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Supply for military units
I haven’t been keeping up with all the threads lately, and I haven’t played any of the games that have appeared since Civ II, so I’m sorry if an idea like this has already been suggested, or if something similar has already appeared in another game.
This is the basic idea: At the beginning of each turn, the computer calculates the distance (in movement points) from each unit to that unit’s source of supply (more on that in a minute), including the square occupied by the unit, and then reduces the unit’s strength bar by some function of that distance.
It should be possible for the programmers to use the same algorithm for tracing supply as is used for the GoTo command, except that the line of supply could not pass through or next to an enemy unit, so I don’t imagine it would be too hard to code.
The player doesn’t have to do anything or keep track of anything at all, and he sees the effects immediately before he starts doing anything.
For example, at the lowest level of technology a unit within two movement points of its source of supply might lose no strength at all, while one more than ten movement points away might lose half of its strength. The discovery of certain technologies might be allowed to affect the calculations (e.g. the discovery of the internal combustion engine means that trucks can be used to haul supplies so more distant units will be easier to supply and will lose less strength). Ideally, there would be a random factor included so that there would be no incentive for the players to waste time micromanaging exact distances, and there would also be a global factor for scenario designers to change the scale for different-sized maps.
Lack of supply can kill: if a unit is already at half strength, then losing half its strength for being too far away from a source of supply would kill it.
Each unit would need an extra factor to measure its reliance on sources of supply. Infantry will be weakened at a slower rate than armor, for example, because armor needs all that gasoline to keep going, and maybe partisans will lose strength only very slowly, because they can live off the land. Triremes should weaken very very quickly, sailing ships like frigates very slowly, coal-burning ships much more quickly than frigates, oil-burning ships more slowly than coal-burning ones, and nuclear ships very slowly again. Air units would also lose strength very quickly. Explorers would not need supply. And so on.
Naval units (and land units being transported by naval units) would be handled slightly differently from land units. It doesn’t make much sense to trace a line of supply for them, so each turn that a naval unit starts at sea it would be weakened by a set amount. If it starts the turn in a port then it will not be weakened. If all damage can be repaired in a naval base in a single turn, then naval bases will be the best places to resupply, but ships can still resupply in normal ports through the normal process of repairing themselves.
I haven’t really thought through the issues with air units yet.
I think there are at least two advantages to including supply. First, it would help keep players from expanding too quickly in the early parts of the game especially, and it would make exploration-related technology more meaningful by preventing regular land units from wandering freely all over the map. As things are, it is too easy to send armies wandering halfway across the continent.
Second, it will encourage more realistic strategies. Because distance is calculated in movement points, a unit that is six grasslands squares away from its source of supply would suffer the same strength loss as a unit that is two mountain squares or eighteen road squares away. This will force you to consider your lines of communication while attacking, and also allow you to rely on natural terrain while defending. For example, you couldn’t just send an army marching across the middle of the Himalayas or the Alps anymore without building a road at least for supplying them, and you wouldn’t have to garrison every inch of your borders if part of it was impenetrable swamp or jungle. Also, this would allow some creative tactics, like outflanking an enemy army (or dropping paratroopers behind it to cut a road) to put it out of supply.
As long as the player doesn’t have to keep track of anything, I don’t think there would be any serious disadvantages (but perhaps you all can enlighten me on this!).
Other details:
What counts as a source of supply will depend on what other decisions the designers make about supporting units. If there are home cities, it would be the home city; if it is civilization-level, it might be the nearest friendly city.
Personally, I am in favor of regional-level or civilization-level support for units, but I think you should have to work up to it. Early in the game, at the monarchy or republic level, each unit should have to trace supply to its home city. This would make it more of a challenge to concentrate a large army, which is realistic considering the weakness of central governments in early times. At a certain level of development, roughly around the eighteenth century in historical terms, but in game terms keyed to some appropriate technology, it might become possible to build a new city improvement known as the supply depot. This should be cheap to build but expensive to maintain so that players will choose carefully where to put them; on the other hand, it should be cheaper to support a unit through a supply depot than through a home city (thanks to the added efficiency of centralization and specialization) so that players have an incentive to build at least a few supply depots and stop using home cities. (You might want to keep using home cities for isolated garrisons, though, where it is not worthwhile to build a supply depot.) At this point you could designate a unit’s home city as "civilization" and that unit would trace its supply to the nearest supply depot thereafter. Perhaps each supply depot would only be able to draw upon the resources of the other cities that are within a certain distance of it (in movement points) so that each supply depot represented something similar to one region; this would have the advantage of allowing the player to define the regions in his civilization however he wanted to. There are a number of possibilities that the basic concept could accommodate.
There could also be a new kind of unit, the supply unit, which could come in several different versions: a slow land unit ("wagon"?) for ancient to early modern times, a faster land unit ("truck"?) for modern times, and a ship ("collier"/"oiler"?) also for modern times. If a supply unit is stacked with another unit or units that should lose strength due to a shortage of supply, the supply unit loses the strength instead. The supply unit might lose so much strength that it disappears (gets used up, in other words), or it might survive long enough to get repaired (load up with more supplies, in other words). Supply units would still make it possible to make amphibious landings far from any friendly supply source, for example. Supply units should be expensive and rare so that players don’t feel tempted to keep a lot of them running around; perhaps each one could cost ten times the cost of an average unit and be able to take ten times as much losses in supplies (though not in combat damage! simply divide the strength loss by 10 before applying it to the supply unit if it is taken during the supply check?).
One other possibility that came to mind is that a unit in an irrigated square would "live off the land" instead of losing strength due to lack of supply: the irrigation would disappear and the unit would not lose any strength. This would happen before any movement took place, so it would not be a normal "pillage" event, and the unit could still move normally during its turn.
