Yeah, that's pretty accurate. It's not like the US could deploy 60 divisions to Morocco.
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Yeah, that's pretty accurate. It's not like the US could deploy 60 divisions to Morocco.
Another Friday, another diary! Today we will be talking about something a lot of you have been asking about for a long time: The Supply System. This is going to be a big one!
The HOI3 supply system had a lot of problems. It was hard to understand how it worked, and it was hard to know what to do to solve supply problems for the player because it was usually due to missing something some time ago. We even made a separate Arcade Mode for supply which of course nobody used (what self respecting player would pick something called "Arcade Mode"?).
After a couple of glasses of 16yo Lagavulin and some deep thoughts the following problems needed to be solved:
- It must at any point be possible to look at an area and see how many troops can work there without problems. Also for naval invasions.
- It must be possible to see exactly what the bottleneck in your supplies are and give the player possible actions to fix this that are clear.
- The supply system itself must not have long complicated flow networks where cause and effect are hidden by time.
- The supply system must not collapse if a capital is taken which was a big problem in HOI3 and both unrealistic and not fun.
- Holding out in cities should be possible even when cut off from the rest of your force.
- Resistance must be able to hurt your supply lines without being a Whac-A-Mole problem.
- Supply issues need to get gradually worse for a unit rather than feel binary like in HOI3.
Scary list? Sure is, but I think we managed to solve all of it. So how does it work then?
- The world is separated up in Supply Areas, made up of provinces. They are purely for gameplay and generally follow terrain types and such.
- Each area can tell you at a glance exactly how many divisions it can support and how much you are taking up.
- If you hover your mouse over an area it will show you an arrow tracing the path supply takes, and indicate what is limiting it. Areas also have quick buttons for helping solve problems right there (improve naval base level or infrastructure etc).
- The game will show alerts from areas with supply problems to notify player (super useful when you are, say, Britain and spread over many theaters).
The supply level of an area are decided by the following things:
- A local scripted value. Think of it as base infrastructure that can't really be destroyed (will be basically 0 in mountains and deserts and pretty high in densely populated Europe).
- Any big cities/victory points will increase it. So holding out in these is possible.
- Local resistance movement activity in occupied territory disrupting things for you (we'll have a separate diary on these guys)
- Incoming supplies from neighbor area. We trace back to capital, or if capital is cut off the next best area. The supply you get is limited by the lowest infrastructure on your route (also possibly sabotaged by resistance), including your own infrastructure level. So for a player what you need to care about is what the bottleneck is, because that is what is going to affect how troops on the front fare. There is also some guaranteed spillover from neighbors to soften the transitions between bad and good areas (simulating that even if decent railway lines stop at a point it's feasible to transport some distance with trucks or horses etc).
- If we are cut off from home area, say fighting in Africa, or on an island, supply will travel overseas using convoys and be limited by the size of the ports receiving it. So making sure convoys are not sunk and bases are able to sustain you is important before doing any overseas activities.
- Put transport planes on a mission to drop supplies. Useful for cut off troops (this is still WIP so can't show it yet).
- It also worth noting that supply areas will change size if they are being fought over so actual levels will depend on how much you control.
When a unit finds itself out of supply it has a short period of time where they can live off their own supplies, after that their situation will gradually get worse up to about 30 days when things get very bad. Being out of supply makes you lose organization, move slower, not fight as effectively and take a lot more attrition. Veteran players of HOI know that the best way to beat the enemy is to cut off their supply, encircle them and then destroy them, and this remains true in HOI4.
So how can a player improve their supply situation?
You start by finding the bottleneck.
- Improve infrastructure to allow more supply into the area.
- If linked by sea, make sure to escort convoys and protect them from raiders.
- Build bigger naval bases to allow better throughput.
- Deal with local resistance.
- Research and attach Supply Companies to your division templates to help them manage.
- Airdrop supplies.
- Simply withdraw some troops from an area.
So, what is supply exactly?
In HOI3 supplies was something you produced and stockpiled, then fed into a flow network towards units. In HOI4 the only thing you can stockpile is equipment so this is what you do. Moving, training, fighting, being in bad weather or in particular in bad supply means equipment breaks down and this equipment needs to be shipped. The worse a supply situation is the longer it will take to send equipment and the more attrition you will take. So instead of a flow network we have a system being limited by bottlenecks.
