Supply Line Simulation in Single Player - Suggestion

What do you make of my suggestion?

  • The suggestion makes sense. It should be implemented.

    Votes: 23 41.1%
  • I would like some sort of supply line system but not like this.

    Votes: 8 14.3%
  • I'm happy with the current system.

    Votes: 25 44.6%

  • Total voters
    56

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RoboSenshi

Grandmaster Knight
Supply Line Simulation in Single Player - Suggestion

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So in the latest game play video that Taleworlds released, something happened that I really really hate. I suspect that I'm not alone. During the video, the player gathered an army and galloped right through hostile enemy territory and attacked their capital. The only consequence seemed to be that enemy armies arrived to counter them. Otherwise it was just a clear path to the city. This is an occurrence that really bothered me in Warband as well. It seems it hasn't been fixed and the things mentioned in this blog don't seem to address the issues.

The Problem
A large army should not be able to march right through enemy territory without more adverse consequences. If so, then what is even the point of castles and fortified towns. Historically, you would have to besiege settlements to move further in land so you wouldn't be attacked from the rear and your supply lines wouldn't be harassed. Cause of this, most wars were fought on the borders and territory was periodically claimed gradually. I know that this an overly simplified look at military history and I'm sure some of you armchair historians can find obscure examples of armies moving through hostile land by foraging etc. Like Hannibal. Please don't bring it up here. I'm being very general and I'm trying to find a solution to the above mentioned problem in the game.

The aim of my suggestion is to build upon what is already in the game and improve upon it to "simulate" a supply line. The suggestion is meant to be something realistic that the devs could hopefully implement with some what little tweaking. As opposed to another system that might have them create actual units that bring supplies to and from armies in the game map. Or something that makes them change entirely how the game works at it's core. In an ideal world, we would have something like this. However, we have to work with what we have. I also want to make the game a little more challenging for the player and allow them to think more tactically about planning campaigns. But above all I want a system the allows wars to be mostly fought at the borders of the two opposing factions. A system that can practically eliminate armies sacking capitals deep in enemy territory as soon as a war starts.

The Solution
My suggested solution in a nutshell is to tweak the consumption of food in party inventories depending on your location and introduce an automatic resupply system.

Food Consumption and resupply
Firstly, the rate at which food is consumed should be greatly increased. Even with a full inventory of food, those supplies should last about 2-3 days till they are completely diminished. However, you also have a system where those food items can be automatically restocked if you are in friendly territory. This can be an option you can tick on or off. While ticked on your army will automatically resupply its food while moving within your own nation. The cost can be deducted gradually and the rate of resupply can also depend on the prosperity of the region. The devs can also consider making resupply free when you are in or around your own fief. This will allow you to operate within your own territory with relative ease. Giving you an upper hand against invaders. This is a war game so eventually you will have to attack your enemies and vice versa. The system still applies in that the rate of consumption remains the same but the rate of automatic resupply drops as you move further away from friendly settlements. Not saying it drops to zero once you cross from one faction to the other. It's about distance. Again this is aiming to simulate a supply line not actually create one. So disregard skirmishers harassing supply lines for now. So as you move further away from your last friendly town or village (maybe castle), your resupply rate starts to fall and your army will run out of food faster. You would need to take an enemy settlement or return back to your faction for the resupply rate to normalize.

Operating in Hostile Territory
You can still operate in hostile territory with this system. It just becomes more challenging. When you are fully in enemy territory and surrounded by hostile settlements your resupply rate will fall to zero. What takes over can be a foraging perk that can be added to one of the skills. Perhaps it could allow you to still get some resupply while in enemy territory. Of course a higher tier perk can increase the rate of resupply through foraging. However, the only certain way to stay supplied and prevent your army from starving is to raid villages. Since resupply is not automatic in enemy territory, you will have to physically raid around to get food in addition to having a foraging perk. And even then it would barley keep your army afloat due to an increased rate of consumption (consumption rate could increase when fully surrounded or it could also stay normal). Obviously this system discourages the payer and the A.I. from doing this for long stretches of time.

