[Mass Combat] Detailed logistics

[Michael Thayne]

Mass Combat assumes that players want to focus on fighting, not logistics, and therefore makes the rules for logistics as simple as possible. But this causes a few problems—it makes it unclear how one would cut supply lines, and means that there's no penalty for maintaining long supply lines over land, and little benefit to sticking near rivers and ports. Here's some suggested alternate rules, meant to stay relatively simple while introducing some extra realism.

Here's how it works: all units consume generic "supplies". Supplies magically originate from "supply points", which are placed at the GM's discretion, but are typically major settlements, rail depots, etc. Every element should be assigned an Endurance stat, representing the number of days worth of supplies it can carry itself. This might be 10 for a TL0-5 land element, 30 for a TL3-5 Sea unit, and could be very high for a TL7+ nuclear powered naval vessel. Moving more supplies than allowed by a force's Endurance stat requires elements with Transport capacity. Supplies have WT 1 per $1000 of value. (Question for audience: should higher-TL supplies, particular > TL5, be worth more $ per WT?)

Among other things, these rules mean that if a force is camped 5 days from a supply point, the Draft Team elements needed to bring it supplies will cost the same as a land logistic force in the standard rules. Forces camped closer to the supply point can get away with a proportionately smaller logistic force—conversely, long supply lines can be dramatically more expensive, because it becomes necessary to use Transport capacity to supply the Draft Team elements. Generally speaking, every additional 15 days beyond the first 5 doubles the size of the required logistic force.

If the GM decides the rules for "Campaigning Season" (p. 14) apply, these logistical issues can be ignored entirely—assume the portion of an army's cost to maintain not covered by foraging consists of easy-to-transport items such as the army's payroll. When using this system, ignore the rules for "Maintaining a Force in Bad Terrain"—logistics will naturally become harder any time the baggage train has to move "off road". The Terrain feature does not provide its RAW benefit in terms of making it easier to maintain a force in bad terrain (also on p. 14)—but small forces in their preferred terrain type at TL0-5 may be able to forage at the GM's discretion. If the GM allows this, it has the same benefits as operating in campaigning season.

When forces forage in agricultural regions, the GM should consider determining the total $ value of all supplies in the region the force could theoretically appropriate for itself. Taking more than 10% of this theoretical maximum is likely to cause starvation. This rule effectively requires forces beyond a certain size to keep marching if they want to avoid starvation—though where exactly the threshold is depends partly on how much their commander cares about the well-being of the local populace.

When the rules for actually running a battle refer to the "logistic force" and the "fighting force", treat all elements with TS 0 as being part of the logistic force as long as they are used exclusively to transport supplies and other elements with TS 0. All other elements remain part of the fighting force.