So this means that the abstract "supply" of HOI3 is now instead requests for specific equipment instead which fits a lot better in with HOI4's equipment and production focus. This also means that there is no separate fuel need as such in the game, this instead is included in production of replacement equipment which need Oil (all tanks, trucks etc). Before everyone chokes on their friday beer give this some thought. Being able to stockpile fuel generally leads to the same problems as all other kinds of stockpiling when it comes to hindsight, so by wrapping it into the actual production of equipment requests to units (also nobody would request a tank without diesel to run it, and if they did it wouldn't really be usable as a tank) everything clicks into place and player doesn't have to micro manage all movement, airplane rebasing etc to try to avoid fuel waste and focus on making sure they have access to a strategic Oil resource and replacement equipment and a clear path for units to be supplied.
(p.s dont look too much at the numbers in all these screenshots, we havent really finished balancing supply yet)
Next diary we will take a look at civil wars and coups!
Is there going to be a possibility to create supply dumps manually? I.e. I'm preparing a major attack and I anticipate dramatic increase in supply demand over the course of the attack. I want to be able to accumulate corresponding amounts of supply in order to keep my attack going. Such system was, in fact, used in real world operations.
It is rather disappointing to learn that there will be no more fuel requirement. Our ships and planes are going to move powered by player's will to victory (or red bull or both) .
Referring to earlier statement by developers on the subject of transport planes, is common sense going to take over and make it possible to build transport aircraft? Just make them less, a lot less expensive to build than bombers and things will work out just fine. Perhaps, not something thought of by arcade minded players, but surely appreciated by HoI franchise fans. Supply by air can be absolutely crucial in conditions of poor/absent infrastructure, extreme remoteness of the battle field from our cores or time concerns: island campaigns, para drops, marine assaults, para drops, arctic campaigns.
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Welcome to HOI4 Triumph of the will !
Others country leaders will have to emulate Adolf disregard for reality. Where he moved imaginary divisions, we will move imaginary supplies.
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This is just nonsens, why do people keep saying "living off the land" this is bull and you would know it if you actually read the dev diary. We have two examples from the dev diary.
Korea:
Local supply: 16,5% (this will drop if you do not control every province in the area) - 3/10 produced by victory point cities.
Incoming neighbor: 21,6% (short distance transportation of supply, think trucks etc.)
Incoming from mainland Japan: 61,8% (long distance transportation, ships, train etc.) - limited by infrastructure in North Japan, probably due to that region not being able to send all the supply possible further down the chain.
North Africa:
Local supply: 43% - 1/3 produced by victory point cities
Incoming: 57% (no supply from neighboring areas) - this is limited by infrastructure in the area in question.
How is this "living off the land"?
Its obvious in both cases that most of the supply for the area is being imported into the region from the mainland either by convoys or rail.
And the thing about USA and Canada having the same supply limit if they drop troops the same place. Ofcourse they would, they also did in HoI3, if both nations had to send the supply to north africa the ports in north africa or the infrastructure there would be the thing restricting supply. This was the case in HoI3 and its still the case in HoI4 the only difference is that HoI4 will tell you exactly why and where you need to focus to improve the supply situation so you can supply more units.
If someone were to sink their convoys otw to the north africa and that ended up being the bottleneck then the US will have an easier time protecting the convoys due to their larger navy. This was the case in HoI3 and this will still be the case in HoI4.
Regarding if a unit is in supply or not (not looking at fuel) the difference between the new and the old system is:
Supply doesnt travel from province to province capacity does.
Supply doesnt need to "catch up" as before
You dont produce supply or send it into the network (essentially this doesnt matter as you would always make sure you have enough supply in HoI3, so in actual gameplay it doesnt really remove anything besides another thing to keep track off)
Its easier to spot where the bottleneck is.
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First, of course they are not unlimited. I never said they were, specifically I said they were limited, to 1 and 2 years of military use respectively. The current US Strategic Oil Reserve, by comparison, holds two months of oil, for the entire country at current consumption. If it was limited to only military use it would last a lot longer, years I am sure.
Tooze also references the boost that the German economy received from the reserves of conquered countries. IIRC France's reserves supplied Germany with an additional year worth of copper. Tooze also spells out that the Germans wanted to stockpile much more of these strategic reserves, but could not financially afford to. So instead of making it historically difficult to do so, Paradox has instead just thrown the baby out with the bathwater and eliminated stockpiles altogether.
