New player dealing with refocusing & wondering what to build

[Marshall Thomas]

I was looking at my logistic points moving through hexes from my capital (SHQ) to my eastern front; which is where most of my units are fighting a war. I noticed the number going way down as it passed through a city. I later learned that this was the result of refocusing.

I figured that building a truck depot in all my adjacent cities leading to the front was a good way to increase logistic capacity down the road. I had no idea that this was actually hurting me (I couldn't figure out why my troops on the front where having fuel problems).

These truck depots are just level 1 because I had created these zones; so they have very low population. Back in my capital the truck depot is level 4.

Should I avoid building truck depots along the way to a front to avoid refocusing? and just keep the truck depot in the capital at as high a level as possible? Thanks in advance

[LeoMPanther]

If Fuel and population allow you should keep your truckstation in the Capital SHQ as high as possible.
Just using truckstations you'd start losing logisitics capacity after about 12 hexes distance. This can be extended with a supply depot once (so no daisy chaining them) and using sealed roads.
In an ideal situation you at most want a truckstation at 12 hexes distance(radius of 6 hexes to reduce admin strain) between each other starting from the SHQ. This is not a rule just a suggestion.

However, if you're a long way from the capital and you have the resources you'd likely be better of setting up a rail connection to the front.

Admittedly this is just general advice as I'm guessing as to what the situation looks like.

[mroyer]

A long time ago there was a nice logistics tutorial by DTurtle that had some good discussion of refocusing.
https://www.matrixgames.com/forums/view ... 0#p4736700

Most of the way down the first page:

So, you have some logistical network going out from your SHQ and it is going through some cities. You want to be relatively careful when those cities have their own logistical assets (which they should!). After all, when the points from a truck station meet another truck station those points are refocused - resetting all their AP but also losing at least 25% of their points. The same goes for rail stations.

The last thing you want to do is this:

(Adjusted a bit from a real case).
So we have four Rail Stations 1 (each providing 2000 rail points) and two Rail Stations 2 (each providing 4000 rail points). That is a total of 16000 rail points.

However when we add together the three legs going out from this system we only have 2906 + 459 + 7502 points: a total of 10806 points leaving this network to the other outlying zones! We already lost more than five thousand points through refocusing!
In fact we can look at the individual stations and see that the rail station in the center (sitting on the SHQ) lost almost all rail points:

Only 693 of the original 4000 points made it out!

So what do we do instead?
Well, the obvious solution would be to simply have a level 3 or 4 station in the SHQ and not have built all those level 1 stations at all.

But, how about this:

I think that the basic idea is clear: Have a main route (that runs through the SHQ), with all other stations sitting one hex off of that route, adding their rail points to the main route. A traffic sign stops the points from diverting off the route to those stations. I also added some traffic signs on the direction away from the SHQ so that more points go towards the SHQ (after all, that is where we need the most points).

So what does this result in?
4698 + 2775 + 6670 = 14143 rail points leaving this part of the network. We only lost 1857 points - because we are rerouting some stuff from the outside towards the SHQ, which refocuses them. We can adjust how many points we want to have in the SHQ - the higher the proportion, the higher the lost rail points.

There is one slight disadvantage when you use this approach of having the logistical asset sitting beside the main route: Usually you build that asset in a city. And as you can see in the screenshot above, the amount of points available where that asset is sitting are only those produced in the asset. However, we can address this:

This way, the city gets the full number of points available on the main route! You don't even have to have the rail station right next to the city, but anywhere along the route where needed (though having it right next to the city will have it have the maximum amount of rail points available).
As I noted on the picture, you can also do this with truck stations. However, you will need to have a lvl 1 truck station mothballed in order to stop the civilians from building a new one. Also, usually trucks are a lot more AP constrained so you need to refocus a lot more anyway. So it might only be useful in certain use cases.