Fri Mar 18, 2011 9:41 pm
Now, the 0/3 1/3 2/3 3/3 only concerns those transport methods, which usually move supply 5 regions per supply phase. If you are at 1/3 rail, supplies will only move by rail in the first phase (5 regions along a railroad). The other two phases they will travel by wagon using whatever intrinsic transport imfrastructure is in the region (usually road, track, or none).
These wagons (which exist only in the supply programming) travel several times faster than the supply wagon units you build in the reinforcements screen, so theoretically they can still travel up to 5 regions in clear terrain with fair weather and good infrastructure, even without being aboard a railroad or steamboat. As far as I can tell, they can always travel one region; eg supply can flow from Oregon to Rockies in the dead of Winter.
However, it's important to note that in each supply phase, the supplies must start in a structure and must end in a depot, fort, supply wagon, or city level 3 or above. This is why, although a given supply point may move up to 15 regions in a turn(usu by rail), it will only do so if it can stop in a valid supply target every 5 regions, and usually needs 3/3 railroad transport (unless the weather and terrain is perfect, which is very rare).
Lastly, there's no way to actually observe the movement (or potential movement) of a given supply point. It's simply too complicated. The supply window will generally tell you where your supply system could theoretically put a supply point, but not whether it will do so in practice. Given enough time, you can experiment and investigate the results, but it's hard to figure out what's really going on. As the Union, I discovered some pretty big gaps in my rear-area supply network, mostly between Eastern and Western Pennsylvania. However, this was after many games in which I had not experienced a major supply shortage that I could attribute to this Allegheney Chokepoint. I built several depots to get things through the mountains, but did not notice a substantial difference. You could probably design a test to severely stress your East-West supply network (such as putting your entire army in eastern Ohio in Dec '64) to see if it overwhelms the NYC-Albany-Rochester-Buffalo-Cleveland line and shows the more Southern routes (Harrisburg to Pittsburgh, Harpers Ferry to Grafton, etc) to be actual bottlenecks. But that could be a big time-eater.
Likewise, the rail line from the Carolinas etc to Virginia is apparently choked through Garysburg, while the rail line from Knoxville etc to Petersburg VA etc thru SW VA appears to be too long for supply to flow (no depots or lvl3 cities for more than 5 regions). Whether these apparent limitations in the starting set-up are real or merely theoretical is again difficult to ascertain without some major testing.
I have never encountered major problems, even when marching a half-million men etc to the Gulf Coast. But I always tend to rail and shipping investment.
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