Well not altogether. Just now you can't stockpile natural resources, you can only stockpile equipment. So paradox isn't, seemingly, against stockpiling, just against creating a workable system to do it for natural resources.
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What does the information about the American oil reserves have to do with the quote You made of me? I genuinely do not see the link.
But it would be a no brainer decision. No brainer decisions are not good gameplay. There is no baby they are throwing out.
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Only if there is no consequence to the decision. Sure, if the binary choice is between Don't Stockpile, and Stockpile, and there is no cost, detriment, or benefit to do one over the other then I would agree. That is where the skill of the game designer to craft meaningful decisions comes into play. In this case they have simply decided to avoid the issue. You may find that an acceptable decision. I do not.
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Can you please link me to the dev diary where the devs talk about the factories that produce supplies and what kind of raw materials they use? If those factories are not represented in-game in any way you can roleplay/imagine how much you want but the fact is that without such mechanics the units are literally living off the land just like in EU IV. The supply direction system (as pictured) is apparently a simple algorithm that lends extra capacity to “supply” troops to adjacent "supply" areas and at least overseas ports if you have enough convoys. The bottleneck is well a bottleneck that reduces the boost the supply areas get with the said adjacency. Like I said before you can roleplay how much you want but without the HOI IV ability to sink all convoys/cut off the adjacency “supply” boost whenever we fully encircle divisions what is left is the EU IV system.
I am going to wait for more info/clarification from the developers so I will probably rest my case in this thread.
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Now you are just being silly. Will you please tell me what extract the ressources in the game? Oh theres no mines or similar then surely ressources are just found at random on the ground theres no kind of extration done at all. Oh a ship is built only by using steel and oil, but then how does it communicate wheres the gunpowder to fire shell silly me the ships must just be blocks of iron with a pool of oil inside.Can you please link me to the dev diary where the devs talk about the factories that produce supplies and what kind of raw materials they use? If those factories are not represented in-game in any way you can roleplay/imagine how much you want but the fact is that without such mechanics the units are literally living off the land just like in EU IV. The supply direction system is apparently a simple algorithm that lends extra capacity to “supply” troops to adjacent "supply" areas and at least overseas ports if you have enough convoys. The bottleneck is well a bottleneck that reduces the boost the supply areas get with the said adjacency. Like I said before you can roleplay how much you want but without the ability to sink all convoys/cut off the adjacency “supply” boost whenever we fully encircle divisions what is left is the EU IV system.
I am going to wait for more info/clarification from the developers so I will probably rest my case in this thread.
EUIV has a supply that derives from the province itself. Hence they get their "food" from a single province.
HoI4 has an area which consists of numerous provinces and with important cities (victory points) that produce "food" for the army in the area. Hence theres supply coming from and going to provinces inside a supply area.
HoI4 also has a system where the supply from two neighboring areas are sent between so as to level out supply this is as Podcat described to simulate truck etc. transporting "food" from one area to another. Hence here we actually have supply move between quite a few provinces.
HoI4 also has a system where supply are being sent from the capital or the next best area if the capital are cut off (as described by Podcat) this is to simulate long distance transportation of goods.
Now tell me how this is similar to each other? How is this "living off the land"? Its true theres no actual supply going into the system but that doesnt mean that the capacity isnt tracked. The only thing being abstracted is the factories actually producing the supply in the system.
Now if you look at HoI3 what does the actual supply add to the game? to be fair, nothing at all. You have X amount of IC/factories bound to production of supply, this could have been done by letting X amount of civilian factories in HoI4 being locked into supply production.
1. Do you at any point in HoI3 run out of supply in your stockpile? - no you dont
2. Do you at any point in HoI3 send less supply than is needed into the supply network? - no you dont
3. Do you at any point in HoI3 have troops that are out of supply? - yes it can happen
Why do you have units which are out of supply? - because they are either cut off or they are in an area where the throughput cant send the supply needed to the units.
1 and 2 are not simulated by HoI4. 3 is simulated because its a capacity system but still includes flow.
Could 1 and 2 be simulated? Yes, you can add X- amount of civilian factories which are locked into producing supply. At the same time you can add more civilian factories to all nations. Would this add anything to the gameplay of the game? - no it would not.
