Simple "Supply" System

[alms66]

Am I the only one that thinks exploration & expansion (E&E) is too fast in standard civ games? I switched to Rhye's mod in order to experience slower E&E, and expansion is slowed significantly there, but I still feel exploration is a bit too fast. It's still far too easy to circle your continent and map the interior before the middle ages. A supply system would fix this, by limiting the operational range of units. I've seen many proposals, most of which are good, but too complex or too micromanagement (MM) intensive for most players. I've never seen a proposal similar to this one however.

It's probably too late to adjust the AI to use this for Civ4's initial release, much less the time needed to add it to the game in the first place, but perhaps an expansion pack or Civ5 could make use of this (please do, Firaxis - it's free of charge ).

The Basics:
1. All units have a new stat "Operational Range" (OR)
2. Moving more than a number of tiles equal to the units operation range outside of your borders causes a chance that the unit will automatically disband - think of it as "sinking in sea" for land units. For example, if a unit's OR is 4, moving 5 or more tiles outside of the civ's borders would cause a chance of loosing the unit.
3. Technologies and Promotions could grant percentage bonuses to OR.

Using this system is advantageous for several reasons:
1. It limits early E&E without artificially restricting movement (suicide runs are possible).
2. It reuses a familiar concept (ships sinking at sea).
3. No MM at all.
4. This might reduce the desire to use ICS, since you will want to push your borders as far as possible in the early game to increase OR.
5. It adds just the right amount of realism and playability. (IMHO, of course. )

What do you folks think? Any comments/criticisms?

[Terra Nullius]

i see two main issues here
1. slowing exploration
2. implementing supply issues

for me, i'm not so fussed about slowing exploration specifically, although it is one part of the game i most enjoy. i really would like to see more detail throughout the ancient age, though.
getting iron working so soon just seems wrong to me, i'd like to see that happen more gradually. i haven't had time yet to play through the conquests (mesopotamia??) but that seems to have addressed some of those issues.

i like your proposals for supply chains, but it should also allow the player some means to extend the operational range (supply wagons?). don't quote me, but i have read that historically, this was one reason why spices became so important. as a means of preserving food, it allowed units to operate much further form home. if you didn't have spices, your ships/armies were at a disadvantage. so food preservation could be another tech in the tree, and things like spices and salt would become strategic resources.

it always struck me as unrealistic that these guys could wander all over the map without ever stopping for lunch.
of course, there have been many ways of solving the problem historically. early on, armies would pillage the countryside and take what they found. later it became necessary to maintain a supply chain. i've often wanted something like that in civ. it would make campaigns really interesting if you could cut off supply lines and let their army starve.

i would also suggest that a unit should be able to live off the land. a unit should be allowed to use the food from the tile it is on. if you send troops into the desert/tundra and leave them there, they die. at the same time, as a defender, you could try a scorched earth tactic (something i've really longed to do) - pillage tiles ahead of the invading army to reduce the food available to them. maybe guerillas get special advantages for example.

this could also introduce some realism to the game in that stacking limitless numbers of troops on the same tile would no longer be possible.

i'd like to see it happen.
at the same time however, this is implemented simplistically in existing versions.
there are no formal supply chains as such, but cultural boundaries act in much the same way. units cannot heal in enemy territory. you cannot go to war with someone and march gaily through their territory. it is necessary to provide a place for your troops to heal. although it's a crude device, i do think this works in a similar way to building a supply chain.

and while we're at it,
why can't my boys just drop dead from random diseases?!!
let's face it, dysentery has killed more troops than weapons ever did.
ok, i know, random event, doesn't add anything to gameplay, blah, blah
but i want to see half my troops fall over before they reach the front!

and another thing,.. why doesn't movement affect a unit's strength in battle? surely troops which are at the limit of their movement range for that turn should suffer some sort of strength penalty.

[MattPilot]

I'd love a system like that.

