Replacements thread for the wiki Game Concepts page

[ArmChairGeneral]

In the replacements issues thread pgr posted

In reference to replacements, is there a thread (or wiki article) that explains in detail how the replacement pool works? I for one am curious how the mechanic works when I set the game settings to give me 10%. Do the resources for those replacements get subtracted at the start or the end of a turn? Should I leave troops, cash, and WS in the bank so to speak, so the system can create replacements? Even when I do leave resources, pool replacements don't seem to be created and I wind up doing it manually. I'm just curious about the mechanics.

There is now a wiki page for Settings, and another for Replacements under Game Concepts, as these questions apply to both topics. Unfortunately, there is nothing in them yet. I volunteer to write up some stuff to get the wiki going for these, but could use a hand with answers to pgr's questions as well as others, so I thought that a thread for asking/answering questions about replacements would be a good place to gather information so it can be wikied.

Other questions I would like to know:

1. How does auto-replacement distribute purchases between the unit-types? Will it try to bank 10% heavy artillery replacements for example?

2. (Edit: See below.) The general consensus seems to be that a replacement chit can provide roughly 10 hits before it fails a roll and is consumed, but my experience is that this is a pretty low estimate; I regularly recover 100+ line infantry hits with just three or four chits. If anyone knows the probability of the per-hit roll, I could work out the distribution and its implications from there.

3. Is there a relationship between how many spare chits you have and whether or not you receive elite brigades and whether they are missing elements? Similarly, the initial Armies in the Mid-Atlantic are missing many elements. Does the player have to buy some or all of these, or does the script for these forces add replacements for free to bring them up to strength?

4. An experienced player can usually guess, but is there a way to know what type of replacement chit a brigade that is missing elements (white chevron) needs?

Please, any answers, questions, observations or rambling discourses about replacements are welcome and will help to get more content onto the wiki!

[GraniteStater]

There's more than a few who have never played AACW, so bear with me, this springs from the original game.

There was no AutoBuy.

You bought Replacements & Reinforcements separately. The Replacements screen showed, numerically, how many elements you had to fill for each category of Men, i. e., Inf/Cav/Art, Hvy, Lt, etc. Naval was abstracted to at least some degree, IIRC.

The 'rule of thumb' was keep 10% of the Elements Out on the Board, in play, that is. This was usually enough to cover most contingencies. If you bled heavily sometimes, you bought more. The 10% rule helped preclude having to buy every Turn.

Now, the system will attempt to buy zero, 5%, or 10% as selected - every Turn, I suppose - from what I've been seeing, it 'targets' the percentage desired & selected.

So, ya gotta buy manually, sometimes. In essence, it's a bookkeeping device.

Feel free, codeheads, add on.

[ArmChairGeneral]

Warning, dorky math ahead.

I think I have found the answer to question #2 above.

According to the manual

As a rule of thumb, one replacement element can replace exactly one lost element or be expected to replace an element’s worth of
hits lost (with a chance of being consumed for each hit replaced).

This implies a geometric distribution with the percentage chance of any individual element consuming a chit being 1/(#of hits in that type of element). So an infantry replacement chit would have a 1/20 chance per hit of being consumed, and the average chit would be consumed after replacing 20 hits. The variance and thus the standard deviation increases with the number of hits in the element type, so the larger the element the more likely it is to be farther from the average, so expect some variability (both up and down equally) in replacements hits from infantry, elite and cavalry replacements and less variability in brigs and artillery. This variability can be seen turn by turn, but the number of replacement hits you will use over the course of the game is pretty large in terms of this type of distribution, and the variances aren't that big, so over the course of the game the average is pretty reliable. ("That's why they call it an average," as my baseball coach used to say.)

The geometric distribution is memoryless. In other words, the probability of a chit being consumed by a particular hit is not dependent on how many hits the chit has already provided. Therefore, none of the chits shown in the production window are "partially used" from the previous turn, you can expect the normal average number of hits to be replaced by any chit you have no matter how many hits it has already provided.

The takeaway of this is that in order to figure out how many replacements are needed, divide the number of hits showing above the NATO symbol by the number of hits in the typical element. For infantry, elite infantry and cavalry, divide by 20. For light and medium artillery divide by 8, brigs by 10, etc. Visually, if a damaged element is showing 50% red, it will take approximately 50% of a corresponding replacement chit to bring it to full strength.

[jamebrooks224]

i think you are right