No air supplies in HOI4?

[jalapen0]

Game is already a year late. Let the guys get the game out and patch air supply in later. Not anything to get your panties in a wad about.

 

[RolandRahn]

(snip)
didn't always fail, like in the Demyansk pocket, and the air supply of the 6th army would probably not have failed had hitler allowed a breakout, or if indeed a breakthrough to the encircled troops had suceeded, the purpose of air supplies is to buy that time,
(snip)

I disagree. The longer they waited, the more difficult an breakout became.
For two simple reasons:
(1) With every day, the Soviets were able to prepare against such an operation (by preparing defenses e.t.c.)
(2) With every day that the 6. Army would receive less supply via airlift than was required, the fighting power/mobility of the 6th Army was lowered. As they never received the necessary amount, we can safely assume that with each day passing, their ability to conduct a breakout decreased.

David Glantz came in "Endgame at Stalingrad, Book two" to the following conclusion (p.606):

If Sixth Army had conducted Donnerschlag prior to 18 December, as much as 40 percent of its personnel might have made it back to German lines. Thereafter, the percentage escaping would have decreased geometrically each day through late December, with less than 10 percent being successful after 26 December.

While nobody can prove how many could have escaped at a given time, we can clearly see that time was on the Soviet side.

 

[agentgb]

I disagree. The longer they waited, the more difficult an breakout became.
For two simple reasons:
(1) With every day, the Soviets were able to prepare against such an operation (by preparing defenses e.t.c.)
(2) With every day that the 6. Army would receive less supply via airlift than was required, the fighting power/mobility of the 6th Army was lowered. As they never received the necessary amount, we can safely assume that with each day passing, their ability to conduct a breakout decreased.

David Glantz came in "Endgame at Stalingrad, Book two" to the following conclusion (p.606):


While nobody can prove how many could have escaped at a given time, we can clearly see that time was on the Soviet side.

Well i agree with you, the longer they waited the worst there situation got, no doubt about that, i am merely advocating that some supplies by air as opposed to no supplies by air in most cases is the difference between life or certain death/surrender, hitler gave the stand and fight order against all advice, and as i mentioned earlier, operation flax resulted in a huge loss of transport planes that where attempting to supply axis efforts in africa, and affected the ability to better supply the 6th army at stalingrad which was degrading by the day.

Look i concede, it seems that people generally find air supply either pointless or apparently gamey/exploit. I say the die as been cast & more people will pick up on it at release, the fact this is the third thread asking a question on air supply that it is indeed a feature people want to see, and if considered pointless or not, in world war 2 there were many attempts made to supply by air, most mostly failing, and some a success, but attempted they where, even if stalingrad & arnhem are held up as argument for it being pointless. I hope podcat does find time to implement this later, since i believe those advocating to skip this feature completely are wrong on this one, but i give up trying to debate that airsupply should be implemented since i can't understand why some would not want this feature in.

 

[RolandRahn]

I agree that sooner or later (hopefully sooner ), there should be air supply in HOI IV.

However, it will still be playable without that feature.....in real life, it didn't work for LARGE pockets (like Stalingrad).
The most likely uses would be airdropping supplies on smaller units (the Demyansk pocket that you mentioned, consisting of multiple divisions, or cases where supplies would be dropped on smaller formations like advancing spearheads or paratroopers).

 

[lekim]

It was clearly a tad too easy in HoI3! I think the current HoI4 supply model would make it easy to have a simple bonus that would be far easier to tweak and keep at a reasonable level. For example (and just one potential example, I'm sure the devs have better ideas), each supply plane from a region that is in supply running a 'supply mission' to another region increases its supply cap by 0.0X (number adjusted to be sensible, but kept pretty small as it took a lot of planes to adequately supply a unit at HoIs level). I'm not suggesting it should be in the game at launch though, the devs have a lot on their plate, and the game can live without it at launch and as far as cut features to make launch, I'd back it as a good call to cut. Just that the simpler supply model should make it a lot easier to balance once it's been coded in.



Are you suggesting +0.5 to the cap or plus 50 per cent supplies? If plus 50 per cent, that'd be far too high. Even +0.5 would be high unless there were a lot of planes involved.



