Hearts of Iron IV - 33rd Development Diary - Supply

[Victor Cortez]

Here's my opinion (not that I see a reason why anyone should be interested).

Oil is still a crucial resource at a (grand) strategic level, and this is the most important thing.
As Germany you will want to be friendly (or take over) Romania, as SU you will have to worry about the Caucasus, as UK you will fight for Egypt and ME, as Italy you're screwed anyway, and as the US you won't really have to worry.
Without stockpiling (which is realistic btw), any nation will need a constant flux of oil to produce things.

At a tactical level, you will need your units to be in supply, with or without oil. An infantry division out of supplies will be useless just like an amoured division.
It's not simply getting the divisions back to strength, even a 100% equipped division will be useless if our of supplies (and then it doesn't really matter whether you run out of oil or foodstuffs, your soldiers won't fight, probably shoot their own officers and go looking for food on their own).

I don't know whether the system will work (on paper it should), it will have to be seen in game. To me it seems like a simplification pretty much like money was simplified. Some might not like it, but it's for a greater good.

As for tanks running forever, I don't get your point.

 

[Nicolas I]

Even if you get the equipment you will still not be in supply, we track supply status too, it isnt JUST equipment you currently have..

First, I want to say there are many things, I should say most of the things I like in the new supply system. We can see the supply status in each zone and act to solve problems working on the different components of the supply system (infra, ports, convoys, resistance) whenever possible. I rate this 9/10, maybe 10 when I see this in game. Well done !

But here is what I still don't get.

We are told that fuel and supplies are already included in the equipment we build. So when we send equipment we are also "kind of" sending fuel/supplies. If we do not go over the supply limit, all required equipments should reach the divisions, as well as all fuel/supplies required. Am I OK till there ?

So if I disband a division shouldn't that release/make available its equipments as well as its fuel/supplies components for use by other divisions in the same area? Then I am told that even if I get the equipment I will not be in supply. So after all, the supplies/fuel are not included in the equipments ? If not, where are they ? This is where you lose me. I try hard to understand this aspect (fuel/supplies) of the new system.

Or did you mean that even if I release the equipments (and their fuel/supplies components?) by disbanding a division, if the others divisions in the zone are still over the supply limit they will suffer until I remove some more divisions or increase the supply limit ?

 

[Hobus1]

Wouldn't Germany's Tank and Aircraft production actually go down when the war starts since it cannot import oil to build them?

 

[mursolini]

If you lose 90% of your equipment and aren't replacing it then you are going to take out of supply penalties as stated in the DD. Those would include org penalties, movement speed penalties, and probably attack/defense penalties too.

You don`t have to stop though. Your tanks run thrugh unopposed just fine, since there is no way for defender to sent forces to stop you, since your tanks don`t need to stop and resupply.

To be completely honest, in all my hours of playing HoI3 I never ran out of my stockpiled fuel. It might as well have not existed as a thing.

Which was a problem of HOI3 overabundance of oil and lack of civilian use of any kind, and had little to do with the existance of fuel itself.

But then what is to stop every player from churning out oil barrels from 1936-1939 and never have fuel problems?

What is stoping them IRL? Stockpiles must be build and guarded, they could occupy a factory slot and this would be enough of a limitation really.
Stockpiles had to be purchased for something, in particular in HOI4 you have to give your civilian industry as a trade, so there is a large drawback, if you trade in all the oil, you will trade out all your production, unlike HOI3 where money was needless. And Axis can`t really afford to ignore early game build up, if they want to get anywhere as in 1936 they are outmatched.

Even if you get the equipment you will still not be in supply, we track supply status too, it isnt JUST equipment you currently have

So, you replaced a simple system of consumption and complicated system of delivery, with simple system of delivery, and another array of rules, that try to implicitly determine if the supplies should be present or not.

Why not simply have supplies and fuel be produced by factories from resources, and distributed by the same supply system? Having to trade your civilian industry for oil already creates an easy and natural limit to any stockpiling strategies, which are far better than simply having all the ships present in 1936 have infinite fuel, and a can of worms of "rules of being in supply or out of supply" without drawing any supply from national supply system.

What is the logic there? Why we can have complicated system of models, national focuses, 6 types of resources, 3 types of factories but having 2 extra types of equipment (supply and fuel) braks the game?

 

[ozmono2005]

Scrapping the stockpiles of fuel and supply would be bad if it weren't for equipment doing the same thing. That is supply stockpiling of a kind has it's place as far as I'm concerned. Making it equipment feels more abstracted on the surface but at the same time it's more realistic as supplies aren't just generic now. It's a interesting solution that I wouldn't have thought of and I look forward to seeing it in practice.