A.I. and Player Armies
So I don't know if the devs already have a system to "force" enemy armies to fight on their borders. However, I feel a system that organically does this is better than just having code script the AI behavior. For one it won't apply to the player and we would be free to rape and pillage unimpeded while the AI would be following the script. With this system the AI could be tweaked to understand the need for an automatic resupply. Just like when they are low on troops they go and recruit units or when they are low on food they go and buy some. The understanding of being resupplied in friendly territory and having none in hostile territory could be added onto their behavior. I don't believe it would be impossible to do so but I'm not an expert. Anyway, this understanding would make the AI (hopefully) fight generally around their borders. And invasions and sieges would be against settlements closest to friendly ones.

Adverse Effects and Other Factors
The first and most obvious effect of not being supplied is morale. The morale of the army can be affected slightly by the rate of resupply. So the negative morale effect increases the further you get from friendly territory. While isolated in enemy territory, the base morale hit would be substantial unless you are raiding and pillaging. Other factors that can affect the rate of resupply is the weather. A feature we haven't really heard about in a while. During winter the rate of resupply could be greatly reduced. This would make campaigning in winter quite hard. On the flip side, during the spring and summer the resupply rate could be at it's peak. It would make those periods ideal for waging war and invading enemy territory. Another factor is moving through Neutral territory with your army. This could just change the cost of resupply. Moving through neutral factions to get to the enemy would just increase the cost of your resupply unless the faction is your ally. In which case the prices are normal. A host of little additions could be added to make the system more robust. For example, your relationship with notables or settlements could affect your resupply cost and rate in a particular area. The same goes for your relationship with other clans and lords. I strongly believe your resupply cost should be lowest or zero and rate should be at it's peak in your own fief, regardless of notables and relationships. However, this can be tweaked around a bit.

Tweaks
This system is by no means a perfect solution and would have to be tweaked and tested extensively before it functions as intended. The rate of consumption and resupply would have to be balanced to make the system challenging but not tedious or annoying. There would have to be a happy medium. The price of consumables would also have to be tweaked. As will the price of automatic resupply. You could also reduce the price for resupply if the character has a foraging perk. The Supply Line Simulation is just meant to build upon what is already there and to add an extra layer to the grand strategy element of the game. It would make factions fight on their borders more often and also make sure that they gradually invade territory, taking one settlement at a time in a manner that makes sense. Not run straight at the enemy capital. Of course it could be more complicated than this but the whole idea was to make a system simple enough for the devs to hopefully take notice of and implement. I feel this could work very well.

I tried to keep my suggestion relatively short and concise to allow for discussion. I also wanted to avoid a wall of text as much as possible. Please let me know what you think. Am I making sense or am I talking out of my ass?
 
I dont find current system immersion breaking because Calradia is relatively small; like 50  cities and many castles, it resembles and area like France i think. France probably has more than 5000 medieval castles. And that period supply was more like a campaign, raise levies and attack; then back. It's fits M&B theme, fill the inventory, fight & loot; then do something else. I always felt M&B as  feudal duchies fighting each other. So i dont think supply was a problem unless you crusade etc., would be nice to hear from amateur historians in the forum.

What i would like to see weather conditions, unresting decreasing morale (need to camp or stay in cities), cold making sick(fur, cloth etc. protecting morale), scorching earth, destroying bridges, cities&castles locking paths, locations in map such as a tower in a rocky hill, neutral temples,  mud in spring, events like comet, sacred weeks where fighting is dishonorable, (like noel) basically weird stuff  coloring the game but i think many find them annoying so can wait for a mod.  :grin:
 
but usually people attack in the borders i think. There is no point to attack further because it will be hard to defend it, i doubt will be a economic diference in some casttles or towns to some players take that risk.
 
This makes me think about the attrition and reinforcements in Europa Universalis. I think the idea is good overall, wih 2 comments. It should affect only large armies, with a gradual increase (maybe starting to have an effect over 100 troops?). And then this mechanic should not add hard limits on what you want to do. For example you should still be able to attack the enemy's capital in mid-teritory if you gathered enough resources and prepared for the campaign. In such case it would be a nice aspect you must keep account in the late game and it won't give you headaches.
 