So yes theres "factories" producing units of supply for your troops but since the player will always keep his troops fully supplied theres really no actual reason to have them on the map as they do not add any choice to the player. They just add something more to adjust. The thing which is interesting for the player is how many troops can i supply in this area of operation and what can i do to increase this number.
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you already have confirmation that you can cut off supply. If you have units encircled in a victory point city it will essentially have capacity for 1 supply. thats 1 triangular unit. Thats atleast how it has been described.
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Yes, I really do think that.
What's Army A? Supply is now drawn by armies? Why are there only 3 depots? Could I improve efficiency in the long-run by adding another depot?
You really have no idea what you're talking about.
See previous post.
I'm beginning to doubt that you've actually read what I posted.
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I'd have thought recovering organisation would require fuel and recovering unit strength would require equipment. But I guess this abstraction will probably workout okay once I get my head around it.
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Your not supplying the actual Division your augmenting the Supply Area and someone has left a strait in from Japan to Korea which I assume explains the high homeland figure that should be removed.
As far as I can tell looking at the Italian screen local supply is 6 and required is 1.39 so you don’t actually need the convoy for supply?
Podcat said that if there is no local victory point or base supply you will slowly starve but in this case there is actually 2 victory points so even without a convoy the Italian Divisions should remain in a state of supply, is this the case?
If so they should not lose organization, move slower or take more attrition they would however not be able to replace equipment, is this the case?
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Like I said before you can think whatever you want even to the point of thinking the abstracted-to-non-existence supplies actually exist and are produced everywhere but there is no need for insults.
Regarding specifically your HOI III comments it is now clear that you did not play it that much because for example all experienced players know that at times the capital supplies stockpile can hit 0 due to another bug still in the game or shiping too much of it into the network (...)
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The Victory of the play can only be achieved by Faith in his imaginary supplies.
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First I must admit I must had used "living off the lands" as you are right that supply limit is a combination of local, neighbour and mainland supply limits.
But, supply cannot be imported as it doesn't exists, as you recognize yourself:
Here I catch you again, they don't send supplies, remember what you said : You dont produce supply or send it into the network.
Only if you could afford it, because in HOI3 you had to actually produce supplies and not all countries could afford to produce enough supplies, at least not unless cutting somewhere else. Shortages happened, or at least could happen if you were not careful enough.
In HOI4 there is only a "supply limit" which is a cap to how much divisions can be supported without penalty. You don't produce supply (must I quote you again ?).
That being said, I find the new system is better in many aspects because it will be more transparent and possible to act upon to solve bottlenecks.
The lack of actual supplies production I could swallow because it's supposed to be abstracted to be included in equipments we must replace.
The weakness I find is the lack of fuel. OK fuel is also abstracted to be included in equipments of moving units, that could also be swallowed. Which brings me to the real weakness, ships don't use/consume equipments, they cost a lot of oil to build and then they run forever without using oil/equipment. Just lower the oil cost construction of ships and add "ships supplies" that cost oil as an equipment you must build in factories and then ships will work as all the others units (and moving units) in the game. Then I could live with the new HOI4 supply system, better than HOI3 but still perfectible.
You do produce supply as equipment are supplies and actually more realistic then what the generic HOI3 supply resource was as well require tought and strategy instead of a calculator.
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Which, incidentally, puts Germany in a waaay better position than OTL: the Reich was going to collapse, bad, if it didn't get the resources it then looted from France. As you said, they didn't have the money: their economy was on the verge of a complete meltdown. French resistance would have spelled their end.
More realistic ? Building a tank (or part of a tank) to replace ammunitions or fuel don't look more realistic in my eyes. As someone said: Sir, we are short on ammunitions. OK, order more tanks! Sir, we are short on fuel. OK, order more tanks! But as I wrote I could swallow this abstraction for the sake of playability.
But the fact that there is no ship equipment to act as supplies is even less realistic. Sir, The USS Missouri is low on fuel. OK, order another Iowa class Battleship! Sir, The USS Lexington is low on fuel. OK, order another Essex class Carrier !
To solve that, either introduce a "ships supplies" equipment (as all other units in the game) or make ships use a part of a country total oil capacity (which would vary when in port or in mission, so more difficult to manage).
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