisions in southern China, which I think is quite unrealistic, especially since there was a port right behind it. So there is or was some issues with shipping IMO, which I hope will be fixed with SF.

 

[Slan]

I tried to clear up this misunderstanding about instantly getting out of supply once before. Because it is not true. If a unit is recieving no supplies, it will use up the reserves first, that much everyone knows. But said units will decrease their actual consumption once they go below one day's worth of supplies, and will slowly converge to 0 supplies in the province. This transition happens within a week, so it is rarely noticed. And yes, if a unit has less then a day's worth of supplies in its province, then it will fight with less than -50% penalty.

IMHO this is one of the parts of the supply system which could be improved by a button or slider or something that tells the unit to cut back on supply consumption, intentionally giving the unit the combat penalty, but it might keep the unit in a constant, albiet low supply level, if the logistics can keep up with that level. (Supply demand would stay the same, only the unit would eat less.)

Also, for this to be user-friendly, it would need to be toggle-able for multiple units, preferably through the HQ's interface.

 

[numdydar]

Traveling Salesman Problem again

The problem I find with supply is that its not really a problem and unrealistic.

For example you don't have fuel in HOI3 what you have is electric tanks that must be plugged into a grid, if you outpace the electricians you will have no power, if you strategically deploy to a province where the grid has been removed you have no power.

I believe that for supply to work and to become a really important part of the game play you need basically ports inland. That certain areas such as cities become essential cogs in the supply system, they should always be supplied and have the capability to build up supplies. One way of doing this is to have them behave like ports and have an ability to re- base armies to a city much like a fleet.

Cities, ports and airports should be major distribution points for all supplies. If I tried to imagine a simplified but realistic system I would see the capital as the main reservoir and supplies flowing out to fill up the regional reservoirs (based in ports, airports and urban centres)

It is from these Supply Dumps that units within range get supplied this rate of supply is modified by the infrastructure, you can push a unit beyond its supply range but increase the penalties until it can get no supplies whatsoever, winter could half the range of Supply dumps.

Of course you may then be able to make it more brutal and less forgiving for example if you quickly shift your armies from a victory in Poland to the French border you will simply not have enough supplies to attack immediately. You would need to re-base your armies to cities like Dresden or Cologne only then would supplies from the east start shifting to the west in large numbers. We must have already some system that can calculate the range of HQ so perhaps this could be adjusted to calculate a range for supply.

In the end I would like a supply system that was tougher and more realistic and became part of the game play its not really at the moment.

Now that I have done the hard work go off and make it so Paradox.

The issue with ANY system that tries to model this in a real time game is the number of calulations involved which would cause the game to completely stop. In a board game you can look at a map and visually see (and calculate) pretty quick whether a unit is supplied. A computer cannot do that. It need a formula or polynominal that can be solved with very few CPU cycles.

Calulating supply paths and routes from depots involves much more that many here seem to realize. Do a google searh on these types of problems and you will see that they would cause far more issues that the current system does.

 

[Slan]

Actually, the idea of using ranges could make sense, but it would not take into account the infrastructure, so it wouldn't really work either. (The whole point would be to avoid considering a line between the two ends, so trying to take into account the infrastructure would take you back to square one.)

 

[cougar46]

But what I also don't understand is why people continue to compare the game to what happened in real life. HoI3 does not even try to resemble reality. I am not saying this is either good or bad, just a design decision to enhance replayability according to devs. Real life problems in WW2 have little to do with HoI3. Likewise, problems in HoI3 do not (sometimes) have anything to do with real life.

Well, namely because one of the main attacks on the system is that "it's results are completely inaccurate, units never stopped because they ran out of supplies." I've said countless times the supply system has flaws and quirks, but denouncing it because it's results seem unrealistic isn't the way to go because that's completely untrue.

Again, there are some flaws with this system and hopefully Paradox is thinking of ways to improve them, as they did with Semper Fi.