 

[keynes2.0]

Scrapping the stockpiles of fuel and supply would be bad if it weren't for equipment doing the same thing.

Tanks and planes go obsolete. Oil barrels do not (well not until the mid 21st century anyway which is far outside the game timeline.)

 

[EntropyAvatar]

You don`t have to stop though. Your tanks run thrugh unopposed just fine, since there is no way for defender to sent forces to stop you, since your tanks don`t need to stop and resupply.

At least they will slow down (and the penalties there could be pretty large). If they run out of org, they won't be able to advance.

On the other hand, if you destroy a Panzer division, you've also effectively destroyed all of the ammunition and fuel they would be expected to use over their operational lifetimes.

 

[Jonas]

One problem with replacing supplies with equipment is the vastly greater strain on the supply system an artillery piece in constant action will cause compared to a rifle. If You had supplies, the greater strain of the artillery could be represented by a greater supply need in a more straightforward way. I assume different types of equipment will have vastly different weights in the load they put on the system but I doubt the different loads will accurately represent the weight of the ammunition and fuel used. The effects of putting the fuel in the construction of a unit are also not promoting realism.

The problem of hindsight causing unrealistic buildups of strategic resources or potentially supplies and fuel could be solved by restricting the ability to stockpile according to the world tension level and the level of political control realistically wielded through different political laws or settings attained per nation.

The actual distribution system look really good though.

 

[wingo]

Interesting solution.

On one hand, the abstraction itself is pretty unintuitive and removes things that were in previous titles (supplies&fuel) which in itself makes people angry, as seen by many posters. I´m not a fan of hardcoded province supply production, reminds me of EU where provinces have fixed base tax and manpower throughout centuries freezing relative province values regardless of what happens. It is less of an issue because of the timeframe, but still player has no control of how much supply he can produce (player can only reduce supply transport bottlenecks but not supply source).

On the other hand, it looks like it will produce desired results - intuitive and easy to use, no micro, hard to unrealistically exploit (famous capital exploit of HOI3) while still making you think hard about supply sitation and enabling defeating units by cutting them from supply. Looking forward to try it out.

 

[theJ]

Why even order new panzers since your old ones run forever since they were built?

You don't.
You order fuel, ammunition, spare tracks, greasing oil, and a less-shitty radio, coming out at 0,16 worth of "panzer supplies", all of which are conveniently constructed by a factory-park in Leipzig, and costing a total of 0,16 oil, 0,32 metal, and 0,16 rubber.

It all starts making A LOT more sense once you stop thinking of 1 in-game "tank resource" as a singular tank and nothing else, and start thinking of it as a collection of various supplies and spare parts more-or-less-related-to tanks.

You drive for a day? That's 0,03 "tank supplies" worth of fuel.
You fight for a day? 0,03 fuel + 0,04 ammo + 0,01 new track = 0,08 "tank supplies" needs to be delivered from Leipzig before the tank is again ready for action.

Abstract? Aye.
Bad system? Nay.

 

[Tasmosunt]

But then what is to stop every player from churning out oil barrels from 1936-1939 and never have fuel problems?

Well they could make fuel degrade, so several months after it's production if not used it's destroyed.

 

[Nicolas I]

How about if you don't get the equipment (don't have any left in your stockpile), but are in supply (in a region with lots of supply delivery capacity)? I'm assuming you don't suffer out of supply penalties, but you just suffer degradation of your unit stats as equipment that can't be replaced is lost to attrition or combat.

But we are told fuel/supplies are included in the equipments. So how can we be in supply if we dont receive equipments because we have no more left in stockpile ?

 

[keynes2.0]

What is stoping them IRL? Stockpiles must be build and guarded, they could occupy a factory slot and this would be enough of a limitation really.

Because of a variety of economic factors that would be complicated to model but all boil down to the same thing "No you can't do that". Storage on that scale was technologically impossible. The powers that would want to store lacked the currency to do it. The powers that would want to store didn't have sellers on that scale. It would require metagame knowledge.

Well they could make fuel degrade, so several months after it's production if not used it's destroyed.

Then why store it in the first place? Just have a limit on oil consumption at any given time.

 

[Hobus1]

You don't.
You order fuel, ammunition, spare tracks, greasing oil, and a less-shitty radio, coming out at 0,16 worth of "panzer supplies", all of which are conveniently constructed by a factory-park in Leipzig, and costing a total of 0,16 oil, 0,32 metal, and 0,16 rubber.

It all starts making A LOT more sense once you stop thinking of 1 in-game "tank resource" as a singular tank and nothing else, and start thinking of it as a collection of various supplies and spare parts more-or-less-related-to tanks.

