Table of Organization and Equipment

KFS1 on 1.27 TOE

TOE stands for Table of Organization and Equipment (in US military parlance). It is the combination of the Order of Battle (OrBat) with tables of which entities get what equipment.

In WWII Online/Battleground Europe, spawnlists have always been a component of individual towns or armybases. At the very start, spawning was limited only to so many of each vehicle at a time - any vehicle you killed could spawn back right away.

Later we introduced the OrBat and Brigades and eventually limited spawning to towns which had a Brigade. Supply was still based on the towns themselves, and if you ran out of equipment you just moved your brigade to a different town to get an instant spawn list.

With TOEs, moving only slows down your resupply. Coupled with changes to Factory Link effects on supply and movement, this should introduce new and interesting challenges to gameplay.

Some of you have expressed concern that TOEs is "adding more complexity" to the game. Quite the opposite - TOEs is actually about reduce the long and complex list of supply rules and boiling them down to a more simple ruleset that is based on the fact that brigades are no-longer just flags on the map which control which spawn lists you can see - the brigade and the spawn list are now one.

The first simplification is that we got rid of most of the country-specific dependencies, replacing them with "side". The few remaining restrictions are fairly innocuous, such as which brigade a persona can pick.

Most of the changes come with the supply system - but before I explain these, it is essential to remember that the supply system has been replaced. The old system that handled AB spawn lists and Depot lists has been completely discarded and a new system, that is brigade-centric, written in its stead.

So now, here are the new supply rules. Some new terms are introduced, which will be explained if you read the complete list.

NOTE: "vehicle" refers to all spawnable equipment including troopers.

Supply

1. Replacement.

When you spawn a vehicle, a ticket is created requesting a Replacement in 4.5 hours. This ticket is deleted when your vehicle is returned home or Manually Supplied/Oversupplied.

• Replacement time is affected by factory states.
• Replacement tickets will never oversupply a vehicle.

2. Manual Supply

You can manually replace lost vehicles at your brigade by spawning equipment from your division hq and despawning it at your Brigade. The Division HQ will keep its Replacement ticket and the Brigade will remove a replacement ticket.

• Cannot Manually Supply equipment from Brigade->Brigade or Brigade->DivHQ.
• DivHQ and Brigade must be in different towns when you spawn.

3. Manual Oversupply

You can Manually Supply vehicles above their normal capacity levels to the higher of 10% or 1 vehicle. E.g. a vehicle with capacity of between 1 and 19 can receive 1 additional vehicle, a vehicle with a capacity of 50 can receive 5 additional vehicles.

• Same rules as Manual Supply apply.
• Vehicles that would exceed the limit are Rescued (you are still awarded an RTB result)

4. Rescues

If you RTB someplace your vehicle can't or if you despawn with a "rescued" status, your vehicle does not go straight back on to your origin's spawn list, its return is delayed by 15 minutes. Your Replacement ticket is canceled and a new ticket created for 15 minutes.

5. Brigade/Division Movement / Transfer

When a Brigade/Division moves from one town to another, all it's available vehicles are taken off the spawn list and converted into 2-minute delayed Trickle Supply requests. - Includes any vehicles that were still trickling from a previous move. - Does not include vehicles which still have valid Replacement or Rescue ticket. - Equipment is not available until it has been delivered at the new destination.

6. Off-Map/Routing

When a Brigade or Division is moved manually or by routeing to the Training Grounds, all of its supply is set to zero. Only when it is redeployed onto the map does it begin Trickle Supply.

7. Trickle Supply

Trickle Supply creates supply tickets for all the vehicles not accounted for by existing Replacement or Rescue tickets for a given Brigade or Division. The absent units are divided into groups which are then delivered every 2 minutes over a total of 30 minutes.

• Oversupplied vehicles are delivered last - so complete trickle may take longer than 30 minutes.

8. Supply Processing/Factory Links

The supply chiefs process incoming supply in batches, and they process one batch every 15 seconds.

If a Brigade or Division has no Factory Links, each batch takes 10% longer to process. So a 15 minute ticket that is linked for 5 minutes and unlinked for 10 will require 16.5 minutes to come due.

