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HOI4 Dev Diary - Naval Access

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.

route.jpg


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 ;)

state.jpg


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.

dr.jpg


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.

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
 
for people who are following and don't want to go to the wiki check the spoiler
Shore bombardment is not exactly a mission. In order to perform bombardment of any enemy land forces in a coastline province, all one has to do is move a fleet containing Capital Ships to the sea area next to the land province the player wishes to bombard, and keep it stationary there with "Hold" mission.

Simply put yeah it's there but there's a reason why it's so rare and hard to notice in game. From what i've seen the AI never does it and no one in any MP game I've ever had the pleasure of being in has either to be blunt its a feature that functions as a non-feature. Of course it could just be my group of friends and I who never use it, I've definitely never seen the ai use it so lets be inquisitive about this:

Have you ever used Shore bombardment or been in a game where it was used?
if yes mark this post as disagree

if no mark as agree
I've had the AI shore bombard me plenty of times.
 
I've had the AI shore bombard me plenty of times.
Personally i never notice any affects of shore bombardment when i'm defending a costline. Granted i normally play either in central/south america or the far east but that just shows even more that at the very least the AI doesn't use it effectively enough if I've yet to see any real threats from amphibious assaults even without costal forts. Anyway looks like man the guns is going to make it at least a lot more clear of whats going on in the future