Slitherine

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Toyohara (on Sakhalin) is connected by high volume rail to Shikuka to the north.

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ORIGINAL: Historiker

Toyohara has a daily surplus of 9.800 resources. Its port can only handle 11.250 per day. So either you have nearly permanently a convoy docked and loading - which means at least two, rather three to four convois only for Toyohara, you MUST enlarge the port!

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ORIGINAL: Graymane

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ORIGINAL: Mike Solli


[snip]I allocate a set amount of supply to operations, with a reserve that I don't touch unless absolutely necessary. I also track about 20 or so stats daily. I want to catch trends before they become critical. [snip]

What stats do you track and how?

Created by the amazing Dixie

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I plan on accelerating ships (all ship types, not only cargos) when they are 10-30x duration in days from being received. That's the most cost efficient (in shipbuilding points) way to accelerate.

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ORIGINAL: Historiker

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I plan on accelerating ships (all ship types, not only cargos) when they are 10-30x duration in days from being received. That's the most cost efficient (in shipbuilding points) way to accelerate.

Will it be cheaper, then?

Created by the amazing Dixie

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ORIGINAL: pompack

Well Mike, I kinda approached it from a different direction. This example is for resources; oil is more complex because there are fewer size choices for tankers.

Assume little ships are less efficient (ton-miles move per dollop of fuel); note that every ship will be sailing every day (unless loading/unloading) but the short haul routes will spend proportionally more time loading/unloading thus that is where you want the small ships.
Assume that I will deliver to a port that is the same size or larger than the source port
Assume that escorts will be the limiting factor so strive to maximize the convoy size
Assume that all of the two smallest AKs are converted to PBs

So I find the closest port that is a source of goodies.
I take one escort (1941, I expect to have to add an additional escort every six months as the subs get better) and as many of the smallest AKs required to be just below the size of the source port.
I determine the transit time; divide capacity by twice transit time plus two days (not always true but this assumes one day load/unload) to give mean daily transfer rate (MDTR); divide daily resource production (or overland movement if port not resource center) by MDTR to determine ROUGHLY how many convoys are required to service the source.
Create the required number of convoys and start them moving. Note that they will bunch up at first but that doesn't matter; in the steady state they will NOT interfere unless you have created too many convoys.
Now repeat for each successively more distant source. Note that as you go further out, the ships in the individual convoys get larger simply because you run out of small ships.

Now I have found that the source ports are not fully utilized; a level 3 port is capable of handling 10k- 20k (big ship versus little ship) and that is more than can be made available in every case I have found (so far). The bottleneck can come at the receiving end with many convoys coming into a limited number of ports at irregular intervals. HOWEVER I have found that there are not really a limited number of ports. The trick is to insure that you direct (for as long as possible) single convoy STREAMS to a single port. When you have a case where the desination port is big enough to simultaneously take a convoy for each of two (or more) streams, then you can direct those multiple streams to a single port.

Now you will still run out of ports that way, so the next step is to monitor the loading of each destination port: a destination port can be considered as a one-convoy-port or a two-convoy-port, etc based upon the size of the convoys and the port. Each day simply note how many additional convoys of the largest size scheduled for that port could be accomidated there and note the most underutilized port on Honshu (this is actually more rigorous than necessary, I just eyeball it myself). When it is necessary to add the next convoy stream, route it to that port. As usual, there will be short-term conflicts but they will work themselves out as the convoys space out to to initial congestion (usually, there will always be recurring conflicts due to the beat frequecies generated by the varying convoy voyage times from different streams using the same destination port.)

The selection of a destination port is not as significant as it seems at first glance. When you use multiple destination ports, some convoys will have to steam further than others but it really doesn't matter that much as long as you avoid crossing routes (e.g. a southbound convoy from Sakahlin heading for Hiroshima meeting a northbond convoy from Luzon heading for Hirosaki would be a Bad Thing). By spreading the load among many destination ports you do tend to increase the sailing distance but you drastically reduce the congestion at the few big ports. Also note that you should be cautious about using a destination port that is adjacent to port on another island; that can reduce the amount of inter-island transfer by "osmosis" and require you to use precious shipping for inter-island transfers.

Now reading this, it sounds much more complicated than it really is. At a basic level it is use convoys that fit the source port and send them to as many destination ports as possible. They will conflict at first but then space themselves out automatically