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PaperclipPerfector  11mo ago (text post)   2814 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for December 1, 2023

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...And now I want a game that is all about army logistics.

On the shallow but higher-production end, Hearts of Iron.

On the extremely crunchy and lower-tech end, Shadow Empire.

Hearts of Iron

Are you referring to Darkest Hour, 3, or 4?

Personally, I play 4. I would not be surprised if an older one delves way deeper into one or another logistical element.

The reason I feel it's worth mentioning, despite the many, many non-logistical elements to the game? Aircraft carriers. I'd been playing Endless Space 2 and especially Stellaris while complaining about the portrayal of carriers. Far too often, strike craft are treated as a glorified missile. The point of a real-world carrier isn't to shoot missiles at enemy capital ships. It's to project force via strikes, recon, and air superiority. I wanted my Stellaris carriers to be spaceborne bases, dominating their entire star system without ever having to show up on enemy scopes.

I'd also been playing Ashes of the Singularity and its far superior predecessor, Supreme Commander. At least those games tried to give aircraft radically different movement and constraints than land units! But they were still just big blobs of hit points, because they had to play nice with the existing RTS paradigm of bubble-shielded turrets and fog of war. They couldn't implement realistic force projection without breaking the assumptions that kept all the rest of the game functional.

So I started brainstorming a true logistics RTS. It needed supply depots and convoys, because aircraft benefit from a distributed attack surface rather than a single all-or-nothing megabase. It needed more robust intelligence gathering to allow decisive tactical advantages without disregarding all pretense of counterplay. It needed to model equipment and supplies and the effects of their absence on an army. In short, I wanted to focus on ways to pressure the enemy beyond the traditional method of "make all his hit points go away."

Then I tried HoI4. Supply centers and railways, check. Production and stockpiling of materiel, check. Aircraft that are actually modeled as flying missions rather than continuous close air support, CHECK. A naval game of cat and mouse that I didn't know I wanted. The game is janky as hell, and it doesn't always live up to the mechanics I'd like. But it's trying for something so different from a traditional RTS that I can't help but love it.

Gary Grigsby's War in the East 2 may qualify. This page describes the game's logistics system.

Thanks, that's quite interesting. I was more interested in pre-railroad warfare, though, back when they had armies and not fronts.

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