You drive for a day? That's 0,03 "tank supplies" worth of fuel.
You fight for a day? 0,03 fuel + 0,04 ammo + 0,01 new track = 0,08 "tank supplies" needs to be delivered from Leipzig before the tank is again ready for action.

Abstract? Aye.
Bad system? Nay.

Well if
Panzer supplies use oil to make, and the tanks consume it just by marching then it is not so bad.
If it is not exactly as you described then Bad system? Aye

 

[Gort11]

Being able to mouse-over an area and say, "I can send fifteen divisions here without supply problems" is going to be rad.

The "replace an entire tank to represent running out of fuel" thing will work fine if you think about it in terms of the hundreds of thousands of tanks a country's war machine will go through - the system only starts looking weird if you think about a single tank at a time, and nobody's going to do that while playing because an individual tank is insignificant.

I do wonder if we'd be better off with some kind of oil usage for capital ships though - it'd be good to be able to strangle the enemy navy by cutting off their oil. Tanks and aircraft I'm not too bothered about, since those are going to be destroyed and replaced at such a rate that you'll quickly see the enemy forces suffer for the lack of oil, but it might be years before you noticed that the enemy hasn't been able to build any new battleships.

 

[ozmono2005]

Tanks and planes go obsolete. Oil barrels do not (well not until the mid 21st century anyway which is far outside the game timeline.)

But to supply a t-34 do I need to build a t-34? or can I build any tank? Sorry if it already came up I only read the OP and first couple pages.

 

[EntropyAvatar]

One problem with replacing supplies with equipment is the vastly greater strain on the supply system an artillery piece in constant action will cause compared to a rifle. If You had supplies, the greater strain of the artillery could be represented by a greater supply need in a more straightforward way. I assume different types of equipment will have vastly different weights in the load they put on the system but I doubt the different loads will accurately represent the weight of the ammunition and fuel used. The effects of putting the fuel in the construction of a unit are also not promoting realism.

I don't think the weight of the equipment being shipped imposes any load on the supply system. As I understand it, divisions have something like a daily supply requirement as a stat. The sum of all these daily requirements (which go up when fighting) is what will overload your infrastructure and ports. Then you compare supply demand to supply availability to see what fraction of your normal equipment delivery rate you get each day.

So it's totally possible to load up artillery with a very high supply consumption stat, so divisions with lots of artillery will be harder to support in low-infra regions.

 

[keynes2.0]

Equipment takes attrition when training or in rough terrain. Tanks not in rough terrain and not doing manuvers would be travelling by rails anyway.

But to supply a t-34 do I need to build a t-34? or can I build any tank? Sorry if it already came up I only read the OP and first couple pages.

Whatever tank you build is the tank the division will have. So if you have T-26 and you do maneuvers, the T-26 will wear out and be replaced by T-34.

 

[Heatth]

First, I want to say there are many things, I should say most of the things I like in the new supply system. We can see the supply status in each zone and act to solve problems working on the different components of the supply system (infra, ports, convoys, resistance) whenever possible. I rate this 9/10, maybe 10 when I see this in game. Well done !

But here is what I still don't get.

We are told that fuel and supplies are already included in the equipment we build. So when we send equipment we are also "kind of" sending fuel/supplies. If we do not go over the supply limit, all required equipments should reach the divisions, as well as all fuel/supplies required. Am I OK till there ?

So if I disband a division shouldn't that release/make available its equipments as well as its fuel/supplies components for use by other divisions in the same area? Then I am told that even if I get the equipment I will not be in supply. So after all, the supplies/fuel are not included in the equipments ? If not, where are they ? This is where you lose me. I try hard to understand this aspect (fuel/supplies) of the new system.

Or did you mean that even if I release the equipments (and their fuel/supplies components?) by disbanding a division, if the others divisions in the zone are still over the supply limit they will suffer until I remove some more divisions or increase the supply limit ?

The way I understand, "supply" and "equipment" are two separated things. You are not sending 'supply' alongside with the equipment. You are sending the equipment, period. The thing is, 'equipment' is a thing that you build and stockpile, while 'supply' is something that exist and that you move around. The supply exist as a constant flow that originates from the supply regions and move through infrastructure and ports. You can have an unit out of equipment (because you didn't build enough) but full of supply or vice versa (although being out of supply mean the unit eventually start to suffer attrition and will take longer to reequip).

Fuel is the thing that is eliminated and abstracted into the equipments (oil being used to build tanks and etc).

 

[Alex_brunius]

You drive for a day? That's 0,03 "tank supplies" worth of fuel.

Abstract? Aye.
Bad system? Nay.

And for ships?