But for it to work you need supply units - Call em supply wagons in the earlier ages and HQ's or something in the modern ages.

You'll need the ability to wage war without having direct land access.


Supply wagons should start appearing the the medivial or industrial age, but not to soon. Supply wagons should put any unit within 1 square in supply and modern HQ units should do so for 2 squares.

This would make combat very interesting.

[alms66]

You bring up two issues which I intentionally left out, for simplicity's sake:

1. Lack of Supply (cut lines, foraging and such)
2. Extended OR (Supply Wagons)

#1 requires #2, so I'll do it first. Supply Wagons (or whatever name is given to them), would be a physical unit on the map, which has it's own OR from the civ's border, but extends OR for other, non-Supply Wagon Units, so that one cannot simply make a chain of Supply Wagons to cross the continent. This requires a bit of extra work to implement, which is why I left it out. It's completely optional, and the simple supply system would function just fine without it. With that said though, it would be a very nice option to have.

Cutting supply would be a simple matter of killing the Supply Wagon. Then we have three options:
A. All units that were in supply by the wagon are now out of supply and might very well disband next turn. It's not automatic though, chances of auto-disbanding are the same as for normally leaving supply.
B. All units that were in suppy by the wagon are given a number of turns equal to OR to get back in-supply (whether by wagon or getting closer to home), otherwise the civ risks loosing the unit as normal. This represents foraging to a limited extent, and could be complicated by terrain and other factors, but I'll leave that to your imaginations.
C. Teleport all units, on the following turn, towards the mother civ, just enough to re-enter supply.

Option A requires no amount of additional work. Options B and C require some extra work, but option C reuses the teleporting concept when you are forced out of another civ's borders. Personally, I would go with option A or B, A before B even, since it requires no extra work.

[MattPilot]

forget disbanding... what about the chance of losing a hitpoint per turn out of supply

[alms66]

Originally posted by MattPilot
forget disbanding... what about the chance of losing a hitpoint per turn out of supply

Sure, that's reasonable and many people have suggested such a hitpoint-loss system, but it's also not reusing old concepts (that is already written code), which is something I tried to stick with, hopefully increasing the chances of Firaxis doing this in civ4's initial release. If you noticed, the only thing that needs to be added to get the basic system (first post) up and running, is adding a single variable to units (OP), while the rest is just slightly rehashed "sinking in sea" code that is tried and tested - not to mention the fact that players almost never complain about that concept, so why would they complain if it were extended to land units? I think, and this is just speculation on my part, that people would complain about the ease of a hitpoint-loss system more than a disbanding system. With disbanding, you either want to risk it, or you don't, whereas with a hitpoint-loss system (assuming a 4hp unit) you effectively gain two more tiles of Operational Range by walking out of supply two tiles than back in two, heal, rinse, repeat... and the AI would never do that, giving the player an unneeded advantage.

[Kuciwalker]

I highly doubt this would be included in cIV.

[alms66]

Originally posted by Kuciwalker
I highly doubt this would be included in cIV.

I can think of several reasons why it wouldn't be, but I'm curious, what is yours?

[The_Aussie_Lurker]

I suspect you might be right, Kuciwalker, but it would be nice if we could still lobby them to put it in or-failing that-to leave enough room in the code for good modders to put the system in themselves.
I actually suggested Operational Range as a concept well over a year ago (great minds think alike eh, Alms !), as I felt it was the one thing which both could slow down the Snowball effect AND add a new strategic element to combat. I would be cool with either unit disbanding or HP loss, but also think that the distance beyond a units OR should also determine how degraded its combat performance is (making its defeat that much more likely in enemy terrain).
Instead of Supply wagons, though, my idea was that forts could act as 'supply points'-as long as a unit could trace an unbroken line between itself and the fort (and as long as the fort remained in safe hands !)
Also, the fort itself would have to be able to trace a direct, unbroken line to a city within friendly territory or another friendly fort. This could result in a chain of forts acting like a 'supply chain' for your invading armies, a chain who's links become ever more vulnerable to attack the longer you make it. After all, this is VERY much what happened with Napoleans army in the Summer of 1812!