This is the basic idea: At the beginning of each turn, the computer calculates the distance (in movement points) from each unit to that unit’s source of supply (more on that in a minute), including the square occupied by the unit, and then reduces the unit’s strength bar by some function of that distance.
It should be possible for the programmers to use the same algorithm for tracing supply as is used for the GoTo command, except that the line of supply could not pass through or next to an enemy unit, so I don’t imagine it would be too hard to code.
The player doesn’t have to do anything or keep track of anything at all, and he sees the effects immediately before he starts doing anything.
For example, at the lowest level of technology a unit within two movement points of its source of supply might lose no strength at all, while one more than ten movement points away might lose half of its strength. The discovery of certain technologies might be allowed to affect the calculations (e.g. the discovery of the internal combustion engine means that trucks can be used to haul supplies so more distant units will be easier to supply and will lose less strength). Ideally, there would be a random factor included so that there would be no incentive for the players to waste time micromanaging exact distances, and there would also be a global factor for scenario designers to change the scale for different-sized maps.
Lack of supply can kill: if a unit is already at half strength, then losing half its strength for being too far away from a source of supply would kill it.
Each unit would need an extra factor to measure its reliance on sources of supply. Infantry will be weakened at a slower rate than armor, for example, because armor needs all that gasoline to keep going, and maybe partisans will lose strength only very slowly, because they can live off the land. Triremes should weaken very very quickly, sailing ships like frigates very slowly, coal-burning ships much more quickly than frigates, oil-burning ships more slowly than coal-burning ones, and nuclear ships very slowly again. Air units would also lose strength very quickly. Explorers would not need supply. And so on.
Naval units (and land units being transported by naval units) would be handled slightly differently from land units. It doesn’t make much sense to trace a line of supply for them, so each turn that a naval unit starts at sea it would be weakened by a set amount. If it starts the turn in a port then it will not be weakened. If all damage can be repaired in a naval base in a single turn, then naval bases will be the best places to resupply, but ships can still resupply in normal ports through the normal process of repairing themselves.
I haven’t really thought through the issues with air units yet.
I think there are at least two advantages to including supply. First, it would help keep players from expanding too quickly in the early parts of the game especially, and it would make exploration-related technology more meaningful by preventing regular land units from wandering freely all over the map. As things are, it is too easy to send armies wandering halfway across the continent.
Second, it will encourage more realistic strategies. Because distance is calculated in movement points, a unit that is six grasslands squares away from its source of supply would suffer the same strength loss as a unit that is two mountain squares or eighteen road squares away. This will force you to consider your lines of communication while attacking, and also allow you to rely on natural terrain while defending. For example, you couldn’t just send an army marching across the middle of the Himalayas or the Alps anymore without building a road at least for supplying them, and you wouldn’t have to garrison every inch of your borders if part of it was impenetrable swamp or jungle. Also, this would allow some creative tactics, like outflanking an enemy army (or dropping paratroopers behind it to cut a road) to put it out of supply.
As long as the player doesn’t have to keep track of anything, I don’t think there would be any serious disadvantages (but perhaps you all can enlighten me on this!).
Other details:
What counts as a source of supply will depend on what other decisions the designers make about supporting units. If there are home cities, it would be the home city; if it is civilization-level, it might be the nearest friendly city.
Personally, I am in favor of regional-level or civilization-level support for units, but I think you should have to work up to it. Early in the game, at the monarchy or republic level, each unit should have to trace supply to its home city. This would make it more of a challenge to concentrate a large army, which is realistic considering the weakness of central governments in early times. At a certain level of development, roughly around the eighteenth century in historical terms, but in game terms keyed to some appropriate technology, it might become possible to build a new city improvement known as the supply depot. This should be cheap to build but expensive to maintain so that players will choose carefully where to put them; on the other hand, it should be cheaper to support a unit through a supply depot than through a home city (thanks to the added efficiency of centralization and specialization) so that players have an incentive to build at least a few supply depots and stop using home cities. (You might want to keep using home cities for isolated garrisons, though, where it is not worthwhile to build a supply depot.) At this point you could designate a unit’s home city as "civilization" and that unit would trace its supply to the nearest supply depot thereafter. Perhaps each supply depot would only be able to draw upon the resources of the other cities that are within a certain distance of it (in movement points) so that each supply depot represented something similar to one region; this would have the advantage of allowing the player to define the regions in his civilization however he wanted to. There are a number of possibilities that the basic concept could accommodate.
There could also be a new kind of unit, the supply unit, which could come in several different versions: a slow land unit ("wagon"?) for ancient to early modern times, a faster land unit ("truck"?) for modern times, and a ship ("collier"/"oiler"?) also for modern times. If a supply unit is stacked with another unit or units that should lose strength due to a shortage of supply, the supply unit loses the strength instead. The supply unit might lose so much strength that it disappears (gets used up, in other words), or it might survive long enough to get repaired (load up with more supplies, in other words). Supply units would still make it possible to make amphibious landings far from any friendly supply source, for example. Supply units should be expensive and rare so that players don’t feel tempted to keep a lot of them running around; perhaps each one could cost ten times the cost of an average unit and be able to take ten times as much losses in supplies (though not in combat damage! simply divide the strength loss by 10 before applying it to the supply unit if it is taken during the supply check?).
One other possibility that came to mind is that a unit in an irrigated square would "live off the land" instead of losing strength due to lack of supply: the irrigation would disappear and the unit would not lose any strength. This would happen before any movement took place, so it would not be a normal "pillage" event, and the unit could still move normally during its turn.
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