The Balancing Factor
Tempering the player's (and the enemy's) fortification, unit construction, and unit movement was supply. WOTW utilized a superb and complex supply network system based upon 3 materials: Steel, Coal, and Oil for the Humans, Blood, Copper, and Heavy Elements for the Martians.
A sector would not supply any of its resources to a faction unless it had resource gathering/harvesting structures operating within. Each sector had its own resource potential, and each resource impacted upon player and computer activity in different ways. For example, moving Human naval vessels used up tremendous amounts of Oil for the duration that they moved, while Martian construction facilities demanded large supplies of Copper to operate.
Unit movement, unit construction, structure construction, and fortification construction all drained resources. In addition, the mere existence of units demanded a certain level of sustaining supply. What did this mean? It meant that the larger the force and the greater the activity, the more demanding the strain on resources and the more critical that supply infrastructure became. Every activity but unit movement displayed an Efficiency rating - anything less than 70% and things could really begin to slow down. One couldn't just crank out The Hordes without suffering consequences, nor could a player do everything at once. In the worst case, such forces would be immobilized, or construction times might be doubled or worse. Players had to make hard decisions about what to prioritize, when, and where.
The supply system itself was elegant if simple and abstract. A supply network existed where those resource draining activities closest to the resource-rich industrialized sectors would suffer the least from activity excesses, and those the furthest away from these centers would suffer the most. Starting construction of a unit deep in developed country might reduce overall efficiency from 90% to 75% (depending on the magnitude of the task), while starting the same in a barren front territory might plunge efficiency there to 40% or lower. Thus, a balance must be achieved in operations and a viable war economy must be sustained. Bad decisions can cripple production rates.
Take a newly conquered territory facing possible/imminent counter-attack: if the player begins pumping out all sorts of reinforcement units and making sweeping strategic redeployments, manufacture of on-site defenses (cannon, mines, electrified fences, hardened batteries etc.) might be drastically delayed and dangerously prolonged. The sector might then be easily re-taken, despite best-layed defensive plans...
Resource levels were displayed in the Resource Views available upon the strategic WarMap. Players could pass the cursor over a resource type in a sector to see what a structure there would supply, and overall usages were apparent at all times.
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Screenshots.
War of the Worlds main page.
