Solution to the Beachhead supply problems

[Veers]

Good response, Kraut.

 

[MikeC_81]

Well, I think every invasion should only be possible with overwhelming air and sea superiority, thats one of the reasons why the germans never tried Sealion, because they knew they couldn't risk it as long as the RAF and RN were still operational. So, any solution that requires such essential operational necesarities is a good solution IMHO
With the old system of supply points at the beach an invasion could be successul without having anything in the air or sea, as there is no sea interdiction in TOAW and cutting off the supply to the invasion forces would be impossible.

I think the tried and true interdiction model in the game which subjects penalties to supply probably would work better in contested cases. And resupply does occur in the face of enemy air onslaught. The destroyers supplying Tobruk garrison during the North African campaign and those which supplied the Japanese in Guadalcanal ran the gauntlet of air power frequently. The Italian merchant fleet supplied Rommel even under heavy sea and air interdiction. They took lots of losses but it wasn't as if the supply was squeezed dry.

... and he better does that, or suffer the consequences About the AAA: thats again a scenario designers decision, in WW2 merchant ships had a light AAA on board, so some AAs might be justified.
If the attacker would be indeed forced to keep a keen eye on his supply force, and has to keep a good portion of his air force on air superiority missions to protect them, that would make me really happy, because that's just what should happen. Just imagine what the german Ju-87s would have done to the dens stream of allied supply ships towards the D-Day beaches, had the allies not protected them with their own fighters :bite:

.....

About the evaporation: true, but than again, the scenario designer can easily influence how easily the supply unit will sink (evaporate) by assigning more/less equipment to its TO&E, or by changing the supply % of its formation to influence how quickly a supply unit recoveres from an attack. Such a unit at 1% formation supply would hardly receive any replacements, so if your planes destroy only 20% each turn, the supply unit will still get weaker every turn, as they'll get fewer replacements than necessary to replace the losses.

I agree that to some extent, but the fundamental problem of all or nothing is still there. I must make the decision to really pile on attack aircraft and risk a lot of my assets for a 100% win or I lose everything.

For example the hypothetical storm of every last Ju-87 on the beachheads might have produced catostrophic losses for the Germans but maybe it would have been worth it if they cut down the Allied supply to 50% by sinking half the transports.

In this case though, when I send my suicide storm of Ju-87s, 50% damage isn't going to cut it and I will have probably lost all my aircraft for 0 effect because I lost on the coinflip. Conversely if you lost the conflip, well game is over.

Even if we pad it so that you could chip away at the unit and then evaporate the ships over 4-5 turns of combat, I might really need the supply reduction now rather than later where 4-5 turns costs me a lot.

Every feedback is welcome, and I don't really expect every scenario designer to blindly adept it, it's just ment to be another tool in the toolbox, use it if you like it, use something else if you are looking for a different 'effect' for your scenario :smoke:

For sure. I just wanted to raise the point that using your trick as a method to try and simulate air (or sea) attacks on supply convoys probably isn't the way to go. Standard interdiction via aircraft or modeling naval intervention with events/theatre options might be a better way to go.

Your ability to create different supply values for different hexes using the +distance settings as well as the inherient flexibility of the system to let you restrict attackers to a certain number of beachheads by limiting how many "fleets" they have is really great though.

 

[Kraut]

I think the tried and true interdiction model in the game which subjects penalties to supply probably would work better in contested cases. And resupply does occur in the face of enemy air onslaught. The destroyers supplying Tobruk garrison during the North African campaign and those which supplied the Japanese in Guadalcanal ran the gauntlet of air power frequently. The Italian merchant fleet supplied Rommel even under heavy sea and air interdiction. They took lots of losses but it wasn't as if the supply was squeezed dry.

Well, in theory you are correct, but again the game engine doesn't allow us to let it handle these aspects of the war, as it simply completely fails in doing it.
One reason is that interdiction is always simulated across the entire map, so if you have a map of western europe to play a game of 1944-45 western front, you cant restrict your interdiction to the D-Day landing beaches, it will always include Berlin, too. So, even with the allied superiority in the air their interdiction level will not rise above 2% (see the West Front 44-45 scenario) and therefore supply reduction by interdiction will remain meaningless really.
Next is that even if the german Luftwaffe would manage to fly interdiction missions a) their supply reduction to the allies would be meaningless, too, and b) they can't interdict anything at sea. Interdiction strikes only happen on units moving over land, I have never seen an interdiction strike on a sea convoy.
So this interdiction you describe which could stop sea movement / sea resupply... it is impossible to do with this game, it simply does not simulate any of this. Maybe with the development of TOAW III we'll see some improvement here sometime in the future, but at the moment it simply can't be done.

