[Mass Combat] Logistics and Guerrilla Warfare

[Michael Thayne]

I have thought about getting rid of the logistic force, and treating each $1000 of supplies as having 1 WT that must be moved by transport units. Details here. Though even this may be too abstract for your purposes. Realistically, a guerrilla force might be able to access plenty of small arms and ammunition but not jet fuel or replacement vehicle parts.

[lugaid]

Originally Posted by Michael Thayne

I have thought about getting rid of the logistic force, and treating each $1000 of supplies as having 1 WT that must be moved by transport units. Details here. Though even this may be too abstract for your purposes. Realistically, a guerrilla force might be able to access plenty of small arms and ammunition but not jet fuel or replacement vehicle parts.

That's an interesting suggestion. I think that there should be more than just transport in a logistics force, though. Also, to a certain extent the abstraction is helpful, so that shouldn't need to be changed much. Perhaps a solution should look toward temporarily converting the logistic-abstract values to mass combat-abstract ones by some means.

[lugaid]

Also, perhaps in your suggestion to get rid of a separate logistics force it could be something like an amount of logistics capacity equal to the starting wealth of a given TL per WT instead of a fixed value across TLs.

[Michael Thayne]

Originally Posted by lugaid

Also, perhaps in your suggestion to get rid of a separate logistics force it could be something like an amount of logistics capacity equal to the starting wealth of a given TL per WT instead of a fixed value across TLs.

The reason not to do this is it will crash your logistic costs as TL increases, since the cost of transport units mostly doesn't increase with TL. You could maybe double $ per WT at TL6 when motor vehicles first appear, but that's as far as I would go. Sure ammo is expensive but you still need to haul a lot of fuel and other things that don't have a particularly high value per unit weight.

(Though possibly my $1k per 1 WT is too low—it works if you assume the "typical" distance from supply points is about a week. YMMV on that assumption though.)