Changes to unit ammunition and ressuply
I am unhappy with how the current ammunition/logistics and ressuply system works.
The problems:
- Some units, notably nebelwerfer, have the tendency of drying out your ammo storages to fill their own stockpile. This leaves your other units with nothing to work with.
- Some units, notably boats, carry much less ammo ingame as they did in real life.
- Boats have separate per-turret ammunition stockpiles, even if the turrets house identical weapons using identical ammo. Situations where one turret is empty and the other full are common.
- To implement per-turret ammunition and to make turrets killable, turrets on boats (and b1bis) were made their own units). This is a hack and results in some funny bugs (boat killed before completion => full health turrets on seabed).
- Anything <= machinegun does not consume ammo at all. This is illogical.
- Each turret(unit) has only one ammunition stockpile, no matter how many types of shells it can fire (AP, HE, HEAT, SMOKE, ...). There is no way to specify that a tank should .e.g carry 5 AP runs and 1 HE round. Having this option would mean that the tank would not deplete its "AP" rounds firing at approaching soldiers, and would still have something with which to engage armor.
The solutions:
-
(1) A widget is added with which the player can specify the maximum refill amount of the unit type (e.g. all nebelwerfers), up to a maximum that the unit type can actually carry. Currently, the planned setup is as follows: The widget reads player preferences from a configuration file in player's home directory and sends all these preferences to the game_ammo gadget via the SendLuaMsg system. -
(2) All units are given realistic maxAmmo. The current "maxammo" becomes "defaultammo". -
(3) The ammo gadget is changed to work per-weapon (particularly the "freeze weapon when out of ammo" machinery). -
(4) B1Bis is de-composified? -
(5) All weapons are given ammo cost. This will unbalance the current system of storages. -
(5b) All non-storage structures become small storages to compensate. -
(5c) Unrelated, but the same as (2b) is done for command. The total command "storage" should grow together with your "economy", which should grow together with income. -
(5d) To prevent small arms from running out of ammo mid-refill, add option to specify minimum remaining ammo in storages at which point >machineguns are still ressuplied. -
(6) The ammo gadget is changed to work per-shell, with separate refill limits for each shell type (HE, AP, HEAT, ... summing up to the total limit)
Additionally:
- Make increased ammunition carried proportionally slow the units down. It is expected that infantry mobility would suffer the most from setting their maxAmmo to a value that is too large (#s44 log 20200219)
What is not on the agenda:
- Make dead/abandoned units drop their ammo, which can be collected and reused. (same with small arms and guns). Why not? Too much work.
- Replace the current refill logistics system with purchase orders, where you submit orders for how many of each type of shell you want and it gets delivered at next ressuply. Thus "ammo" would no longer be a "liquid" that can be cast into whatever shell that is needed. Too micro heavy. Why not? Too much work/micro.