Yours,
Aussie_Lurker.

[alms66]

Originally posted by The_Aussie_Lurker
I suspect you might be right, Kuciwalker, but it would be nice if we could still lobby them to put it in or-failing that-to leave enough room in the code for good modders to put the system in themselves.

This is definately high on my list of mods to make for civ4. In fact, it's probably going to be #1. That's assuming they don't include it, and I'm fairly certain they won't at this point.

[Kuciwalker]

Originally posted by alms66
I can think of several reasons why it wouldn't be, but I'm curious, what is yours?

Not a hint of it from Soren and the fact that the overall structure of the game seems to be largely finalized. Plus that fact that it's a major fundamental change to the way civ works.

[paramir]

How weak would you guys sugest suplly wagons are? Like setlers or weakish military units

[Trifna]

Supply, because of all its gameplay implications (invasions, explorations, pillage...), is pretty much at the highest point of my wishlist. The tricky part is that to get something like this implemented, it needs to be simple.

Possibility 1- The simplest I know of which could bring all the gameplay are supply chains with forts/cities. Each has a range, and you have supplies as long as ranges are touching each other.

Possibility 2- I know that Rise of Nations has supplies with only one unit going on with the troops: no way to cut a supply chain, but it does a good job. So why not for Civ: ONE supply unit, with little couriers automatically staying behind as GalCiv's mini-freighters (from the latest fort/city).


Any comments? (Especially idea 2, to which I find a certain elegance)

[The_Aussie_Lurker]

Well Trifna, if you check out my earlier post, you can see that I VERY strongly support Possibility 1, with cities and forts acting as 'supply points'. If units are 'cut off' from these supply points, or if these supply points are captured by enemies. Cities and forts would have a supply range, and units would have an operational range. The combination of these ranges determines the maximum range that a unit can travel. As I also said, units-and supply points-MUST be able to trace a DIRECT path between itself and its nearest supply point-otherwise it is 'out of supply', and suffers degraded performance AND a chance of hitpoint loss or disbanding.

Yours,
Aussie_Lurker.

[Cabbagemeister]

Originally posted by The_Aussie_Lurker
Instead of Supply wagons, though, my idea was that forts could act as 'supply points'-as long as a unit could trace an unbroken line between itself and the fort (and as long as the fort remained in safe hands !)
Also, the fort itself would have to be able to trace a direct, unbroken line to a city within friendly territory or another friendly fort. This could result in a chain of forts acting like a 'supply chain' for your invading armies, a chain who's links become ever more vulnerable to attack the longer you make it.

Very interesting ideas here. Just to clarify: I assume that by "fort" you mean a worker-built tile improvement, and not a small city, right? And by "a direct, unbroken line," do you mean that there is a path of maximum length x tiles (where x is your supply range) between the fort and another fort or city without any enemy units in the path? I think that would work very well, particularly in the context of mid-game wars. Also, it's a good idea because it would still allow for some exploration, but not very much. If, say, you badly wanted to explore in one particular direction because you suspected that some important civ was over there, you could build a chain of forts and get your scouts where they needed to be. But you couldn't do that in all directions unless you stripped all the workers from your homelands.

My only concern is that such a change might tend to over-emphasize the super-fast REXing, since that would in effect be the best way to explore in many directions. Personally, I never enjoyed the fact that I had to spend every second of the Civ3 early game plotting how to get more land, or the computer would steal it all from me. But I know some people enjoy this land-grab phase a lot. Also, it would eliminate the ability to go on pillaging rampages, which I always thought were a lot of fun.

Still, this is clearly a needed gameplay improvement. Let us hope that the modding tools are as powerful as promised, and maybe someone on these boards will figure out a way to do it!