HUMMAN said:
I dont find current system immersion breaking because Calradia is relatively small; like 50  cities and many castles, it resembles and area like France i think. France probably has more than 5000 medieval castles. And that period supply was more like a campaign, raise levies and attack; then back. It's fits M&B theme, fill the inventory, fight & loot; then do something else. I always felt M&B as  feudal duchies fighting each other. So i dont think supply was a problem unless you crusade etc., would be nice to hear from amateur historians in the forum.
That's true. I guess the supply problems really show themselves when you have mods with much bigger maps. For example 1257AD where you can see the entire English Army ride across the entire French nation to attack Bordeaux only to then travel all the way back. But since the devs are trying to build a lore around the map being separate large kingdoms it wouldn't be a bad idea to simulate it that way. Of course a land area the size of France wouldn't have a cold snowy North and a hot dessert South. There's a little bit of suspension of belief involved.

urugamer5 said:
but usually people attack in the borders i think. There is no point to attack further because it will be hard to defend it, i doubt will be a economic diference in some casttles or towns to some players take that risk.
Unfortunately the A.I. don't see it that way on their own. They just attack based on numbers irregardless of most other factors. I suspect the devs have just scripted their behavior to fight on the borders with no real underlying reason and that leaves it open to exploitation by the player. If I'm able too I will just raise a large army and sack the enemy capital which would undoubtedly make me rich and give me lots of influence points. Once it's over I can just disband and saunter back to my keep not really caring if the A.I. take they're capital back. I've already gotten my renown, money and influence. I can see it being an exploit. Which is bad. It wasn't a problem in Warband because the 'Army" system didn't exist.

RhodokPeasant said:
This makes me think about the attrition and reinforcements in Europa Universalis. I think the idea is good overall, wih 2 comments. It should affect only large armies, with a gradual increase (maybe starting to have an effect over 100 troops?). And then this mechanic should not add hard limits on what you want to do. For example you should still be able to attack the enemy's capital in mid-teritory if you gathered enough resources and prepared for the campaign. In such case it would be a nice aspect you must keep account in the late game and it won't give you headaches.
That would work very well. The larger the army the large the rate of consumption and vice versa.
 
I like the sound of this, it is logical and to a fellow non-coder like me it appears feasible, so I am in favour. I don't know yet whether Bannerlord will solve the problem though- I think I am right in saying that AI armies need food (I think when lord parties combine to form an army, they pool their food resources), and that they can run out- if that's correct, solving this issue should just be a matter of balancing the rate of consumption so that armies cannot feasibly go deep into enemy territory, at least not without raiding so often that they cannot effectively besiege anywhere. But it depends on whether Taleworlds consider this a problem, and to what degree- they might not want players to feel constrained as to where they can go.
 
Well they talked about solving the problem in their supplies and logistics blog but they never really got into the nitty gritty. For example they said this:

They can also send out raiders to attack villages directly, which will not only loot resources but also wreak havoc on the region and damage its economy. Once the enterprising parties re-join the main army, their spoils will be shared among parties in the army, and they will earn extra influence for a task well done.
It seems like just a glorified fetch quest. Like those Marshall quests in Warband to scout and get cattle. In BL it seems you'll be sent to raid villages for resources as one of these type of quests. However, it feels more like a scripted thing to break the monotony rather than essential to the cohesion of the army. I guess we'll see it when we play it but in the game play videos so far, I haven't seen anything resembling a supply and logistics system. Besides what they talked about just boils down to: "If you stockpile a massive amount of food, you can pretty much go anywhere".

DanAngleland said:
But it depends on whether Taleworlds consider this a problem, and to what degree- they might not want players to feel constrained as to where they can go.
That's the real problem I think. The devs don't really see the problem in armies traveling through the map without restriction. As long as you have enough food that is.
 
the suggestions you have made are not enough to create a support line mechanics and LOGISTICS.
The fact that you wrote little depends on the fact that your suggestions do not describe the mechanics and its consequences.

how can the support line be attached?
Does it have a strategic value?
does it only slow down an army's advance?

your simulation system, which does not create a true line of traveling carts, is included in my post on support lines and logistics.
I simply expand this idea by inserting an infrastructure in the game that makes this line TANGIBLE and that gives it a strategic value that the simulation aspect alone does not give it.

