Logistics Observations

[Kshim]

After playing for a few months and trying to understand logistics in this game, I have come away with several observations and notes about logistics that I'd like to run past the more experienced players.

1. Facilities are mostly inefficient. Whenever I run through a logistics town I find that facilities are usually turned off and are not being fed. This means that the ratio of Msups being consumed to the amount of material being produced is always considerably lower than it has to be.
2. Mid-Line logistics seems to be the biggest bottleneck in the supply chain. The most efficient way to move goods from the rear to mid-line storages is by railway, followed by freighters. Furthermore, if Quickpull inventories are not created at seaports, single logistic players don't want to do mid-line logi because it takes forever to load up 5 containers, put them on a freighter and deliver to the front. Thus, a majority of material produced sits at the rear lines until squads deliver them to mid line hubs.
3. A big challenged faced in the rear line logistics is that some regions have an abundance of a couple resources like coal and components, but will be lacking oil and sulfur. This means that these regions should "trade" with other regions that have a comparative advantage. The region that has coal and components should deliver the surplus to a different region that has a shortage of these, and in return should have oil and sulfur shipped in.

[Auticeon]

1. That is a really good observation of facilities which I've never seen before. Unlike the backline town factory or MPF facilities aren't really used 24 hours a day and have a maintenance cost. All that does mean they do have a sort of additional cost being that you do not use your facility 24/7 but still get billed as if they do.
Thing with that however is that is how things work as maintenance is an MMO mechanic rather than something transferred from real life. It's to clear up old player made structures so they don't hold up server resources. It's more of a byproduct of limited computational power than anything else really.

2. I haven't seen people refer to a midline like that in ages. Usually people just deliver stuff to a frontline depot and be done with it. The reason for long pull times is mainly alts and griefers however I sometimes question it myself as now everyone just uses bots to pull public goods and it kinda just holds up the entire system making the shipping part of logistics a bit of a hassle. I don't really have any solution to that other than accepting public goods as being lost instead of holding people from taking from public in the backlines or having different pull times for the back and frontline depots.

3. It's less that there is a trade to other hexes and more of just anarchy in most cases. There's no real centralized command structure or even governance and so people just trek to hexes with the resources they want and go back or make a facility/set up in the hex so they can push materials and goods from there to whatever front they're fighting. It's first come first serve essentially.

[Kshim]

The solutions I can think of to midline logistics is that items should either be shipped immediately to midline warehouses, or to the frontline directly. At the very least, items should be deposited in a public quickpull inventory, no?