In response to Harmon's post in the artillery discussion, I think this discussion can be separate from the other.



I agree, and still hope to find a way to accomplish something along these lines. One probably controversial idea I had was to remove supply wagons entirely, but increase the amount of guns to more historical numbers. This way you'd have guns that you wouldn't always be able to find good ground for, which adds some realistic feel. Also, you'd want to keep your guns silent when they don't have good targets they can damage, because once the gun uses its 120 shots, it can't fire anymore. This would represent artillery fatigue, damaged guns, etc. The cannon could be used only so much each battle, rather than just having them fire non stop from beginning to end with no concern for ammunition or fatigue.

What do you all think of trying no ammo wagons? It would also mean you can't resupply infantry, but that is rarely necessary with 60 rounds anyway, and is in my opinion not too significant.

I like the idea of actually replacing guns during battle. You'd actually have something to do with your guns instead of just place them and let them fire away forever. We'd also see all of the ammunition types used, currently we resupply them so much they hardly ever fire anything but shrapnel and canister.

i disagree that resupply is for inf wouldn't be a problem the last have ever many battles i always have to resupply my inf, as far as another idea is to lower how much a ammo wagon can can carry into battle, that way people would have to conserve arty ammo.

That doesn't work because artillery use almost no ammo from the wagon, so having low ammo in the wagon you can still resupply guns, but won't be able to resupply infantry.

Personally I kind of like the idea of having limited infantry ammunition as well. We could raise infantry ammunition if necessary. Currently if you run out, you can just resupply instantly with no drawbacks.

Hi.

I'm definitely not a historian by any means, so what I'm about to propose could be off the wall.

Instead of having to pull your troops back to respply, why not issue the order to the commander, and he sends out a courier to the supply line, and the supply line immediately sends out a supply via a supply cart so the troops don't have to move. I mean you can have the troops resupply themselves the way it is now, but wouldn't it just be better to have the cannon stay in place, and have the ammo brought up?

Just a thought....

I think the constant supply of reinforcements is honestly a bigger problem than an easily accessible supply of ammunition. Penalizing a player for being in combat constantly, even if it isn't their fault (necessarily) seems a bit silly. Yes, unlimited ammo is not historically accurate, but we had problems before with only, say, one or two infantry regs using up the entire wagon, because they always go for max on resupply.

If you want to make people more conscious of taking care of their troops, cut down the flow of reinforcements, not the flow of ammo during a battle.

Is there a way to change the time it takes for the supply wagon to issue out the ammunition? As it stands now, the wagons only have to do a drive by on the artillery batteries and everyone magically refills their caissons. I think a happy medium would be for the wagon to have to sit at the battery for a minute or two before the ammo is replenished. Same goes for infantry. Right now, it's like the supply wagon is being driven by Santa Claus, distributing beans and bullets to all the good billys and johnnys.

In the supply aspect we have very little to work with. We can't make the wagons slower, we can't make them give out ammo slower, we can't have wagons get shot and explode, we can't make wagons unable to move in rough terrain, we can't make certain wagons only work for infantry or artillery, and we can't change how much ammo is used for resupplying different units.

Part of the problem is that the ammo in the wagon can be counted as either a musket shot or a cannon shot. So if we just limited the total ammo in the wagons, you'd save the last say, 1000 rounds which could either give 10 bullets to 100 men, or 100 cannon shots to 10 guns, and use that for artillery. So practically, artillery ammo would still be infinite, only musket ammo would be limited.

I was wondering if you could use Mikesla's idea about sending a courier to the ammo wagon from each reg and back. and could you have more than one ammo wagon per division? How about seperate wagons one for art and one for inf? Resupply of ammo was a major concern during the Civil War and the courier method seems to simulate that process fairly well.

Just to add, to do away with the supply is in my opinion ridiculous. Here one on hand players wish the game to be more realistic, and on the other hand want to do away with one of the most important part of warfare...the supply.

The supply line is the most important component outside of having an excellent tactical commander, and well trained troops....with a poor supply you are dead before the battle even begins.

Of course this is just my personal opinion.

Later!

