Thinking about supply - some proposals

[LintMan]

Thinking about the supply situation and all the silly endless wine bag forging/scout carrying micromanagement that goes with it...

In my current game, I have almost 30 scouts sneaking around with my assorted armies carrying endless wine bags, and before the game winds down, I'll probably end up with 5-6 more as my armies contimue to expand. Further, because I'm playing Marignon which has stealthy friars, I need to do CTRL-Move on the combat Groups to get my friars to fight, which means that I have to separate out my wine scouts and sneak them separately to the same province, else they show up in combat. To make tracking them all easier, I've now renamed them "Food 1" .. "Food 29". Be amazed by my impressive roleplaying immersion!

Even with all those walking wineries, I still end up ending up with some starving units because some provinces I attack have virtually no supplies, and to make all my armies use 0 supplies would probably require an *additional* 5-10 wine scouts.

For nations that rely on large numbers of eating troops, making wine scouts or some variant of that is an almost required step which just strikes me as silly and very micromanagement intensive for something that doesn't really add much fun/interest to the game. So I have some thoughts on improving things:

1) Most magic items don't "stack", so having more than one doesn't work for most items, which prevents scouts from carrying 2 wines each. But items that generate gems (ie: astral clams) *do* stack. I'd suggest that the endless wine bags are closer in effect to astral clams than to, say, +1 Nature Moonvine Bracelets, and allowing wine bags to stack would help things a little bit.

2) Forging Cauldrons of Endless Broth would also allow using less scouts to carry all the food, but the cauldrons are really a bad deal: you need a Nature-3 mage to make them, and they cost 20 gems while only giving twice the supply of the 5-gem wine bags. (Ie: they cost twice as much per nature gem, while also tying up a much more expensive mage to make them). My thought: reduce the cost to 10 gems, and make them const-6 (if it isn't there now).

3) Make forts/castles supply value not just affect the supplies during seige, but also the province's regular supply value, and the amount of supply the castle provides to units in neighboring provinces. (IIRC, that doesn't matter currently). So then, you could pick the high-supply Fortified City and have a lot less supply headaches.

4) Preferably to (just) fixing the magic supply methods, I'd like to see a non-magic-item solution that echoes how real armies would deal with supply:

Add some non-combat "mule train/supply wagon"-type supply units...

- Probably the simplest implementation would just be that these supply units would just have a +supply attribute. Perhaps +50 supply.

- A more interesting (but complex to do) implementation might make them able to carry certain quantity of supplies, which they would dispense (and maybe run out of) in provinces where food was short, and resupply in provinces where
there was surplus capacity. In this implementation, lets say that one mule train could carry 200 supplies. So if you had a 125-supply army with one mule train supply unit in a 75-suplly province, you could go 4 turns without
resupplying. But if you had a 200-supply eating army in a 0-supply province, it would only Last 1 turn before running out. (But maybe then your army eats the mules before it starts starving!) And of course, if you had two mule trains, it would double that time before you ran out, etc.

- A supply unit would be a commander-type unit (0 leadership) which would abstractly represent one whole team of mules/wagons/etc and their handlers. This unit would be purely non-combat, so it would never show up in a battle screen.

- You move supply units into enemy territories along with the rest of your army, but conceptually, they hang a bit behind, in a camp, waiting for the battle to end. If the attack fails, there is a chance the supply units will be
overrun and destroyed before they can (automatically) route to a neighboring province. (Imagine this as there was no time for them to load up the mules/wagons and flee their camp before getting overrun by the victorious defenders). Perhaps this destruction chance would depend on the relative speeds of the mule team unit and the pursuing army. Similarly, if any supply units are in a province that is attacked and defeated, there is a chance the they will be automatically destroyed instead of routed. (And of course like all other units, if there is no where to route to, they'd be lost.) Finally, if supply units are moved into an enemy province without any actual attackers to go with them, they would again be either automatically destroyed
or routed.

- Given their no-combat-capability, vulnerability to getting over-run if combat goes poorly, upkeep cost, and my desire to make supply units a viable/preferable alternative to wine scouts, I wouldn't make them too expensive. I'm thinking 40-50 gold, 20 resources, but that would also depend on how much supply they provide (and whether it's the unlimited +supply implementation, or the limited supply quantity implementation).

- I'm thinking that these mule trains/supply wagons/etc could have race dependent variations and be recruitable at all castles/forts. (Maybe an independent Version available also?) Aside from the unit picture, the variation could be things like map move speed, amount of supplies provided, and likelihood of getting overrun instead of routed.

- Another possible capabilty for supply units: allow the supply units to have some number "blank" magic item slots which would let it carry any type item in them (but not use those items), and also maybe carry more than 30 gems. So it could transport 2 magic swords and 2 helms to the front, but would be incapable of using any of them.

- Someone is probably thinking: "All you've done is replace wine scouts with some new supply unit to manage!". Well, yes, but with several benefits: With a "mule train", you don't need to both forge the wine bags, recruit the scouts to carry them, get the scouts to a lab to give them the wine bags, and also no need to sneak the wine scouts around while you CTRL-move the rest of your army. Further, there is the added strategic risk/interest of potentially having some of your supply units suddenly destroyed if things take
a bad turn. In contrast, wine scouts have very little risk of getting killed. Also, if the "limited supply" implementation was done, it would require more varied strategic concerns than wine scouts do.

So, the benefits of dedicated supply units as I see them:
- No nature gems required
- No nature mages required to forge large quantities of endless wine bags.
- less micromanagement: just buy the unit and move it with your army
- The potential to lose your supply units if your army is routed adds some fun strategic considerations
- adds some level of "realism" (Though I'm not a big stickler for realism in a fantasy-based game)
- The AI will have a better chance of keeping its large armies from constantly starving, because it would be far more capable of recruiting "mule trains" from castles and indep provinces than it is now for forging wine bags to give to large batches of scouts (or even just to give to regular army commanders).

And the downsides vs. wine scouts:
- Initial and upkeep gold costs for the supply unit are likely higher
- Much greater vulnerability to being destroyed when battles are lost.
- Unable to use the dedicated supply unit as a scout or for combat