In short, the support line should be linked to these factors:
1) to the economy of the place in which it is created.
2) to the relationship that our pg / clan has with the lord of the place.
3) the difficulty in defending it and the costs must increase with distance (so defensive camps should be constructed that outline the route that the wagons, which make up the support line, must travel, in order to arrive enter the radius of the army's scounts.
4) this line must be real because it must be able to be attacked in different ways:
a) in a direct way, attacking the wagons.
b) indirectly, razing enemy villages to the ground, worsening the economy and therefore the quality of the support line
c) always indirectly, besieging the enemy city from which the line starts, thus blocking the line itself.
(Don't you have the strength to defeat an enemy because he has a big army?
he annihilates his support line, in such a way that he can confront it after having reduced his morale and reduced his statistics.
clearly a support line can be more or less well defended, so depending on the case, if you have a small unit, you can afford to be fast and attack the line without having big losses, and then wait for the time it takes for the shortage of food does not oblige the enemy army to return to the city to recreate a line or make a desperate advance that could cost it all.
And in both cases, you may have the opportunity to ambush him or attack him directly.)

But to do this the line MUST EXIST and BE TANGIBLE.
We need carts full of supplies that travel from point X to point Y, whose load and time frequency depends on the player's choice.

this is linked to another factor:
"a mechanic should never be outlined for its own sake, but must be interconnected with the other mechanics."

Therefore a mechanic of this type can be linked to a quest system related to the support line route, to an attack on the support line, or to the rescue of a line under attack, or perhaps to the interception of such line, or more thin, to deliver a message to the city from which the line starts to make a change of frequency and load for the support line.
And if you are caught with the message, the line is exposed and another series of missions can be started.

Read the post I wrote, which takes both the suggestions you have placed, but makes them tangible and with a strategic value that should not be ignored.
 
I kept it short and simple for the purpose of utility. Thinking that the devs will drop everything to implement a wholly new, detailed and intricate feature design is unrealistic. That's just wishful thinking and the purpose of my suggestion is not how I wish it was in my fantasy but how a system could fit on top of what is already there. In the hopes that perhaps a dev could see it and implement something similar.

darksoulshin said:
your simulation system, which does not create a true line of traveling carts, is included in my post on support lines and logistics.
I simply expand this idea by inserting an infrastructure in the game that makes this line TANGIBLE and that gives it a strategic value that the simulation aspect alone does not give it.

In short, the support line should be linked to these factors:
1) to the economy of the place in which it is created.
2) to the relationship that our pg / clan has with the lord of the place.
3) the difficulty in defending it and the costs must increase with distance (so defensive camps should be constructed that outline the route that the wagons, which make up the support line, must travel, in order to arrive enter the radius of the army's scounts.
4) this line must be real because it must be able to be attacked in different ways:
a) in a direct way, attacking the wagons.
b) indirectly, razing enemy villages to the ground, worsening the economy and therefore the quality of the support line
c) always indirectly, besieging the enemy city from which the line starts, thus blocking the line itself.
(Don't you have the strength to defeat an enemy because he has a big army?
he annihilates his support line, in such a way that he can confront it after having reduced his morale and reduced his statistics.
clearly a support line can be more or less well defended, so depending on the case, if you have a small unit, you can afford to be fast and attack the line without having big losses, and then wait for the time it takes for the shortage of food does not oblige the enemy army to return to the city to recreate a line or make a desperate advance that could cost it all.
And in both cases, you may have the opportunity to ambush him or attack him directly.)

But to do this the line MUST EXIST and BE TANGIBLE.
We need carts full of supplies that travel from point X to point Y, whose load and time frequency depends on the player's choice.

All these sound sweet in the ear but the reality is the devs would most likely not implement all this at the current stage of development. It would make a great mod however, I'm hoping for something simple enough that the implementation could simply amount to changing some values in the code. It would also achieve the desired effect which was to stop armies moving with impunity through enemy territory.
 
I think it's a good idea. It would force the devs to implement an automatic food purchasing system, which I wouldn't mind at all. It should just calculate your distance to the nearest friendly fief and simulate the supply line like that. Also you gotta take cattle into consideration. Your army should automatically slaughter cattle that's accompanying you when you run out of food.
 
Cattle following you is a good idea. It could give you some extra food reserves to allow you to travel further. The trade off could be that your party moves slower.
 
