The land supply system is complemented by the overseas supply system. It works like this: Each of the maritime trade boxes where you have either merchant fleets or transport fleets can take supply from your nearby unblockaded harbors and redistribute it to other nearby locations in need. The valid locations here are not just restricted to harbors but also include coastal depots, so with this system you can set up a kind of a ‘mulberry before the hour’ by landing troops in an enemy region, have your supply wagons build a depot, and then the turn after receive supply in the depots, provided you have control (or at least partial control) of the nearby maritime trade box. No need here, as you can see, to manually shuttle transport ships with supply. If you plan for a large scale invasion though, it will be better to capture a large harbor, and install a depot there (or increase the size of the existing one), to be sure you start accumulating extra supply.
Gibraltar is a pivot for British supply in the Mediterranean. Drawing supply from the British harbours in South England, the base is capable of sending them further in Malta and Eastern Med. This is accomplished thanks to the existence of transport fleets in the Atlantic MTB and Mediterranean MTB.
Having supply materialize by points on the map is a decision we never regretted, because this ‘regional localization’ is great to solve a host of issues. For example there is no need in PON to come with abstracted, sometimes awkward rules, about siege and surrender. If you manage to besiege a force, then the supply points that were there at the instant the siege began will be the only resources the besieged can rely upon. This also goes for ammunition. Perhaps they have an ample reserve of food but are low on ammo, who knows? So after 2-3 aborted assaults (that you will do using the combat posture ‘probe’ to limit your losses, but more about combat postures in another article), they will have expended all their cartridges and shells and you’ll be ready for the real attack. There are really a lot of subtleties involved here, should you like to play things smart.
Beware of besieging a harbor though, if you can’t blockade it, because it will be easy for the besieged to stay supplied from the sea (or navigable river). Here again, simple logic, and it works well in the game without need of abstraction.
Another important aspect of the supply system is being in supply in regions with hostile weather, particularly in colonial regions. Each region has a ‘safe supply limit’, or SSL, which is dynamic and depends on several factors, like the weather, development level, if the region is national to you, etc. You can view this value by checking an icon on your army or with the supply filter, should you need it. The rule works quite simply: if the total supply in the region is under the SSL, then nothing adverse happens. On the contrary, if above, then your supply will start to degrade and rot, the higher above the limit, the faster it will disappear. And then enters … the colonial leaders! Colonial leaders are great, because even if they do not command many men without penalty (did we talk about command ratings and capacities?) they have special abilities that will prevent the supply transported by their men from being wasted (at least partially, don’t try to exploit the rule, it won’t work!). In the end, if you were to make a relief force made up either of a column of 5000 men commanded by a colonial leader or an army corps of 50.000 men commanded by another general, from say Cairo to Lake Victoria (without using riverine movement, which is a possibility in the game), we can bet you that the colonial column would be in better shape than the continental corps and have more men able to fight when it arrived! [/INDENT]
