HOI4 Dev Diary - Naval Access

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Diary time! Today, in the 7th diary, we continue showing off features in Man the Guns, but don’t worry - there are loads more coming! The topics for today both concern access.

Sea zone access
With MTG it will now be possible for players to mark sea zones as either Avoid or Banned. A zone marked as Avoid will be treated as dangerous and, well, something to avoid if possible. This goes for all ship routing. So if enemy submarines are decimating your shipping you will be able to route it elsewhere, perhaps somewhere safer and closer to an ally. Ships will still route through a zone marked as Avoid if there is no other way to get where they are going.

A Banned zone won't allow moving through it at all, except by manual player moves, or say if it’s an invasion order triggered by the player. It will for example even shut down trading if there are no other possible paths. Zone markings are shown in the naval mapmode and can both be toggled directly on strategic area alerts, or in the new “state view” for the sea. Here we also show a proper breakdown on the level of naval supremacy in the area much like you are used to for air zones instead of the old sparse tooltip. You’ll have to excuse my sneaky censoring as not to spoil a future topic however

At this point I am sure some aspiring u-boat captains are wondering why the enemy can’t just shuffle their shipping routes constantly to avoid being located and interdicted. Changing your route will put its efficiency at 0, so if you continuously change settings you won’t be able to move things through the route. That said, there might be some good strategy in sometimes changing things up to make it harder for the enemy to concentrate their raiders.


Docking Rights
Asking for or receiving Docking Rights are new diplomatic actions. They function like military access “light” and allow someone access to base out of, resupply and repair in your naval bases. In fact military access by necessity automatically comes with docking rights. Docking rights can give you better reach and avoid troublesome paths. For example, German subs will be able to operate out of Spanish ports (if permission is granted) and threaten British shipping in areas where defending them is trickier and they won’t have to pass through the channel or more guarded waters.

When it comes to repair and such you will be at a lower priority than the owner of the port, but you will have to wait for a future dev diary for more details on how the new repair system functions in detail. Ships in a neutral port that are there due to docking rights can not be attacked with aerial strikes on the base, so if you want to get rid of ships operating there you will need to draw the harboring nation into war also.

That’s all for this time folks. Tune in next week for a *cough* explosive update.

Spoiler

Rejected Titles:

• This feature was inspired by the famous documentary Das Boot
• A pouch of tricks
• Tuesday Teaser Extended Cut HD
• Nono, these U-Boats are on holiday here in Spain
• “Should we be worried that Command is sending us, specifically this ship, into a zone marked as Avoid?”
• Blockchain for dummies - naval edition
• This dev diary has probably the worst Dev-Time-Needed to Feature-Dev-Diary-Length ratio

 

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Looks nice

What will happen if you ban a seazone while submarines engage convoys in that seazone, will the battle continue or will the convoys simply disappear?

they are in the combat already so no teleport for them.

Praise be!

Question @podcat : If invasion orders still go through banned zones will there be some other way to get them to avoid some zones if other routes are available? (Bay of biscay)

not right now at least. rerouting invasion plans throught the access system would be quite fiddly, complex and likely would open up exploits. I can definitly agree on it popping up as an issue from time to time though, but we arent quite sure what the best solution would be here yet.

Does the yellow triangle block trade but still allow fleet missions? To quote myself from the teaser thread:

So yellow is "Avoid". that means trade will try not to go through it, but if its the only route it will still do it. if it was set to Blocked then instead the trade would not function.

Can't you already do it right now with military access? So both hostile fleets repair peacefully in the same port but as soon as they exit the harbor they fight each other in the neighboring seazone?
Never did it so I really don't know though.

yea basically. no fighting in neutral harbor. you can pretend the sailors meet up in the local bar and there is a really uncomfortable vibe though. possibly fistfights.

How likely is the AI going to allow/deny access to the player.
And yes I do understand alot has to due with your relations but as of now one can have good relations but still be denied a request by the player from the AI.

So relations is only one of the things ai looks at, it also looks at potential enemy relations and such and impact to itself in general. specific ai questions like this is hard to answer early as well, stuff tend to change with play feedback

 

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@podcat
I can understand knowing the Air superiority levels, as people can see the planes + radar etc. I can also understand roughly knowing the ship numbers close to shore, but out in the Pacific the sea areas are so large how would you know what's out there. Could this not be altered slightly so that Encryption/Decryption + closeness to shoreline + Radar have an influence on what you know.

well effectively thats how it works for seeing the enemy. you see a range based on intel etc. if there is no intel you wont know much of anything.

So what do we have here? Does it mean 2 subs (or non-capital) and 0 Capital Ships?

2 non capital (mostly subs.. well it is 2 subs in this case)

 

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So is it not possible to have a region blocked off from trade while still allowing ships to perform missions there? I understand sending ships to sea tiles manually is still an option in otherwise blocked zones, but does that include assigning missions to those regions?

Say, I want to reroute my transatlantic convoys to not go through the Central Atlantic, but still want a fleet of destroyers there on patrol hunting for U-Boats. Is that possible?

if you give a specific order in an area set to avoid, that trumps it. so yea you can still do that

 

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What about Air base access between countries? As far as i know, today general military access does not include air base usage right? Only for faction members. Will it be finally possible with new update? Am i dumb and don't know how to request air base usage?