The problem in warband was that you could buy one "piece" of bread which would feed dozens of men for days, which is long enough for you to go round the whole of calradia half a dozen times, which in turn meant that you couldn't prevent an enemy from penetrating your borders by cutting their food supply. But more rapid consumption would just make the game a tedious stop-start of constant buying. I think therefore that food should be acquired by adopting a specific "stance" which would automatically fill your food as you travelled based on your surroundings. Maybe there could be little bars above towns which would show how much available food you could buy and how much you could take by force.

These stance would be like this:
Idle. Don't take any food, rely on own baggage.
Buy. You automatically buy enough food for your army from surrounding villages, perhaps with a slider allowing you to either buy up all the food in the area (and deny the enemy), or buy a less than ideal amount in order to save money.
Raid. Your men occasionally detach from your army to go and take food from undefended hinterlands between villages, with some consequences like wounded men returning and an overall slower movement speed.
Scorched Earth. Your men take what they can and destroy the rest, making it difficult for an enemy to follow you without suffering.
Supply Train. Trains of food are sent to you periodically from nearby settlements meaning you don't have to rely on any of the above. These would be actual entities in the game which could be attacked.

I definitely think that the result of going into an area of low supply should be almost immediate, otherwise the effect on actual playstyles would be minimal
 
That's a really good addition. Those stances work very well. The supply train would be a problem because I don't believe the devs would add it even though it's the ideal feature.

Maybe you could add it in Sayazn II :fruity:

NUQAR'S Kentucky "Nuqar" James XXL said:
Buy. You automatically buy enough food for your army from surrounding villages, perhaps with a slider allowing you to either buy up all the food in the area (and deny the enemy), or buy a less than ideal amount in order to save money.
I like this part especially. Giving the player more flexibility with their money is always a good thing. And of course this would also affect morale.

As someone who actually has experience coding, realistically, how hard would it be to implement these ideas on top of the already existing game. Of course I know you can't be specific cause you haven't seen the full game and all that. But ballpark it if you can.
 
I think the idea of managing an army logistic could enhance the game experience , but then we can come with simplier solutions , and not add another layer of rules :
- there are caravans in the game , we could use them as supply train
- enemy towns and villages should simply refuse to sell you anything
- the army of the player should need more food than what it can carry , forcing the player to set up caravan going forth between the player settlements and the player army

So an invading army would have either solution of raiding / pillaging or taking the risk to see its supplies attacked.

This would also be an improvment to territory expansion : it would be logical to attack nearby settlements instead of going deep inside enemy territory.
 
RoboSenshi said:
As someone who actually has experience coding, realistically, how hard would it be to implement these ideas on top of the already existing game. Of course I know you can't be specific cause you haven't seen the full game and all that. But ballpark it if you can.

These are all things I could prototype in an afternoon, probably code in under a week, and potential bugs would be relatively easy to spot because of how straightforward the system is. The UI for this system would probably take me much longer to make than the system itself.

The problem is that I am one guy, and I don't have a boss or co-workers to answer to, so I can code using whatever insane method I want. But from what I've heard from many developers is that the structure of company doesn't really permit that kind of wild experimentation.

For example, I did a lot of stuff with the graphics which would be impossible in a company. You can do insane stuff with GPU calculations called Shaders, which includes making stuff like realistic puddles, 3D clouds and even a swarm of flies using just pure maths. For instance I made a swarm of believably buzzing flies by multiplying the colour of several randomly coloured boxes by sin and cosine, and then outputting the result into the location of the boxes. This makes them fly around randomly, and the best part is that this has basically zero impact on performance because it's done at a low level on the GPU. There are quite literally billions of flies on my current level and I could probably add several trillion more and it wouldn't impact the framerate at all.

Also, for the movement system in my game I am using "splines" which are like curvy paths determined by a set of points. The problem I faced was that I wanted to tell the AI what to do at each point in the path (whether to snap to the ground, whether to use a climb stairs animation etc) without having to save extra parallel data which would just make the whole thing more prone to glitches. So instead I got the position of each point in the spline and raised or lowered it by a few milimetres, so that the last digit of the position would actually be a key telling the AI what to do. So a spline point which was 3402.4 above the ground would do the 4th thing in the list, i.e. snap to the ground, and a poiint which was 20132.1 would do something else. This is a really stupid system, working around some of unreal engine's idiotic coding conventions, but as you can probably tell I am really proud of it.