 

[Radioactive]

I currently actually care little about the new features. I hope for massively better performance. HOI3 is currently simply not playable in a fun way on my I7 920 with 12GB RAM.

Capturing the SU and allies is barely possible with the time consumed IRL to simulate this. Capturing the World is just impossible.

I really hope for optimized code AND threading. And if it still doesn't work out to be fast, let me disable some features or run a massively simplified simulation of them. Honestly, if you cant for instance get supplies to run very efficiently or in threads, I wouldn't care if you lumped together the infrastructure of 20 odd adjacent provinces and merely checked for connectivity to simplify the whole thing by around 20 times. Just let me play in Semper Fi...

 

[Slan]

I currently actually care little about the new features. I hope for massively better performance. HOI3 is currently simply not playable in a fun way on my I7 920 with 12GB RAM.

Capturing the SU and allies is barely possible with the time consumed IRL to simulate this. Capturing the World is just impossible.

I really hope for optimized code AND threading. And if it still doesn't work out to be fast, let me disable some features or run a massively simplified simulation of them. Honestly, if you cant for instance get supplies to run very efficiently or in threads, I wouldn't care if you lumped together the infrastructure of 20 odd adjacent provinces and merely checked for connectivity to simplify the whole thing by around 20 times. Just let me play in Semper Fi...

I think we might have radically different concepts of 'playable in a fun way' Maybe HoI3 is not for you... By the way, the Arcade Mode could be just the thing for you! If our speculation turns out to be right, it may even improve performance because there will be no need to calculate supply paths at all.

Anyway, optimizing the code for threading is not something you do for an engine that doesn't use it at all. It won't happen for Semper Fi, or Victoria 2, or any other future games that might be made using the Clausevitz engine. BUT, if Paradox designs a new engine later on, I hope they will do so with multi-core systems in mind from the start.

 

[Exterous]

IMHO this is one of the parts of the supply system which could be improved by a button or slider or something that tells the unit to cut back on supply consumption, intentionally giving the unit the combat penalty, but it might keep the unit in a constant, albiet low supply level, if the logistics can keep up with that level. (Supply demand would stay the same, only the unit would eat less.)

I also really really want an indicator of how many days of supply reserves a division has. I think this might get rid of a few headaches and help shed some light on the supply process

 

[abeth]

Three weeks, in game its forever! Apples and oranges. This does not prove your point. They stopped to resupply and refit. It wasn't along the entire front. In game though the entire front would be out of supplies and no single unit could move. Its just not the same.

I can't remember a single time I've ever had front-wide supply-forced advance halting, ever. There'll be pockets of divisions that are having problems, sure, but the whole front, from Leningrad to Stalingrad? Now you're just making things up. The whole front may have problems by the time I get past Moscow and towards the Urals, but that's a different beast entirely and completely realistic/WAD.

in that case cities like stalingrade would get a real strategical relevance.

Stalingrad didn't have strategic relevance other than Stalin's name. The smart commander would've surrounded it, blown it up with bombs and artillery, and moved on long before that process was done.

2x140 divisions with more than 3million men each were fighting each other a war of maneuver. The later 1944 campaign involved even more men and they did not stop at the Rhein because they had no ammo and fuel to move anymore. Or do they? So IRL it was possible to supply that many men there.

And this battle is well simulated by the supply system, as both armies are essentially fighting from within their own houses. 2x300 is a retarded figure and you know it, and I would never agree that any army should be able to supply that many divisions in one place unless their supply system involved UFO's and transporter beams. The 1944 campaign didn't have anywhere near the amount of troops battling each other as the 1940 battle of France, either, so don't even try with that nonsense.

I also really really want an indicator of how many days of supply reserves a division has. I think this might get rid of a few headaches and help shed some light on the supply process

Something like HoI2's planned offensive thing would be nice too, where you could supply a front with up to 30 days of stuff and it would just draw it from across the network.