Pocus wrote:Logistics, part I: Don’t march on an empty stomach!
Logistics. This word by itself can send shivers through the body of even a hardened veteran or an experienced general! Fail to supply your armies, and you will be defeated, no matter the odds. Succeed in cutting the enemy’s supply lines, and everything can be achieved against your foe.
Pride of Nations game rules about supply are rather involved. Before you run away, cursing the gods of micro-management for their betrayal, let us tell you that: the system is involved, complex even, but it runs almost by itself, at least at the lower level (the bean counting level). You, as the player, will only act at the top of the chain, taking the big decisions that will alter its flow. For the veteran players of AACW or NCP, you’ll recognize 90% of those games in the supply system of Pride of Nations, but there are some novelties, though. For the rest of you, here is how it works…
Supply is defined with supply points. In PON you have two types of these points: The general supply point that will feed your troops (think food, water, shoes, small parts), and the ammo points, used only during battle. These supply points are generated by structures, on the map. The structures producing most of these are cities, harbors and some special factories. Depots or fortresses by themselves only produce a meager amount.
Every other turn in PON, supply is produced then moved toward target locations or supply wagons. How supply moves is the core of the system, and going into details about it is much beyond the scope of this article (there is a wiki about the AGE engine though that describes it here: http://www.ageod.net/agewiki/Main_Page). What you should know at this stage is that the moves are done by a series of push and pull. Some locations will emit messages that they are too full, and some other locations (a depot, a supply wagon within an army) will on the contrary send messages that they need supply. And then, a lengthy algorithm (no y to this word!) will arbitrate between all the rich and the poor, like Robin Hood, and distribute supply points.
That’s the basis of the supply system. There are a ton of subtleties involved though. First, a ‘push’ (i.e sending some points away from a location) can only travel so much during a ‘supply subphase’, this is to take into account the advantage of roads, railroads, or the problems in moving through hard terrain. Then there is also the fact that each location has a coefficient attached to it. Some locations don’t want much supply, some on the contrary, like a supply depot, are literally siphoning away tons of supply from the grid, until they are fat and replete…
So, at the end of the sub-phases making the supply phase, our supply points are redistributed. This is where your armies start to use them, but only if they are in or adjacent to the supply points. Yes, that means that if you don’t have a supply wagon in your army, then you had better be close to a supply source, or your men will starve.
We talked about novelties compared to the previous games made with the AGE engine. The most important ones are these:
a) You can deactivate depots, so they stop accumulating supply points (they will on the contrary release what they have)
b) Depots can have multiple sizes, so you can tweak even better your supply grid.
The system works remarkably well, as it has been in use for some time now. We can see that because when you are in your home country, it works well enough that you generally forget about it… You are always well served. And you’ll notice that you have a supply system that requires attention only when you start invading a neighbor, or if your foe wants to cut your lines. Then you will realize that logistics is not for amateurs, quite the contrary!
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