RDBoles wrote:
His idea isn't technically possible as I understand it.

That would just make resupply easier to do.

Not possible.

With all the current interest in "supply" (read "ammo wagons"), I thought one or two may be interested in some data to help understand the "historical" situation.

"During the war, a six mule hitched wagon could carry a maximum of 2000 pounds, less if the teams are new and pulling over rough and hilly terrain. Counting ammunition, food and medical supplies each man required four pounds of transport capacity per day translating into one wagon per 500 men if the wagon can make one round-trip per day from base of supply to point of distribution. Increase the distance to one day each way and the number of men supplied by each wagon drops to 250 and two days equates to 125 per wagon, on the face of it a simple mathematical equation. It is easy to see, however, that the increased distance coupled with a large army could easily out strip the capacity of a combatant to supply teams and equipment. Under this formula, an army of 100,000 men, ten days by wagon road from its base of supply, would require 4000 wagons, a large number yet it falls in the upper range of the number utilized by the Army of the Potomac."

"This simple equation, however, fails to make provision for fodder (feed) either for the animals attached to the army or for the supply teams. Each animal needed approximately 40 pounds of fodder per day. Since, in most cases, the supply teams had to carry their own, either individually or in specific trains, each day a team was away from the base it had to carry 240 pounds of its own food, reducing its capacity by 60 men. Diminishing returns legislates that eventually the teams will only be able to pull their own fodder."

"Supply is, in essence, based on mathematical formulas of which many were developed during the Civil War. In the above example, the actual numbers required to supply the average Civil War army of 100,000 with its attached cavalry and artillery ten days distant from supply base would be computed at 10,975 wagons utilizing 68,850 draft animals. This does not take into account wagons required to distribute supplies to the brigade level."

Whew! One heckuva of a lot more than you wanted to know, correct?

Incidentally, the supplying of artillery ammunition was via caisson/limber chests. Supply were seldom brought into the front line; rather, the caisson was sent to the rear to have the chests replenished.

J

Really the only possibility that I see (and I don't even think it is possible right now) would be to only allow resupply when a unit is not firing. Therefore a unit would have to be taken off the line and back a bit to reload their pouches/pockets/caissons.

Didn't we experiment before with dropping the horsemanship stat on the wagons? We did accomplish making them dreadfully slow to move one way or another, as I recall.

I suggested the same thing yesterday as far as have 2 wagons and just make it a gentleman rule that you can only use arty wagon to resupply arty and the inf wagon to resupply inf, I mean we are all grown ups here if you see somebody breaking a rule like this just call it out in the chat it isn't that had to do, we have had gentleman rules before I don't understand why you think it would be that hard garnier, I also agree that removing the wagon is complete stupid, they are so many other ways around it such as limiting inf down to 40 rounds a man and dropping the wagon down to 100,000 rounds or 50,000 rounds I mean it will make people choose do I want my inf to run out or do I want to resupply some of my inf and my arty, if you drop it to 50,000 rounds it will really put a strain on what you going to resupply.

Geneal William D. Pender wrote:


The concept itself is not difficult, but the implementation is nearly impossible. If you have noticed our discussions, gentlemen's agreements are a complete farce owing to the disposition of certain members of the community. For many, winning comes first at any cost, and so shortcuts to gain an advantage are welcomed by them. Besides, what are you going to do? Calling someone out in chat achieves absolutely nothing, and, if you do it properly, just makes the other team even madder and (as I experienced just the other day) will encourage them to trample said "agreement" even further and more blatantly.

I mean you could have a separate ammo wagon with only, say 1000 rounds or something, which would make it all but useless to infantry, but the fact remains that the wagon with more ammo could be used on either infantry or artillery and there's nothing to stop someone from doing so.

I'll have to look into that, making them really slow would be good regardless I think.
(Edit: They already have 0 horsemanship, so I guess they're already as slow as they go. I tried cutting calisthenics and fatigue to 0 and that didn't change anything.)

As far as agreements, it's not that I just don't like them, it's that they can't be enforced. Nothing wrong with agreeing to something with other players, but it's impossible to enforce it if someone doesn't want to follow it.

