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Curtis Lemay -> RE: New supply system... (2/24/2011 6:24:33 PM)
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quote:
ORIGINAL: Iron Stringbean
I decided to play around with the Tunisia 42-43 campaign as the Allies after reading Jeff Shaara's "The Rising Tide" (first of series and if you like Toaw, I have a funny feeling you'd love these books).
Anyway, after trouncing the German's out of Tunisia early on (I'm going to give "Last Stand if Africa 42-43" a try next...) I moved my forces South to meet Rommel's forces that just arrived. I was starting to form a defensive position around Sfax, and decided to wait until my units resupplied before making a final push South.
That's when I realized all my units had %1 supply. I traced my supply lines back, and although the railroads to the North near the Tunisian supply point were damaged, I still had a rail line to the NW that connected to two other supply points. The problem apparently was the distance from where this rail-line ended, and where my forces were starting to dig in.
The problem is with the Supply Radius. That's set by event, and if there is no event, then the scenario uses the default value => 4. This scenario has no such event, so 4 is just what it uses.
The scenario may be so old that it was designed before it became possible to vary the Supply Radius. Or the designer may just not have known about it. Regardless, 4 is a very short radius for a 5km/hex scenario. And it will indeed cause supply to exponentially decrease very quickly. Just for comparison, my CFNA scenarios are also 5km/hex and on a very similar topic. I use a Supply Radius of 25 in them - and augment them with Supply Units as well.
This would be one of the scenarios that, sans editing, needs to be played with Old Supply Rules.
quote:
That's when I started reading up on the New Supply rules. I now understand that supply runs as if a mech unit (with %50 density) was using its MP from the nearest supply point or connected rail-line, towards your units to determine the supply level. It all makes sense and seems much more realistic, but I'm having a hard time justifying the fact the supply levels can now actually reach zero if you're far enough away from a rail-line. When I turned on the classic supply system, my units had %7 supply vs %1, which I felt was a reasonable number to simulate a stretched supply line.
The way I started thinking about it, if a mech unit didn't have enough MP to reach my units in one turn, then I'd have close to %0 supply rate, but in a realistic sense, if a supply truck took longer than 1 week (or whatever turn length it is) to reach a unit, did it just cut the engines and give up? Rommel's supply trains coming out of Tunis were stretched all the way to Egypt, not just down to Sfax...
To me, the exponential decrease in supply to a potential %0 under the new system is too low and unrealistic. I feel a value that bottomed out slightly under the hard cap of %25 the total supply value from the classic supply system would work better, especially with some of the older and classic scenarios.
I understand redoing the calculus functions is probably too much to ask; so for now I'll just be using the classic supply system unless the scenario specifically states it's for 3.4. It's just a shame, because I really like the rational behind the new system. However, I feel the point at which the values start to exponentially decrease towards infinity is too low; specifically the value of 0.
Let's say you have 100 trucks lifting 4 tons each. They travel 100 miles/day. So, if the target is 50 miles away, they can deliver 400 tons a day. If he is 500 miles away, they can deliver 40 tons a day. If he is 5000 miles away, they can deliver 4 tons a day, etc. (Actually, that's an oversimplification, because the trucks - and their crews - consume fuel and supplies during the trip - so they would actually deliver well less than that).
Clearly, it doesn't level out at all, but keeps on decreasing with distance.
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