If I was in a company I couldn't attempt anything like this, even though it allows me to bypass a lot of the difficult parts of making a strategy game by coming up with dumb solutions like this. I had to edit files all across the board and complete reorganize stuff ruthlessly. If I had even a single coworker this would be impossible without constantly asking "what can I edit and what can't I".
 
I absolutely despise the constant having to buy food in Warband. And I also despise that the enemy can saunter right past my heavily defended castle to attack my villages.

This would solve both of them to an extent but I'd be more than happy with just having an option for food to be automated and for towns and castles to have red zones akin to total war games but you cannot pass at all until the castle/town is taken. Borders should mean something.
 
I don't really like the idea of red zones but I understand why you would want something like it. I don't think it works in a Mount and Blade game because that kind of mechanic is better suited to a turn based game. However, the system I proposed along with Jacobs additions can make it exceedingly hard to operate deep into enemy territory without taking castles and towns along the way. That would make borders pretty significant.

NUQAR'S Kentucky "Nuqar" James XXL said:
RoboSenshi said:
As someone who actually has experience coding, realistically, how hard would it be to implement these ideas on top of the already existing game. Of course I know you can't be specific cause you haven't seen the full game and all that. But ballpark it if you can.

These are all things I could prototype in an afternoon, probably code in under a week, and potential bugs would be relatively easy to spot because of how straightforward the system is. The UI for this system would probably take me much longer to make than the system itself.

The problem is that I am one guy, and I don't have a boss or co-workers to answer to, so I can code using whatever insane method I want. But from what I've heard from many developers is that the structure of company doesn't really permit that kind of wild experimentation.

For example, I did a lot of stuff with the graphics which would be impossible in a company. You can do insane stuff with GPU calculations called Shaders, which includes making stuff like realistic puddles, 3D clouds and even a swarm of flies using just pure maths. For instance I made a swarm of believably buzzing flies by multiplying the colour of several randomly coloured boxes by sin and cosine, and then outputting the result into the location of the boxes. This makes them fly around randomly, and the best part is that this has basically zero impact on performance because it's done at a low level on the GPU. There are quite literally billions of flies on my current level and I could probably add several trillion more and it wouldn't impact the framerate at all.

Also, for the movement system in my game I am using "splines" which are like curvy paths determined by a set of points. The problem I faced was that I wanted to tell the AI what to do at each point in the path (whether to snap to the ground, whether to use a climb stairs animation etc) without having to save extra parallel data which would just make the whole thing more prone to glitches. So instead I got the position of each point in the spline and raised or lowered it by a few milimetres, so that the last digit of the position would actually be a key telling the AI what to do. So a spline point which was 3402.4 above the ground would do the 4th thing in the list, i.e. snap to the ground, and a poiint which was 20132.1 would do something else. This is a really stupid system, working around some of unreal engine's idiotic coding conventions, but as you can probably tell I am really proud of it.

If I was in a company I couldn't attempt anything like this, even though it allows me to bypass a lot of the difficult parts of making a strategy game by coming up with dumb solutions like this. I had to edit files all across the board and complete reorganize stuff ruthlessly. If I had even a single coworker this would be impossible without constantly asking "what can I edit and what can't I".
And that's why a game is meticulously planned out before production even starts. I know changing things on the fly is hard in large collaborations. But at least a system similar to this can be modded into the game in some form if the devs fail to do so. I still feel it should be added into the core of the game but I understand the limitations better now. Thanks.

 
Carloz said:
This means having a castle on the border you'll constantly need to fend off the enemy

As historically eh?  :facepalm:

I like the idea, playing logistic heavy games as Hearts of Iron series gave me insight what a challenge logistics is. I would like a standalone logistics utility mod! It would be great for the community. Make it happen!
 
I love the ideas RoboSenshi, but what about some simpler mechanics that have nothing to do with food supplies? What if party speed, morale, and the chances of being ambushed were altered once crossing into enemy territory? The further the party goes into enemy territory the slower they become, they begin to lose morale the longer and deeper they push into enemy territory, and their chances of being ambushed rise steadily as they continue to press on.
 
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