I'm fine with cutting down the ammo in wagons to say, 50,000 rounds (currently it's between 100,000 and 250,000 usually, but entirely dependent on how many troops you bring). I think all this would accomplish is make infantry not have infinite ammo, so I don't think it will affect artillery at all for players who understand how ammo works, but I don't mind trying it.

Garnier wrote:


Hi.

I have no knowledge of code writing, but how is that impossible? Isn't the code already written in the game? You can already send courier orders to command troops, why can't you do this with supply wagons? I send out an order to the supply wagon, he sends a courier back to me, once the courier reaches me and relays the order, my men are then resupplied. The delay would be the distance between myself, and the supply wagon, how many times the courier keeps getting killed. For instance, I pull up the courier menu, choose resupply, choose arty, or inf, then write my order (request 2000/5000 rounds, etc)the courier then immediately sent to the nearest wagon.

There has always something that bothered me about having to leave the line to resupply. I have seen many battles I was in change from a winning scenario to a losing one simply because of supply. Mind you, you can always pull up your reserve (I always keep troops in reserve while in battle for this type of situation)to cover.

I must be missing something here concerning this whole matter anyway. You start a game, each side has 10,000 rounds, and that's it. If you use up your supply then tough you run out, unless someone has figured out a way to change the amounts while playing the game.

Later!

You could figure out a way to send couriers to supply wagons perhaps. You wouldn't be able to have the supply wagon send a courier back. But regardless, this is something the players would have to follow themselves, and if they wanted to they could just move the supply wagon as normal, so it would make no difference.

I was wondering if a little reminder to the reg or brig commander when supplies run low let's say 50%. A little red or green light shows up on the tabs some where. As it is now you have to indiviually check each reg for low supply. This gets a little cumbersome when you have to watch everything else that is going on in the battle. After all didn't the commanders have help from subordinates, and they took care of some of the responsibilities? Just wondering?

That's not something I can do.

Leave the ammo wagons alone.
It may not be perfect but its certainly NOT broke.

kg_sspoom wrote:


Well said sir.

I am amazed more players don't find a big issue with this topic. Especially the one's brimming with historical accuracy.

Maybe the cost to resupply artillery could be increased. Lets say a wagon could hold enough supply to resupply either one infantry brigade or one six gun battery. Maybe, Norb could do this simply with the game coding? Then all we would have to do is only give ammo wagons that much supply?????????

Then I would be happy, and isn't that what it is all about.......keeping me happy???????

Regards to all,

Harmon

Off topic, sort of, but here it is anyway:

I really like how guns are lost for a period of time if captured or routed, but I'd like to see them come back with green crews instead of retaining their experience. I think this would further encourage players to keep their guns back.

Back on topic:

I agree with Garnier that it would be good if players were forced to be more prudent and strategic using their guns. Right now, it's basically almost fire and forget -- set up your guns on good ground, put the ammo wagon right behind them, select target infantry and use shrapnel, and fire the whole game.

I'd like to try giving infantry regiments 80 to 100 rounds (plenty for almost every battle we've played), max out ammo for guns (120 or so, I think), and eliminate the supply wagons. If it works out and we like it, great. If not, that's fine too. But there's no reason we can't try anything that may make the games better and more strategic.

The strategic decisons are many: do I save my shrapnel for late in the game and use solid shot and shell first? Do I use my shrapnel early and hope to gain an advantage I can exploit? Should I counter-battery fire until I run out of solid shot and then target infantry with shell and shrapnel?

I think this could perhaps make the games better and more strategic, and thus more fun.

NY Cavalry wrote:

Changes to the game, even if they were worth doing, will be "months" away according to last time we heard a timeline. At the rate we're going of about 25 battles a week, that's at least 200 more battles before anything they're working on will be in use. That's a lot of battles to wait for something, hence why we do what little we are allowed and use it right away, to make the games more fun in the meantime.

Anyway, I put in an option for no supply wagons. All it does is leave out the wagons, no extra ammo. We can try it then and see what the effects are, and if we like it. I've tried tons of things before, many of them we've kept, and those that we didn't keep, most people don't even know about because they were only in a few battles.