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Tomn -> RE: Thoughts on the new "pull" system in logistics (7/4/2020 7:26:58 PM)
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OK, I was hoping to avoid this, but what the hell, let's do this - but I'll be honest, my last game was just before the 1.03 beta that introduced branching AP costs. 11 or something?
So let's start with something simple: Near your front, your forces are being supplied by a railhead with rail connection and a truck station in the same hex, along a straight road with one branch leading to the front, and another branch leading to your SHQ. Now place a 100% (or 95%, if you like) in your logistical hub hex leading back to the SHQ.
Boom. You just doubled the logistical capacity available to your front, because your railhead is still shipping in enough supplies via rail to supply the hex with the truck station itself, but the truck station is now passing on its entire output to the front rather than splitting half and half between the front and the useless road leading home. You can now field double the army you could before at no additional cost.
Now you're pushing into enemy territory, and capture a set of road junctions, one area moving down to a less important front, the other leading to their capital. Obviously you want fewer troops down the less important front so you want fewer supplies, so you tune the traffic signs appropriately, popping in and out of preview mode to ensure that you're not starving units on either front while delivering maximum supplies to the important front. Cool!
And now your light armor and mechanized has come online and you're making big slashing attacks, cutting off great big pockets of the enemy and severing their supply lines. Ah, but the AI can build roads for free and negate that, you say? Yes indeed - but even though they can build roads THIS turn, they don't come online until the NEXT turn which means the units are still cut off, and if you sever the new roads you can KEEP those units cut off, starving them out and making them that much easier to kill - that's how I starved out a GR heavy tank so badly that it lost a battle against a unit of militia. The price, however, is that you inherit an insane mess of road spaghetti that specifically exists because the AI was furiously trying to negate your successful flanking maneuvers, and THAT means traffic signs aplenty if you don't want your supplies to be completely dispersed into uselessness.
"But wait!" you say, "You can destroy roads, can't you? Why not simply do that?" Sure - for a cost in IC. A minimal cost, maybe, but still a real, genuine in-game cost that could be devoted instead to raising new troops, preparing new reinforcements, or investing in your actual economy, making you stronger and stronger and better able to win the war. And while the cost per road may be low, it adds up over time when you're striking down every bit of desperate lunacy the AI creates. Meanwhile, the cost of setting up traffic signs costs nothing but the player's personal time and attention - costly enough in real life, but free in-game. As someone else mentioned earlier, the ability to destroy roads becomes a player tax, where either you accept a weaker empire relative to what you could have, or spend a lot of time and effort pruning out branches with traffic signs.
Meanwhile while all this is happening you're capturing enemy assets, branches which now require some degree of logistics to make use of so that they become productive for your empire, but every logistical point devoted to an asset branch is a logistical point not spent keeping your forces in the field supplied, so you want to carefully prune those branches with traffic signs to ensure that a minimum gets through while reserving most of your stuff for your offensive. If you don't do this, you either starve and stall out your offensive, or extract fewer material benefits from your conquest. Not ideal!
The upshot of all this? A player who DOES do all this in detail can sustain a lightning-fast, highly effective offensive for a fraction of the time and cost it would take to upgrade logistical bases to overcome inefficiencies through raw capacity instead. That brings snowballing benefits - hitting the enemy faster without pausing for logistical upgrades means they have less time to react, less time to recover, and less ability to mount an effective counteroffensive, which means you take fewer losses on the offensive overall which means you can devote even more resources to strengthening yourself which makes it even easier to break through their lines and of course breaking through their lines means you're sapping resources from them which further weakens them and on and on it goes until they shatter entirely. And make no mistake, you can sustain an offensive remarkably far on a L1/2 truck station if you channel it correctly. Micromanaging your logistics allows you to support larger, faster offensives further from your logistical bases at a cheaper price - the ONLY real cost is the time and effort it takes to do so. Does it not make sense to do so?
Now, could you overcome the AI without using such tricks? Yeah, almost certainly. But that does mean that every war you fight will be slower, more expensive, and less effective than it could be, and when you add up the cumulative effect of multiple wars that adds up over time to put you in a worse position overall. And in a real sense, that's what it all comes out to - the individual effect of most traffic sign micromanagement is relatively small, but the cumulative effect over time becomes a major advantage, and to do without when you KNOW you can take advantage of it is to fight with one hand tied behind your back. And let's not even talk about multiplayer - someone who doesn't use these tricks is going to have a real hard time against someone who does, all else being equal.
That's part of why I can understand and sympathize with those who like fiddling with such logistics. Because it actually does make a significant, measurable impact on the game! You can put in a whole lot of work, and get a big, tangible reward out of it! If you put in the effort, you can make a logistical system run red hot to sustain an attack at the very edges of your supply capacity, every muscle straining to deliver the decisive blow at the edge of the spear, the extra work, planning, and sometimes knowledge translating into victory! Conversely, with a largely automated system everyone has that advantage, which means effectively nobody has that advantage - it's a level playing field, and the difference that extra work, planning, and knowledge makes in that specific regard is much smaller.
But the thing is, for me? All those rewards still come at a big, big cost in tedium. I dislike having to spend that much time and energy on the business, but I also dislike leaving that much money on the table. It's a situation in which I'm left with no good choices - either I grit my teeth and spend the time, or I grit my teeth and accept the weakness. Neither is particularly appealing and that, ultimately, is why I welcome the new change - because even if for me something is lost, I'm no longer trapped between two fires.
Edit: And of course this isn't including optimization in the peacetime empire which again allows you to do more with less. There is a LOT of room for tuning to reduce your need to upgrade logistics - and remember, every pop not working in an overbuilt logistical building is a pop that can be used to more directly contribute to your economy through mining, factory work, etc. etc.
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