I agree that to some extent, but the fundamental problem of all or nothing is still there. I must make the decision to really pile on attack aircraft and risk a lot of my assets for a 100% win or I lose everything.

For example the hypothetical storm of every last Ju-87 on the beachheads might have produced catostrophic losses for the Germans but maybe it would have been worth it if they cut down the Allied supply to 50% by sinking half the transports.

In this case though, when I send my suicide storm of Ju-87s, 50% damage isn't going to cut it and I will have probably lost all my aircraft for 0 effect because I lost on the coinflip. Conversely if you lost the conflip, well game is over.

Even if we pad it so that you could chip away at the unit and then evaporate the ships over 4-5 turns of combat, I might really need the supply reduction now rather than later where 4-5 turns costs me a lot.

Well, your only chance is that if your all-out attack manages to sink 50% of his supply unit that your opponent might pull it back to prevent it from sinking. Besides that, there is indeed no way to simulate a reduced supply stream, but thats again a limitation of the game engine. It only checks whether supplies can flow from hex x to hex y, and the only supply drops appear after the set supply radius is reached or in muddy terrain. Supply will cross a super river at a 100% rate as long as the engineer unit has 10% major ferry capacity, and will drop to 0% supply as soon as the engineer unit dropps to 9% major ferry capacity.
So, again, to have this issue fixed there is nothing I can do, you can only wait whether the TOAW III developers will someday address this issue.

For sure. I just wanted to raise the point that using your trick as a method to try and simulate air (or sea) attacks on supply convoys probably isn't the way to go. Standard interdiction via aircraft or modeling naval intervention with events/theatre options might be a better way to go.

Well than, how would you simulate attacks on supply convoys by events? (as I already explained earlier, interdiction does not work) Give player Y a xx percent chance to sink player A's supply convoy? What if players y's navy was sunk already or is operating somewhere else, there is no way as to check this by events, so player 2 will still have this TO despite his navy beeing out somewhere else.
And what if the event succeeds, what do you do than... reduce player 1's supply level? well, that would affect the entire scenario, so in the case of a WW II scenario, reducing the supply because of an attacked D-Day landing foce would also reduce the supply of the soviet army, again, the supply model is global, it affects everything on the map.

I said it already but I will say it again, what you want to see simulated is sound and how it should work, but you are hitting the limitations of the game engine here, it simply can't be modeled with TOAW CoW or III at the current state of the game.
First we have to wait for a complete overhaul of the entire supply model, but the developers already said that such a thing should not be expected until TOAW IV, so until than we have to live with what we got now.

 

[Ben Turner]

I think the tried and true interdiction model in the game which subjects penalties to supply probably would work better in contested cases.

Supply reduction due to interdiction is global. This won't work.

And resupply does occur in the face of enemy air onslaught. The destroyers supplying Tobruk garrison during the North African campaign and those which supplied the Japanese in Guadalcanal ran the gauntlet of air power frequently. The Italian merchant fleet supplied Rommel even under heavy sea and air interdiction. They took lots of losses but it wasn't as if the supply was squeezed dry.

To take just your last example, Malta was under more or less constant air attack during the period of Rommel's successes, making its ability to interdict supply to North Africa severely limited. As soon as Malta was given a chance to rebuild its offensive capability the supply situation became incredibly desperate. The Italians went to increasingly great lengths to avoid being attacked by the aircraft and submarines from Malta, but intelligence was always able to provide their routes and the aircraft and ships were generally able to find and sink them.

Even if we pad it so that you could chip away at the unit and then evaporate the ships over 4-5 turns of combat, I might really need the supply reduction now rather than later where 4-5 turns costs me a lot.

You do have a valid complaint. Kraut's solution is best for strategic scenarios where, more than the loss of supply at any one point, it is the loss of the landing craft to be able to carry out a major landing that is the point. For operational scenarios covering just one or two landings, one can generally cope with things using the event engine, because the number of possible situations is finite.