NOTE: Trickle and Replacement tickets that become due while a unit is cut off from Factory Links are discarded when they become due. Rescue and Transfers are still honored.

9. Depots

Depots spawn vehicles directly from your Brigade spawnlist, however, unless you are executing a Hold-at-all-Costs order, they can only spawn a limited numbers over time.

This "throttle" is specific to your brigade.

Each vehicle on the list will reset back to full when nobody has spawned one for 6 minutes.

Deployments and Defensive Forces

Prior to 1.27 several vehicles were "rare" - Paratroopers, Destroyers, Heavy Bombers. These were introduced to spawn lists at specific towns and could only be relocated once a week.

There were also a number of strange rules that tried to provide infantry to support/uncamp air and naval brigades.

With TOEs, we are able to incorporate these into the OrBat and hand over their control to the playerbase (HCs and OICs). Fighter and Bomber brigades will have different spawn lists and Paratroopers will have their own brigades which will house both Transport Aircraft and Infantry!

Air and Naval brigades will each have their own defensive garrison of troops which they will be able to spawn without changing brigades. For now, you will still have to post a mission from an armybase or depot to spawn them - we will be looking at enabling infantry spawning at airfields and docks in a future update.

This does mean, however, that when you spawn a Bofors to defend your airfield, your score will contribute to your Air rank. After considering all the pros and cons of various different solutions, we felt this route was the lesser of all evils. See the Development notes at the end for an idea why.

Note: We will be moving the paratroop brigades to their own divisions and adding new units to replace the gap in their old divisions.

Brigade Movement

Brigades will continue to move as before with one noticeable exception: The new paratroop units will be listed as Army Brigades, but they will be moved like Air Brigades.

There is a minimum 15 minute delay between movements of any Brigade/DivisionHQ. If the destination does not have a Factory Link, movement is delayed by 10% (16.5 minutes).

After a Brigade/DivisionHQ has been moved, all of its Replacement and Rescue tickets remain intact but are delayed by 2 minutes. All of its remaining equipment and equipment transfers are Transfered (see #5 in supply rules above) taking 30-33 minutes to return to the strength the unit was at prior to its move -- unless it is moved again before this time is up.

Where's my stuff?

You can see when the next resupply for your Brigade/Division is due by mousing over the Facility Name above the Vehicle Selection list of vehicles.

We are looking at adding more feedback on the status of the vehicle lists, especially for High Commanders and OICs.

Brigade Stacking

Each Brigade/Division now has its own spawnlist. If you place two Brigades in the same town, you will have twice the equipment but each Brigade will only see its own list.

Development

This last week has been a lot of tweaking and polishing and most of the week has been working on the internal tools to support TOE-based RDP.

After 1.27 release there are a few areas we want to touch up on - such as looking at allowing Paratroopers to spawn at airfields.

Our next host-based task set is to tackle the our networking and spawning systems. We want to take the CTHL issue by the horns, which means changing the way players are spawned into the game world and migrating people from NetCode1 to NetCode2. A very small minority of people have had unsatisfactory results from NetCode2 so far, but right now using NetCode2 only affects a tiny portion of your connection. So we anticipated some people would get no benefit from switching to it, and the number of people not benefiting are well below what we anticipated they might be.

These changes go hand-in-hand with work we have long been wanting to do with opening up the mission system. While we won't be rewriting the mission system for 1.28, we should certainly see some very healthy improvements to it, such as dynamic origins and targets.

This, in turn, leads to the beginnings of a revamp of the scoring system. I hope we'll be able to tackle a number of key scoring issues in 1.28 - such as fire kills - while moving the "replace scoring" item on our todo-list a long way up the list.

Q & A

Q. if I move div HQ and div BDE into town C, why don't i get 2 lots of everything?
Q. if I put two BDEs in the same town, why don't I see 2 of everything?

A: Its simple - we don't combine the spawnlists: the town itself doesn't have a spawn list, the brigades do. So you can see 900 riflemen on one list and 900 on other, or 1 Char B1 bis on the first and 1 Char B1 bis on the second.

