Joe Harker
1st in the Premiership!
^^ But imagine the mircomanagement needed to maintain your armies
I don't think that 'supplies' should be something which has to be built by production, that doesn't seem very realistic to me. Perhaps 'supplies' are something which a goods factory simply generates each turn, and this amount is stockpiled in the city (and can also be 'moved' to an external supply dump somehow). Additionally, if engineer specialists are assigned then additional supplies are generated, and a smaller amount if worker specialists are assigned, and a tiny baseline amount is generated by each city (representing the amount generated by the forges/factories/etc which we do not see). Thus most cities would be capable of creating minimal amounts of supplies for basic use by the populace while some few cities could generate large amounts to drive the war machine, without affecting normal production needs nor (hopefully) confusing the AI.
Otherwise, I think the supply-accumulation feature should mostly only apply to oil (and also ammo, if something like that is added separately from supplies). If it were expanded to all of the health/happy resources, it would indeed get out of hand in terms of micromanagement, and for very little gain for how such resources are handled currently. E.g., who really cares exactly how much ivory has been stockpiled since it has only a very-minor role in this scenario? Stockpiling resources such as aluminum (for building, but not maintaining, air units?), coal (allows rail movement?), copper (???), iron (??? building armor units?) would also have nice strategic implications.
However, operationalizing the movement of various food resources could be useful in terms of running blockades (as I've mentioned elsewhere) or for alleviating starvation in an encircled city. Obviously the food would have to be airlifted in to alleviate the siege, and this would have to somehow add food to the food-bin (currently it only adds health/happiness, which wouldn't be quite as useful in such a situation).
Summarization/Suggestion:
OIL - affects air/armor/naval builds, air/armor/naval/motorized-infantry movement [1 unit of oil used for each movement of air/armor/naval units per turn, and each movement of an infantry unit beyond 1-space (which represents marching without motorized assistance), cavalry do not require oil for movement], airlifting and paradropping (1 oil-unit for each airlift operation). Armor/naval units without oil supply cannot move (-33%/-25% movement cumulative, or immobile at 1.5-2.0 months) and lose battle effectiveness -10% each turn (max -50% at 2.5 months). Air units without fuel cannot conserve fuel and still do full missions (e.g. bombing, air strikes) but could conceiveably still do interception missions perhaps at reduced distance and slightly-reduced effectiveness. Anti-air require oil for movement, but not operation.
COAL - affects production capacity/efficiency (coal plants?), rail movement [1 unit of coal for each rail-movement by each unit per turn]
SUPPLIES -- affects city production capacity/efficiency at a rate much lower than coal, affects 'readiness' of all military units (e.g., lack of supplies could be -10% attack/defense and could accumulate per turn like fortified defense bonus, possible max = -50% at 2.5 months), cavalry require double supplies of infantry (food for horses), air/armor/navy require triple supplies of infantry, anti-air same as infantry. Perhaps unsupplied units in a city (even encircled/besieged) should lose effectiveness at a reduced rate due to scavanging in the city (-5% instead of -10%, but can still max out at -50% it just takes longer)?
So, example based on the above, in a besieged city with one infantry and one armor unit, and no stockpile of oil or supplies, after 3 months the infantry would be at -50% and the armor would be at -100% (i.e., useless). Not sure game-conceptwise if 'supplies' and 'ammo' should be separate from each other, it would make it additionally complex and it is not clear to me operationally how they would differ very much (e.g., if you have supplies but no ammo, you're still very-screwed; but if you have ammo but no supplies, you can shoot but maybe you are starving/freezing/sick-with-malaria/etc and are still ineffective -- so what is the difference if you are -0% for supplies and -50% for lack of ammo, or -50% for lack of supplies and -0% for ammo?)
Stockpiling: must be a way to do this within a city and also out in the countryside. Oil depot and supply depot should probably be separate buildings. It could work something like a granary -- oil/supply depot allows expanded capacity of stockpile, but can still accumulate oil/supplies without one up to a certain low-maximum amount. Oil/supply dump could be built by workers like a fort in the countryside (less time to build, and doesn't destroy improvements already on the square). Also, forts should have the ability to stockpile oil and supplies. Forts/dumps should have smaller capacity than city stockpiles. Forts/dumps can be bombed or sabotaged, if successful they lose some amount of the stockpiled amount ('damaged' means facility must be repaired by workers before lost capacity can be restored, '100% damage' means facility must be rebuilt from scratch and entire stockpile is lost). Probably should make it harder to sabotage a dump/depot (compared to say a theatre or a farm) due to strategic importance and hence obvious emphasis on security, which could be increased in the usual ways by stationing counter-spies/military-units there.
How to 'use' the stockpiles out in the country? Dunno... here is the brainstorm. This could get very complicated. Each unit has a current 'source' of supplies/oil, which it draws down each time it does something. You can change the current source so as to control which stockpiles are being used at which time. Perhaps there should be an 'allocation' screen to control which sources are feeding which stockpiles (should highlight stockpiles which are already full, and have some way of indicating lost capacity due to nowhere to store it). But how does a unit not in a city and not stationed at a supply dump actually 'use' the supplies/oil? Air units are at a base, so that shouldn't be a problem (unless of course the stockpile at the base has run out). However, how to supply armor/infantry/navy outside one's borders? Perhaps this is the place for the supply-unit mentioned above? In any case, units will have to be able to trace an open path to some source. If such a unit is destroyed, what happens then? Unrealistic that all units would be immobile immediately, but would likely be at reduced movement and then run out after rationing of remainder runs out. Perhaps if trace-a-route-to-a-supply-unit is unworkable maybe allow units to 'resupply' simply by being in the same square as the supply unit, allowing the supply unit to visit several squares each turn to supply the units there.
Gosh that's a lot, I better stop babbling now...
I've already merged the fuel mod SDK files with RTW ones and done a lot of art/stats changes already and it's a shame to duplicate work.
Great ideas, however I believe work on this mini-mod has stalled.
You may wish to check out my mod, which is at least under development.
Is there any progress on this or is it abandoned?