The drop zone for those paras was very small. In HoI4, where a province is the smallest available area, there should be enough room for it to work, although still inefficiently (even the air supply of the sixth army involved dropping plenty of supplies in Soviet territory). I'd imagine on the HoI4 scale the fighting at Arnhem would have been an active combat within a province (and it should be far harder/impossible to supply an area if it's just one province in combat).

I am suggesting 1 or 2 points to the available supplies in the region. Could not find a good supply system screenshot fast

 

[Zoob]

Supply should also be less effective if the province being supplied is under attack.

 

[Commissar Yossarian]

There's two separate issues at work here that people are confusing.

Air supply into an airfield, and air supply as dropped out the back of a plane.

Air supply into an air field is completely fine to implement as a pure total transport capacity/air filed capacity equation. Nothing wrong with that. All you need to do is put fuel back into the game and force the planes to deplete the stocks of fuel at both ends per the range equation.
This is one of the dominant reasons why the German air lift to Stalingrad was a huge failure (not that it would have worked anyways, but). The flight was long enough that the plane required to carry most of its total lift capacity in fuel, since it couldn't 'refuel' inside the pocket.
So the actual transport capacity of the aircraft was much lower than the nominal rated capacity.
This is where the game needs to calculate some fun facts about how much effective weight can be moved per aircraft and the appropriate amount of fuel burnt.

Dropping crap out of a plane is fine too (except for fuel back then), but then you need to attrition out much of it as lost or damaged.

Right now HOI calculates an IC cost for supply, and sort of just waves it's hand in the background for HOI4. This is good enough for ground/rail transport which isn't weight limited, but needs to be updated for air supply. The supply needed for an artillery batallion is much lower volumetrically than supply required for a light infantry division, but would weigh almost the same.

So the following would need to happen to make air supply work but not be broken and exploitable:
1. Fuel needs to be modeled into the game
2. Supply and fuel need to be produced by the nation separately. Ideally as a non player controlled 'IC and resource tax'
3. Transport planes lift capacity vs range (there and back) curves need to be added, along with a max cargo weight.
4. Supply has to have a variable weight assigned to it based on target units. The computer needs to calculate an optimal distribution of supply and fuel to keep the max number of battalions fighting.
5. Air missions, and air regions need to be changed to behave like sea regions and missions. No more teleporting nonsense. This way aircraft on route to a target would act like convoys and be able to be intercepted and destroyed and fighters in each region could be assigned to escort missions.
6. AI needs to be improved to handle the new mechanic. If it handles sea combat and transport acceptably then it should be OK with a similar air set up. The bigger issue would be to get it to reasonably calculate if it should or shouldn't try and how many transport planes to build.

This is obviously a big job and while it can probably be done through mods, it would be best to have Paradox integrate it as a DLC. They have access to the fleet mechanics and while they had their reasons for making air combat the way it is, it's weird and broken so needs fixing anyways.

 

[Secret Master]

All you need to do is put fuel back into the game and force the planes to deplete the stocks of fuel at both ends per the range equation.

This is a fair point. Fuel for planes becomes a significant factor in any kind of air supply. With fuel not being consumed while units act, air supply would be more or less fuel free. (And the units surrounded don't need fuel either)

 

[Redswingarcus]

We planned to have it in but it proved too difficult and we ran out of time for development. Its the most difficult thing about developing a game, but at some point you have to say no to any more features no matter how good or you will never finish, or release a buggy mess. I expect we'll add it for free in some patch.

When will it come, we did have a few patchec

It is a disappointed that it is no longer in. Was game mechanic from Hoi 3/hoi 2 no copy paste? I did get a the game price compansation, i am glad i did not pay it miss a lot from Hoi3 after a year i hoped it was fine tuned and equal to the previous hoi

 

[Locklen]

Rise from your grave...

 

[Dalwin]

Air supply would make no sense with the current logistics system, IMO. You certainly would not be dropping in replacement tanks etc.

We first need more depth to logistics in general before there is any logic to including air supply. Then we must also avoid it being able to provide much more extensive supply than was ever the case historically.

 

[FrancescoT]

Necromancy is not allowed. A more than a month old thread should rest in peace.

Closed.