Comment by xg15 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by xg15 | Hacker News Reader

Slightly OT:

I'm surprised that more sophisticated management of supply lines never seems to have caught on much in RTS games. The basic practice still seems to be that logistics are handwaved away and your units just spawn wherever you want (or where your factory is) provided you have enough money in the bank.

I could imagine a game quite fun where you actively have to transport troops and resources to the front and where building, running (using automation) and defending/attacking supply lines is integral part of the game. I guess the result would be something like a cross between Command & Conquer and Factorio or Transport Tycoon.

The handwaving of logistics can also lead to some surreal moments in RTS single-player campaigns when the hero characters somehow manage to bring huge armies with them wherever they go, even if the story establishes that a place is difficult to get to even as a small group.

Kudos for Blizzard and the design of the Zerg here, which turns that kind of awkwardness into an actual part of the story.

Sid Meier's Colonization has this, to a degree.

1. Gold can only be used to buy from European powers. You can't buy goods or units in America, you have to physically move them there with ships or wagon trains.

2. Civilians and combat units are the same. Any civilian can pick up a musket and become a soldier.

3. Defeated units don't die. They rout and are "demoted": a dragoon loses their horse and becomes a soldier, and a soldier loses their musket and becomes a civilian.

4. You can build roads and temporary colonies. Each colony has free storage space.

My favorite tactic was to build a siege camp near the enemy colony, connect it with my colonies with a road, then use it as a supply base. I'd just spam dragoon attacks for as long as I had spare horses.

I'm sure this wasn't the optimal strategy, but it worked on "easy". More importantly, Colonization seems to be the only game where this is at all possible.

As a Civ i-iii player, I do not recognize the game you are talking about. edit: oops, reado

Colonization, not Civilization: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sid_Meier%27s_Colonization

That sounds amazing. I never really got to play Colonization but I pored over it a lot in magazines.

These days it's pretty much abandonware, or $2 on Steam at the moment.

One of my favourite games this. Dragoon skirmishing worked well because horses reproduce themselves but guns are expensive. It was also a game in which terrain was very important as it provided huge bonuses. Or, during the War of Independence, disadvantages for the government troops.

You could try your hand at board game that involves logistics, the infamously-complicated Campaign for North Africa: https://kotaku.com/the-notorious-board-game-that-takes-1500-...

"The Italian troops in World War II were outfitted with noodle rations, and in the name of historical dogma, the player responsible for the Italians is required to distribute an extra water ration to their forces, so that their pasta may be boiled."

The scale/scope of most of the RTS games is that of a battle, not that of a war.

I remember there was an old game, Napolean 1813, that has some level of supply management in the form of needing to build a chain of supply stations in different cities to support nearby troops. The map of that game stretches from Paris to Eastern Europe.

Another game that has supply management is Hearts of Iron, where the map is the entire world. I mostly play other Paradox grand strategy titles, but people have jokingly called Hearts of Iron the "Best supply chain similator game"

> The scale/scope of most of the RTS games is that of a battle, not that of a war.

Hmm, but even "Civilization" magically aways logistics for the most part. Units require "upkeep gold", but there's no real supply-chain that has to be built for units.

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The "Rigs" in Advance Wars delivered oil to the frontlines. But its still simplified logistics, because "Rigs" had infinite oil in them. Still, it was a legitimate strategy to destroy enemy Rigs, cut off their supply-chain, and then wait for the enemy tanks to run out of ammunition or oil and starve them to death.

Although Advance Wars mostly turned into a game of turtling with cheap mechanized infantry (One of the best units for a given price). But the logistics was at least theoretically possible.

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I know "war logistics" games exist, but they certainly aren't mainstream. Europa Universalis and "Romance of the Three Kingdoms" are famously "Excel Spreadsheet games", I've never played them but maybe they are more into logistics than other games.

https://www.paradoxplaza.com/europa-universalis-iv/EUEU04GSK...

https://www.koeitecmoamerica.com/rtk13/system1.html

The supply system for Europa Universalis (which is part of what I referred to as "other Paradox titles") is actually very barebone, consisting almost entirely of "you can only keep a certain number of troops in a province without attrition", where the number of troops depends on terrain, friendly/enemy territory, etc. Hearts of Iron has actual supply chain management.

As for Civilization, I've always treated it as a battle chess game rather than an actual strategy simulation game.

That's actually pretty accurate for the era EU simulates though. Nobody could supply an army of any size by any method other than foraging, aka buying all the food and forage in the area around the army.

As you know, the maximum throughput of any connection is the buffer size divided by the round-trip time. If you're using horse-drawn carts to move food and forage, the buffer size will be quite small; carts don't hold very much and there aren't a lot of them. Horse-drawn carts are slow, so the round-trip time will also be quite long. A number of generals had the idea of supplying the army this way, but nobody could do it further than a few dozen miles because the round-trip times get so high. Before WW1 everyone figured that trains had solved the problem; you would just load your supplies up on big fast trains and send them right to the front. Unfortunately, armies really love blowing up the enemy's trains and railways, so the railheads were never as close to the front as anyone liked and they were always having to be rebuilt. There weren't enough motorized vehicles in the world to deliver all that tonnage more than 100 miles, so the fronts in WW1 were very stagnant. In WW2 there were tens of millions of trucks of all sizes, and the Germans estimated they could deliver sufficient supplies to the army as far as 400 miles from the railheads. Unfortunately, it's over a thousand miles from eastern Poland to Moscow, so that didn't go so well. Also, it's over a thousand miles from Tripoli to the Suez canal, so they didn't have much luck in that theater either.

If you want to read more on the subject, I recommend "Supplying War: Logistics From Wallenstein To Patton", by Martin Van Creveld. Great book.

Ahem. The "Best supply chain simulator game" of all time award goes to The Campaign for North Africa (https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/4815/campaign-north-afri...). And I'm not just saying that because of the logistical effort required to move and set up the game itself.

Dream to play it someday

Hearts of Iron (3 and to a lesser extent 2) are probably the biggest example of a warfare game with a focus on logistics. 3 especially got a reputation for being difficult and unfun, even among many fans of Paradox's other games, though obviously there are more contributors than just a logistics focus.

I can recommend the Wargame-Series (European Escalation, AirLand Battle and esp. Red Dragon). Sure, your logistics begin at the Map border, but you have to make do with the units given in the campaign, so losses are permanent. And you have to keep your units supplied and fuelled throughout the real-time battles. Quite a hassle.

Stonkers, a 1983 ZX Spectrum RTS game had already had supplies.

I felt that Supreme Commander 1 had some of this, since maps were big enough that you'd have supplies lines, just moving units towards the front lines instead of ressources. If I'm remembering right, you could even set transport craft on a repeat route to ferry your units across the battlefield. Of course, once you had built new factories closer to the front line, the logistic issues tend to disappear a little.

it arguably moved the other way (to infrastructure not being a part of the game at all), as MOBAs have taken over RTS

That could be quite fun! Especially since you could try to sabotage or destroy enemy supply lines.

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