Logistics/Supply Question?

[SLB]

This may be a case of information overload - after reading the manual and several threads, the background/question are: Playing as the WA, I just took Messina (Turn 9). Based on the Logistic data (n), there appears to be sufficient depots on the island to not only refit the units but support the airbases/air unit campaign against Italy. I set most of the depots to a supply priority 4. Recognizing the shipping chain of ships and railroads, I see the ports of Oran, Algiers and Tunis have large blue bars (stored supplies). Also, I understand that Oran is a National supply depot. Algiers and Tunis are Priority 2 depots. I prefer to have the supplies sent to Sicily. So after this less than brief background, do I need to keep the Algiers and Tunis depots at Priority 2 to maintain the supply chain, disband the depots to recover the supplies or something else?

Thanks

[loki100]

some rough ideas.

Yes, reset the N African ports to 1/2 - you don't want them holding onto supplies.

There are two constraints to supplying Italy/Sicily. Shipping capacity and port capacity. I tend to find once I have all the Sicilian ports - and they are repaired - you usually get enough to supply any forces in Sicily.

Don't be too quick to move longer range ranges onto Sicily. Keep them in N Africa or Malta or Lampedusa. The advantage is you are not tieing up your naval capacity and/or port capacity. You can often bomb up to around Anzio with 2 engined bombers from the smaller islands.

If you operate with pretty much the at start Med forces (plus a few extra divisions) you should be ok for overall supply once the port system is functioning.

The second part to the supply network is then to distribute it to the right depots. This is usually easy in Italy as its a linear system (you want to pull it close to the front line or where your airplanes are clustered).

The final part is deciding which armies/corps should get the supply. Note here that the supply priority hierachy #4-#1 does two different things. It determines which units are supplied first and it determines how much supply a formation can receive (ie sets a cap). So a #2 priority corp can only receive something like 80% of its needs (forget the exact number) and a #1 priority somewhere around 60%. So if you want a corps to refit after heavy fighting you can't leave it on #2 or they will always be short.

There is a good side to this. Set all your corps to #1 and supply will build up in the depots - can be handy say over winter to allow a spring offensive.

This is a bit unintuitive - for a while I thought that HQ supply priority simply set the order at which they are supplied but the hard cap issue is important to.

[HMSWarspite]

And be careful setting all depots in Sicily (or anywhere) to 4. It's OK if you don't have too many, but as Loki said the limit is ports. If you are using all the port/shipping capacity, setting further depots to 4 does not increase the total flow, it just hits all the depots with something like 'equal hurt' (actually worse, it will supply the nearer ones to ports better I think and starve the forward ones). In other words they all get slowly strangled. Set the key 2-3 at level 4, and the rest at 3. When you invade italy, you will need Sicily to drop supply demand (even if you have a/c based there - that shipping again). Even disband inland ones, and just sit refitting units in ports.

[EddyBear81]

This is really were I struggle : you say that shipping is the bottleneck, but in the Logistics screen, I always have a lot of unused cargo ships (at least early in the game), so I wonder if there is really a shipping issue at all.

From what I experienced, all logistical difficulties are linked with the speed of repair (be it ports or railways/yards), but capacity is always available !

That being said, I do almost what you are suggesting : disband inland (rail) depots and set depots far from the front at 2 (with 3 for the "second line" depots and 4 for the most critical ones, usually 3 or 4 depots)