I consider running planes from neutrals a lot closer to an act of war and would be quite imbalanced I think. I think the reaction from britain vs france would have been quite different between allowing subs to refuel vs german bombers hitting gibraltar from spanish bases.

Actually, this entire feature can help truly model the high sea adventures of the Admiral Graf Spee. A single powerful surface raider breaking out of the Atlantic and having base rights in South America and Portuguese colonies, would certainly help spread the UK navy thin.

>

I mean, there must be some of you that played Silent Hunter III

oh yeah, one of my favourites We have done some changes to certain zones to better fit certain features.

 

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Very nice!

One question though:
"Blocked" means blocked for trade. Does it also mean blocked for convoy based shipping troops around e.g. through the English Channel?

What I really need is an automatic way to tell "my" AI to not ship troops from Northern Germany to southern Italy but to use the land route if I just give an invasion command.

yea thats how it will work essentially

As USA trading with Soviet Union, the default trading route starts from Leningrad. If I ban the Baltic Sea, will the trading route change to Murmansk/Vladivostok?

yes

I have 3 questions now as i only play as UK most of the time
#1
Is it possible to create the asw taskforces (sort of) and send them in shark (u-boat) infested waters while relocating the convoys to safer zones where either me or my allies have enough escorts to protect them?

#2
With the arrival of this improved naval systems would be possible to mod (add modify substract) naval missions in the game

#3
Fuel, love it, hate it, personally prefer both, it will be possible now to have 4 refineries as the original vanilla game had? or you plan to improve the situation with dlc/patch things that you present earlier?

Keep it comming boys, my supply lines will love your ideas but please hurry up its already 1941 and i am starving and my fellow FDR back in the USA has just got a limited lend-lease agreement from the Senate to help me, the u-boats are hungrier than ever!

"Good luck and good shooting!" Quote from Sink the Bismarck

#1 yes
#2 not planned. its too complicated mechanics to support modding. if we could mod them it would be nasty to performance probably. That said you cant tweak a bunch of parameters on stuff.. but we havent really talked naval missions yet
#3 hoi1 had 4 refinery types. I honestly cant remember, but it sounds a bit much. atm we got synth refineries, and silos. extraction from oil wells requires nos pecial building but is reliant on techs. also we'll probably do more updates on fuel later.

Please put this dev diary up on the front page.

I was wondering when the HoI 4 dev diary came out. I had to navigate to HoI 4 forum to find out.

whups. I prepped it and forgot to press GO it seems. its there now.

That's just the range limitation, nothing odd about that.

EDIT: If you are trying to rebase fleet, that's I think with shift or control(either with click). So if the target is out of range, just rebase to it(so long as it's yours or allied). Then you can move to it too as now you will be in range.

its ctrl+right click if I remember correctly, but its all finger memory...

Hmm, is the current limit of 3 sea zones per mission going to get raised then?

yes

How do the docking rights work with the fuel mechanic?

eg. Say Germany sends it fleets to operate out of Mexico, who pays for the fuel and how does it get transferred to that base?

You pay for your own fuel. As for how it gets moved we can call that an abstraction. Perhaps germany paid for it in a deal (I seem to recall fuel being smuggled from america through mexico to germany during embargo)

 

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You need to justify war like usual or you will have a cb to these nations (or at least, a faster and cheaper justify war?)

faster justify. you now get that for a few "helping the enemy" relations.

 

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Thanks for your polite comment on my post. I honestly do not really know, whether the bug is of an nature that needs this much time to be addressed to in an conclusive modus operandi, scince I'm not a game developer or software programmer. One thing however is quite clear. Naval air combat was at least in comparison to its present state, in ship shape bristol fashion eight months ago. It seems therefore a little strange to me, that the elimination of this bug needs so much time. And furthermore you can take my word for it, that my criticism in regard to this problem is in no way lead by any kind of hatred towards the developers of paradox. Hence I hold the position that my comments on the bug are warranted.

So I took a look at that issue for 1.5.4. It was not a planned patch, but something we needed to do to fulfill new data privacy laws to add GDPR, so getting fixes into it was difficult and were done in our spare time because we didnt want to leave people with the china problem. The naval air issue is a big problem which essentially boils down to "rewrite all the air->naval code from scratch". So for our limited patch time it would have been extremely high risk of introducing something worse and dragging out the process (the realities of software development is that if we were to do another patch in between it would mean roughly pushing DLC/big-patch release a month forward which nobody wants. Nothing is free and happens in a vacuum). On top of that since we need to change a lot of other stuff in the naval combat system for MTG we would end up doing the job, then potentially throwing it all out and doing it new again, a huge waste of time. There is also the fact that this doesnt affect that many players (its mainly MP crowd and very naval focused players... who are probably more interested in getting MTG faster), but of course that is no excuse and doesnt make things better for you personally. Its one of those tough choices we deal with all the time. Rest assured we'll solve it for MTG though.