In history armies have always been dependant of a continues flow of supplies. And the enemies have always tried to stop or disturb the flow. Therefor the armies have always been leaving rear guards to secure the flow of supplies. This have made the armies unvilling to move tofar away from the homeland because of the insecure flow of supplies.

In the game somekind of supply dependency for the military forces would make the whole game more realistic, by the fact that the armies always have to make sure that their rears are secure (by leaving troops behind to protect a secure line to the homeland or an ally) and that they don't stretch their supply lines to fare.

If they are on a highway then repair is +1/2

If they are on a railroad repair is +1 the regular rate.

quote: Originally posted by DarkCloud on 07-29-2000 04:38 PM How about if they are on a road, the support is full and they can be repaired quickly perhaps +1/4 the regular rate. If they are on a highway then repair is +1/2 If they are on a railroad repair is +1 the regular rate. Well, what do you think? Any other ideas?

And if an enemy unit is smack-dab in the middle of the road between you and a nearby city, you don't repair at all?

Also the distance to a town or city should come into play. The bonuses should only work if a friendly city is five or six road blocks away in any direction, unless there is a mountain or hill in the way of the roads route, then the bonuses would only be active for two or three blocks.

I don't think that roads mean so much in the matter of supplying troops. Even if you are deep in the enemy territory and there are no enemy units in the vicinity, it is likely that the road will still be blocked to your supplies due to the hostility of the local population.

Therefore, I would propose a somewhat simpler system. If a unit is outside a certain range from one of the friendly (your own or allied) cities, it will suffer a certain combat disadvatage, for example -5% for each five turns that it is outside the range.

This system would solve most of the problems that are mentioned here and at the same time would not require too much extra micromanagement.

First of all, in Civ the units do not represent a certain person, rather they represent an entire army. However, in the game, you can only treat this army as a whole, that is if you move the unit, the whole army moves and if the unit attacks the entire army attacks. This is not the way things happen in real life but this is the way things are modeled in this game.

Second, in real life the units that are guarding the supply routes to the armies can sometimes be very large, but they are almost always still MUCH smaller than the army itself. Unfortunately, the game cannot model that. Thus the only way that you can secure a road in the game is by a presence of another army.

In my opinion it is a gross misrepresentation of the real world to have an entire legion guarding a supply route for another legion. Therefore, your idea, however, interesting is unacceptable to me. I would hate a game that would force me to build an entire armor unit, so that I could safely send another armor to war.

Also, my idea deals not just with being out of my own territory, but HOW FAR you are from your borders. If you conduct a step by step war, conquering closer cities first and slowly moving into the enemy territory you should be penalized less than someone who goes in and just takes a wild shot at the enemy capital.

Therefore, I believe that my idea is actually closer to the real world than yours. The 5% (we could always make it 3% if you think 5 is too much ) strenth reduction for a unit will represent those parts of the army that are currently guarding the roads to the home borders and cannot participate in the battles because of that.

Christantine:
If you are deep inside enemy territory, all roads are already blocked by the enemy, regardless of whether there are enemy units or not. This would represent the hostility of the local population towards your armies and it will be present all the time (recently conquered territories excluded, of course).

That's about all I have for now. If I took any of your ideas DarkCloud, I'm sorry I didn't mean to plagiarize . If you guys are still not convinced than just post give another post telling me your further objections.