What do I need to do to get supply?

[Xrybnix]

Didn't play for a while. So apparently nowadays, there is a new supply mechanic (well, new for me anyways) which if you choose to ignore it is basically saying if you deploy a single troop to africa or south america,, that troop is fucked, even if it is near a port. Yet miraculously, the ai can stack 40 troops deep within the jungles of the Amazon and in Central Kongo and will have perfect supply, thousands of kilometers away from the nearest supply hub, port or railway line.

Seems I am missing something huge. Like a button "activate supply routes" or something, lol. If the AI is able to supply dozens of troops in the middle of africa without any railways or supply hubs, I guess I should be able to do the same. But I am not even close to being able to do that. What am I missing here? Or is the AI just straight up ignoring that mechanic and it is perfectly normal for the player to not being able to put up a fight in undeveloped areas?

 

[Ffc]

If you've convoys and your troop is near a port, it should be supplied.

The system is very basic you've to have a supply hub in range (ports are supply hub) linked to your capital by either :
- rails, in which case you need trains
- sea, in which case you need convoys

You can increase the range of those supply hubs by motorizing them, you would need trucks to do that (you can also "motorize" a specific army which will activate motorization of the supply hubs they are near)

You can increase the supply given by a specific hub by
- increasing rail level if it is linked by rails
- increasing port level if it's a port and using convoys

For the AI, maybe you're playing in high difficulty in which the AI basically can ignore supply, so there is that.

 

[Cavalry]

in war, click the army then click the Motorize button is the step many forget to do. And everyone build truck for supply.

 

[goodcigar]

The supply system while a big improvement over the very simplistic practically non-interactive previous system is not perfect. And it's very opaque. It took me a long time to figure it out as a result. The UI for it isn't very good (clear) either (HOI4 issue since 2016). A lot of stuff isn't explained really.

However, even if you run out of supply, the penalties on your Divisions aren't that bad. Nowhere near what they should be realistically imo. You get a moderate debuff at most it seems like. Don't think I've seen it higher than like -35%.

One BIG thing that leads to confusion is that even with a Supply Hub in range and at full Motorization, even with full Infrastructure, even with adequate railway line connection, it can still be possible for your units in the area to not be fully supplied. It's literally impossible to fully supply units sometimes on certain tiles and then game doesn't explain this at all. The only way to get them fully supplied is to use air supply or build more supply hubs. You have to overlap them basically. It's a confusing and weird design but that's how it works.

Ideally and logically you should be able to upgrade the supply hub to a higher level (beyond level 1) and increase the amount of Trucks operating at the supply hub in order to meet your units' supply needs in the area. But for whatever reason the Devs decided not to do that and went with a different design.

Supply also affects naval units somewhat but it's not really explained anywhere in the game as far as I can tell.

Also of note, even though they added a detailed supply system to the game. They still left the old legacy "state/local supply" mechanic in the game. So you often don't even need to build a supply hub or improve infra or anything if you don't have a lot of units in the area. Obviously this doesn't really make sense in a World War 2 game as modern armies can't just live off the land like ancient armies did. It also undermines the entire point of having a supply system, but again for whatever reason the Devs left it in the game. Maybe to help the AI idk.

There are also disruption factors that effect the amount of supply getting to a tile (weather, terrain) and possibly the range? But the game doesn't directly show you this. There's no map mode for it or numbers provided in tooltips or anything for it. That info is hidden for whatever reason. This goes to the opaqueness issue I'm talking about. There really should be separate map modes and tooltips for all this stuff (state supply, hub supply, weather disruption, terrain disruption, combined supply, allied supply, etc)

Also beware, your allies will flood your territory with units and literally just suck up all your supply. Because it seems to simply be shared equally across all friendly units in the area. No priority levels. You can completely turn off allied supply on the hub, but then their units won't have any.

 

[Gran Strategist]

Firstly if you press F4 then it shows the supply situation on each tile...Blue is good red is bad. The more blue the better, the more red the worse it is.

If you mouse over a tile it will give a rundown of how much supply is being provided and used on that tile.

If you look at a supply hub it will give you 2 numbers, something like 8/24. The first number is the supply being drawn from that hub, the second is the maximum supply that hub can provide. If the first number is above the second number you can often improve supply by building better railways or increasing port levels. This can usually most easily be done by clicking on the supply hub and a railway symbol will appear at the top of it. Click this to upgrade the network supplying that hub and it will automatically queue up any rail and port upgrades necessary to increase its capacity.

Even with adequate supply in an area it can only travel so far and reduces the further away from a hub you get...you can increase that range with supply trucks as already mentioned. Early game when you may not have a lot of spare trucks you may want to upgrade the supply trucks manually at specific hubs in low supply areas but once you have plenty of spare trucks you should just change the truck supply level for the army so it does it itself as it moves around.


For the AI having great supply when yours is rubbish, what difficulty are you playing on as a large part of the difficulty setting are basically giving the AI supply bonuses. I use expert AI which allows you to tweak the difficulty better and I always remove any AI supply bonuses as they don't make the AI better or harder they just make it impossible to beat them in low supply areas as they will always have good supply and yours will always be bad.

Expert AI also does a good job at stopping your 'friends' from stealing all your supply while trying to help you. I would recommend it for that alone. Without mods there is a setting for each supply hub where you can tell it not to give allies any supply.


Outside of AI bonuses, as you get better supply the closer you are to a hub, if you are trying to capture and enemy hub they will be defending close to or on the hub and thus have good supply while (especially in poor supply areas) you will be further away and possibly out of range of your nearest supply hub and thus having supply issues.

Your main objective for any advance should always be the next supply hub, this both ensures you have good supply and takes the supply from the enemy.

If your in poor supply areas like Africa and Asia supply hubs are few and far between and thus even more important. If the enemy is strong you may have to build some extra supply depots to attack some places effectively. It can often be better to focus on the coastal regions as supply hubs take around 6 months to build where as ports take a fraction of that time and will generally be enough to get your troops moving in a supply poor region.


Always remember that any supply hubs needs a connection back to your capital and this can be interrupted in a number of ways. The enemy can bomb or cut off the rail link, they can bomb the supply hub and can also attack your convoys, trucks and trains, or simply you don't have enough convoys, trucks or trains to supply your troops.

Also, when you first capture a hub it usually takes around a week for it to become active and again make sure you captured the rails connecting it to your network or in the rare cases it doesn't have a connection you can capture make sure you build rail to it.


As a final note, in areas of particularly bad supply it is often better to actually have less troops on a tile. 1 well supplied unit will perform better than 10 very poorly supplied units.

 

[Cavalry]

Port too, stay close to coast line and build some quick port when needed. As Grece it is good to build an extra port to help mountain front line. Otherwise if lose the northern city you don't have supplies back up.