Ship Convoys...

[Mister Fork]

Give our new BB groups and attack aircraft/bombers something to hunt down and sink.  Ship convoys.  Throw in a couple of escort destroyers with cargo, transport and fuel ships.  And of course on the merchant ships - 37MM placements.

[ONTOS]

Sounds good to me, but I am afraid people will be negative.  +1

[Sabre]

Count me in. +1. However, if they're going to be in the MA, I feel there needs to be a strategic and/or tactical reason to attack, and defend, them. An analog would be trains between land-locked strat. Unfortunately, even when trains were a part of the game, few bothered to attack them.

A more relevant use for non-combatant ships, suggested before, is to have combat support vessels added as part of the fleets. They would take the place of the ammo bunkers (ammunition ship), barracks (troop ship), and VH (LST) targets at land bases; destroying them would have the same affect as with a land base (and they would rebuild in the same fashion, as well). I'd then up the damage required to sink the flagship.

[Mister Fork]

I think if we had them go from a port where they arrived at another port, helps with country fuel and ammo supplies.

We could have several types of 'convoys'.

1. LST convoy that when you put the last waypoint on a landing spot, the LST beaches themselves and become vehicle hangars while the destroyers stayed off shore for support. THAT would be cool.

2. Fuel convoys that need to arrive at ports otherwise if sunk, a countries fuel drops to 75%. Same for ammo.

You could really enrich the strategy of the game with these ship convoys

[puller]

I think if we had them go from a port where they arrived at another port, helps with country fuel and ammo supplies.

We could have several types of 'convoys'.

1. LST convoy that when you put the last waypoint on a landing spot, the LST beaches themselves and become vehicle hangars while the destroyers stayed off shore for support. THAT would be cool.

2. Fuel convoys that need to arrive at ports otherwise if sunk, a countries fuel drops to 75%. Same for ammo.

You could really enrich the strategy of the game with these ship convoys

+1

[ML52]

Some great ideas here! +1

[hotcoffe]

Sounds good to me, but I am afraid people will be negative.  +1

just so that you dont have unjustified fears , -1

[Greebo]

The problem with using a ship convoy as an alternative to trains for strat supply is in how trains, trucks and barges currently work in AH. They all travel for exactly 10 minutes along their route before re-spawning and their speed is determined by how long the route is. So for a truck convoy doing 60 mph its travel route is 10 miles long. A ship convoy would travel at maybe 12 mph, so with the current strat setup it would only travel 2 miles.

So there would need to be some change to the way AH strat supply works for ship convoys to be workable. If a separate level of supply beyond strat was implemented, lets call it country supply, then a different time limit could be used than for other convoys. You might have a country supply ship convoy every two hours or so travelling about one sector, or twice as far with two convoys in play at once. The problem with this is that MA maps would have to redesigned to create sea lanes in the right places for the ship convoys to supply the city.

[oboe]

Despite the problems, I hope HTC eventually implements something like this, even if it requires a redesign of MA maps.   

I'm hoping to see ship transport of goods (both convoys AND tramp freighters) travelling to ports, docking, and unloading goods and supplies into dockside warehouses.  The warehouse district of a port would be adjacent to a railroad marshalling yard, where trains emanate and travel to the country's cities, strats, and large airfields.   Small and medium airfields could be supplied by truck convoys and AI transport planes.  I hope to see tunnels through mountains for rail and truck traffic too, so that ground transport arteries have reasonable-looking grades.

A robust transportation and supply system will give AH players a new targets and a new offensive mission type - interdiction.   It'll have to be carefully balanced though so a single strike, while doing worthwhile damage, doesn't cripple a country.   That should require a sustained offensive.

The transportation and supply aspect is the next big thing I'm curious about and waiting for in AH3.    Might even be cool to see this implemented into scenario terrains for scenarios.

[hotcoffe]

if we get merchant ship convoys we want submarines as well