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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
 
That’s all for this time folks. Tune in next week for a *cough* explosive update.
[/spoiler]
So by that i think we are to assume he means next diary is about coastal bombardment being added as a feature to make amphibious port assaults more.. "Interesting"

I'm actually just sitting here waiting for the update that'll allow us to set up temporary ports on captured regions to end once and for all this not building an or properly defending the Atlantic wall shenaniganry
 
So by that i think we are to assume he means next diary is about coastal bombardment being added as a feature to make amphibious port assaults more.. "Interesting"

Shore bombardment already is a feature of HoI4 since release:

https://hoi4.paradoxwikis.com/Naval_warfare#Shore_bombardment


However, the bug became noticeable in WtT. Was all the air->naval code rewritten from scratch for WtT? That seems unlikely, please correct me if I'm wrong.
Or did some small change in WtT cause an existing bug to exacerbate? If so, then why can it not be mitigated with a small change?

What was changed in relation to air in WtT was the following change in 1.5.2:

- Added temporary penalty for assigning airplanes to a new region or receiving reinforcements.

My testing and the testing of others have narrowed down that low efficiency of land based air flying naval strikes seems to be one of the main things that is causing the bug to happen ( and I've been playing several MP games where the bug has not happened once as long as we stick to not flying low efficiency airplanes on naval strike missions ). So it's quite a good chance it was introduced in patch 1.5.2, not actually in WtT.
 
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This is very good news: giving players more control over routing is fundamental to getting the naval game right, and, combined with the new sea control dialogue, suggests that MTG & patch 1.6 are going to make naval warfare much more fun. Bravo!

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.

I've read an extract from the diary of a Royal Navy sailor who came across his German counterparts in a Majorcan bar during the Spanish Civil War, with exactly this result. The Germans offered Nazi-style greetings with raised arms, which the matelots thought was very comical, until it gradually dawned on them that the Germans took this stuff seriously. When they talked, the British side were very surprised that ordinary German sailors echoed their government's bombastic line, and the diarist concluded something to the effect of "if war comes, they'll be better prepared than us", even though the RN's Med Fleet had been on a war footing for much of 1936 (because of Abyssinia).
 
Banned sea zones?

Does that mean I can finally enact my Sakoku Policy "no one goes in, no one goes out" edict as Japan like in 17th century? :D
 
What about a practical drag and drop UI for splitting off ships from a fleet to make or add to another fleet and exchange vessels between fleets? Fleet and squadron templates for missions escort, raiding, coast patrol?
 
Shore bombardment already is a feature of HoI4 since release:

https://hoi4.paradoxwikis.com/Naval_warfare#Shore_bombardment
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
 
Have you ever used Shore bombardment or been in a game where it was used?

I don't think I've been playing as a naval power in any game ( both vs AI and vs human players ) where I did not use Shore bombardment. I'm using it as much as I can get away with all the time, and so are everyone I am playing against. Often even both sides got bombardment fleets supporting the same battle when it's a contested one! ( which might not be totally realistic, but tells you how much we use it ).

It's very helpful since odds are stacked against you when your doing amphibious assaults, and not making use of this extra tools make it much harder.
 
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This is already in-game, you can drag and drop ships between fleets.

My key word was a "practical" interface and the one in game can ship classes between fleets in the same location and use a cumbersome 8-item scroll bar to divide and reorg fleets sitting side by side but not to send them elsewhere. Is it hard to offer a list of fleet boxes and locations to sort among to rearrange naval dispositions? Reassigning different classes to various naval theaters should be as easy as manipulating division and army assignments.
 
What was changed in relation to air in WtT was the following change in 1.5.2:

- Added temporary penalty for assigning airplanes to a new region or receiving reinforcements.

My testing and the testing of others have narrowed down that low efficiency of land based air flying naval strikes seems to be one of the main things that is causing the bug to happen ( and I've been playing several MP games where the bug has not happened once as long as we stick to not flying low efficiency airplanes on naval strike missions ). So it's quite a good chance it was introduced in patch 1.5.2, not actually in WtT.
Thank you, that makes sense.

So back to Podcat's claim "rewrite all the air->naval code from scratch" is required,
I believe that's true for a proper technical solution, but it appears a much simpler workaround would be to remove the temporary penalty introduced in 1.5.2.
 
Does not ferrying stuff require more convoys for longer routes ferrying the same amount of resources over from India takes way more convoys like ferrying it over from East Prussia to western Prussia. Basically accounting for more convoys having to go out to achieve the same frequency as they are en route longer?
I could be wrong though I never really look much at what individual routes take I just look at the total number of convoys and see that I produce enough to have a good surplus buffer,

Anyway if whats not how it works I guess that's how it should work imho :)

you need to take account of the future oil needed for shipping ( if it does)
 
temporary penalty introduced in 1.5.2.
The penalty is necessary for balance and outweighs the carrier bug for most players. They're not going to remove a balance change that stopped strat bombers from being absolutely broken.
So it's quite a good chance it was introduced in patch 1.5.2, not actually in WtT.
I doubt that a decaying penalty is responsible for the carrier bug, instead it is likely that it merely drastically exacerbated an existing bug by creating more situations where land based planes were at low efficiency (especially against the AI which probably switches air regions all the time).
 
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The naval air issue is a big problem which essentially boils down to "rewrite all the air->naval code from scratch".

Honestly, how does this happen?? Did you not even test the DLC before you released it? I have never seen a developer break a game so hard and then downplay it equally as hard.

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)

This is COMPLETELY FALSE

I've said it before and I'll say it again, I know several people personally that have completely stopped playing BECAUSE of this bug. We want a game that WORKS not more dumb alt-history DLCs.

Now you want me to buy this brand new, smokin' hot DLC™ and "fix the game from the ground up"... unbelievable. I'm not buying another paradox product in my life.