A: A brigade that is cutoff or out of supply (OoS) receives NO resupply. If you spawn a vehicle and get it killed, when the resupply ticket comes due in just over 4 and a half hours, if you are still cut off the vehicle will not be delivered.

The movement delay is added if you are out of supply, it takes longer for you to move.

The rescue delay is added if you are out of supply, it takes longer to get your unkilled but not returned equipment back to base.

Q. I second that. 90% supply efficiency in a pocket is way too much. I guess that the german sixth army at Stalingrad would have been very pleased with even 20% supply efficiency...

A: There is a very subtle distinction here.

When you are cut off, any Replacement tickets that come due are not honored. But they are there for a reason:

When you reconnect to supply, Trickle Supply is applied to all vehicles that are missing from the spawn list not accounted for by a Replacement ticket.

T+0h Lose 1 T35 tank - 4.5 Replacement ticket (Rt) queued

T+1h Lose Supply Link - 3.5h remains on Rt

... Out of Supply! Any tickets that come due are lost ...

T+2h Regain Supply Link - 2.6h remains on Rt - Trickle Supply applied to vehicles missing without Rts

T+2h32m All equipment lost > 4.5h before you were cut off is restored

T+4.6h Rt for T35 is returned (instead of T+4.5 because of the 1h without supply)

Q: If I understand this correctly; an Air Squad that performs missions which require coordinated fighter escort will need to launch the fighters and the bombers from different brigades and different missions now? If so this means that any coordination between them (Ae.. Target markers, Rally points, shared icons, visibility, etc..) will be lost.

A: I can't speak to the actual templates because they entirely dynamic - but Doc did explain this to me briefly: The "split" between bomber and fighter wings is really to do with how they evolve through RDP cycles. The bomber wings get more of the bombers while the fighter wings are where the new fighters will appear. The bomber wings *do* get fighters suited to the task of escort, though.

Q: I'm confused in the difference between trickle tickets and transfers. Would I be correct in assuming a transfer ticket is basically the same as a trickle ticket but is a place holder for equipment already in the field and a trickle ticket is for supply coming from the factories to units newly placed on the map from the penalty box?

The way it's worded now it looks like transfers are turned into trickle tickets and trickle tickets are not honored in cut off brigades meaning a unit cut off behind enemy lines that moves loses all it's equipment.

A: Transfers are stamped with a special flag, even when they are created by Trickle supply, and Transfers are always honored when they come due - although if you are cut off, the 10% rule will slow down their arrival.

Q:If I have to ditch a plane because of RL stuff, If I ditch it near an army base who knows where and get a rescue, Does that means 15 mins later that Plane will be in the AF pool again??

Or do I have to ditch it near a Friendly Brigade?
Or only air brigades?

A: There are three things that can happen when you despawn:

1. Your vehicle is lost (KIA, MIA)
2. Your vehicle is delivered (despawn RTB at origin or manual supply divhq->bde; room on list)
3. Your vehicle is rescued (despawn rescue, or despawn RTB to some place that can't accept your vehicle)

When #3 kicks in, your vehicle the 15 minute rule applies.

Q: can you move paras or air brigades into cutoff pockets?

A: No

Q: My question is if an airfield or port is in a cutoff pocket, is their supply( paras, planes , boats, etc.) cutoff just like land brigades?

A: Airfields don't have supply, brigades do, and resupply rules are the same for all brigade types.

Q: The over supply rules perplex me.

A: They are simple.

1. . You can only oversupply by driving equipment from your DivHQ to your Brigade.
2. . Your DivHQ must be in a different town than your BDE when you spawn. [Not really a rule, just no way to spawn the equipment if they are in the same town]
3. . You cannot overstock a spawnlist by more then the greater of 10% of capacity or 1 vehicle.

10% of 9 is less than 1 - hence the "or 1".

There's no "frontline" requirement.

And the reason we needed a limit is because your oversupply goes with you. Without limits, we'd no-doubt see a couple brigades pulled off the front line to re-appear stomping up and down the frontline smashing everything in their way.