• We have updated our Community Code of Conduct. Please read through the new rules for the forum that are an integral part of Paradox Interactive’s User Agreement.

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
 
@podcat Just a quick question, will army units on garrison command still use sea transport in banned seazones? One of my biggest peeves while playing many countries is the AI on garrison command, instead of strategic redeploying via land (same continent) will take a swim in enemy naval infested waters and get totally wiped out.

Also if your garrisoning some pacific islands, will banning the seazone cause the land units there to stay put but still have supply ships come through? the AI constantly reshuffling units in the islands and losing them via sea transport can be very aggravating.
Thanks
 
- naval invasions becomes a lot harder IG, and they really should be. D-Day took a year of planning, Seelöwe never happened, Iwo Jima was hell.
We don't want the game to devolve into a stalemate where the Germans dominate the continent and actually build a good defense from naval invasions though.
 
Are docking rights to be a feature in name only, like most of the rest of the diplomatic actions out there?
 
Are docking rights to be a feature in name only, like most of the rest of the diplomatic actions out there?
Well that seems a little harsh, but I take your point. What concerns me about docking rights is that they will probably make the Fleet Logistics military high command role obsolete, as increased fleet range is surely useless if you can just improve relations with a nearby country and have them base your fleet.
 
Well that seems a little harsh, but I take your point. What concerns me about docking rights is that they will probably make the Fleet Logistics military high command role obsolete, as increased fleet range is surely useless if you can just improve relations with a nearby country and have them base your fleet.

Yes, maybe I let my increasing annoyance at arbitrary modifiers get the better of me.
 
upload_2018-8-16_14-16-0.jpeg

Hint to Portuguese focus tree?
 
The 2710 (my source has 2,708 but close enough) is just liberty ships - all up, the Maritime Commission built around 5,000 non-military type vessels (and another 682 military types - CVEs, landing craft and PFs/DEs). The gross registered tonnage (GRT) of the non-military types was about 35.5 million tons, while the GRT of 'just' the Liberty cargo ships was around 19.5 million tons.

I'm not sure where you're getting 14K tons from. From Ships for Victory (a history of the Maritime Commission's building programs in WW2, with plenty of details) the largest deadweight tonnage (DWT) of any of their ships was 12.5K and the Liberty was 10.5K. However, DWT is a measure (more or less) of how much cargo can be carried (in weight - GRT is a measure in volume), not the size or weight of the ship itself. The light displacement weight (that most comparable with the 'standard' displacement of a warship, although it's still not perfect) of a Liberty ship was around 3.5K tons (probably long tons) and the amount of steel used in the production of Liberty ships was around 3,100 short tons. You've got the price about right - Ships for Victory has a Liberty ship costing $1,822,000.

It is the case that cargo ships cost (in dollars) a good deal less per ton than a warship, due to a combination of better quality steel, higher standards of production and (far) more complicated systems on the warship, but I'd argue that in-game, cargo ships are too cheap (even if 1 cargo ship in-game represents 1 cargo ship IRL, where I've heard estimates of one in-game cargo ship representning 6-8 on the forums). For a dollar comparison on the amount spent on the USN build programs and those of the Maritime Commission in WW2, the USN came in at $18 billion and the Maritime Commission (MC) at $13 billion (noting the MC's construction of a number of military types muddies the water here somewhat). The point is, though, that a significant proportion of US shipbuilding capacity in WW2 was spent on merchant ships. The same was the case for Britain and Japan (ie, three of the five major maritime powers during the war). I'm afraid I know next to nothing about Italy's or Germany's merchant ship construction programs :oops:.
In the game according to the HOI4 Wiki of a convoy is 70, while the cost of a 1940 destroyer is 1080, about 15 times larger, which is far away of the realistic ratio of 3, taking the Liberty ships as a kind of standard, since they were produced in larges numbers as far as I know. To represent this, the cost for the convoys should increase 70 --> 300. If one ship in game represents several ships in reality, it would have to be even by that factor higher. Comparing real number of merchant ships at beginning of the war with the numbers in the game insinuates this, by the way. This would increase the importance of the naval warfare to a more realistic level, since you really would have to look after and protect the convoys and also build some naval factories, which can be neglected in current gameplay.
 
In the game according to the HOI4 Wiki of a convoy is 70, while the cost of a 1940 destroyer is 1080, about 15 times larger, which is far away of the realistic ratio of 3, taking the Liberty ships as a kind of standard, since they were produced in larges numbers as far as I know. To represent this, the cost for the convoys should increase 70 --> 300. If one ship in game represents several ships in reality, it would have to be even by that factor higher. Comparing real number of merchant ships at beginning of the war with the numbers in the game insinuates this, by the way. This would increase the importance of the naval warfare to a more realistic level, since you really would have to look after and protect the convoys and also build some naval factories, which can be neglected in current gameplay.
Yes!
 
In the game according to the HOI4 Wiki of a convoy is 70, while the cost of a 1940 destroyer is 1080, about 15 times larger, which is far away of the realistic ratio of 3, taking the Liberty ships as a kind of standard, since they were produced in larges numbers as far as I know. To represent this, the cost for the convoys should increase 70 --> 300. If one ship in game represents several ships in reality, it would have to be even by that factor higher. Comparing real number of merchant ships at beginning of the war with the numbers in the game insinuates this, by the way. This would increase the importance of the naval warfare to a more realistic level, since you really would have to look after and protect the convoys and also build some naval factories, which can be neglected in current gameplay.
The amount of stuff convoys can ship is currently also very unrealistic: shipping divisions in the game require far fewer convoys than e.g. receiving a few thousand infantry kits, or the like. Now how does that make sense?
 
Like the allies did historically, consistently, for several years, at short notice, mid journey?

I'd imagine there was a drop in convoy efficiency because of these changes - taking a longer course (which is often going to be the case because of changes) means less efficiency. That said, just from a gameplay sense, not unlike the issues with air warfare, if both subs and convoys could switch all the time, things could devolve into pretty tedious 'region switching'. Defensive convoy re-routing based on intelligence would probably be better handled in a gameplay sense by a penalty to submarines finding convoys in the first place (ie, abstracting it out). Making convoy re-routing based on intelligence a cohesive part of gameplay would require a bunch of notifications to alert players when intelligence had found submarines ahead of them on their convoy route, and then micro with the convoy changes.

It's the kind of gameplay that might work well in a "Battle of the Atlantic" game with a much higher level of detail on the theatre, but my feeling is it would be a bit fiddly at HoI4's level of routing/intelligence/control abstraction. And that's coming from someone who would include a bunch of extra ship types, missions and naval-related mechanics if anyone was silly enough to put me in charge of design ;).

This feature looks great. Please add the avoid/block feature to EU and CK.

I suspect there might be trouble if the HoI4 devs start tinkering with the EU and CK code - might be more sensible to suggest this to the EU and CK teams :)

In the game according to the HOI4 Wiki of a convoy is 70, while the cost of a 1940 destroyer is 1080, about 15 times larger, which is far away of the realistic ratio of 3, taking the Liberty ships as a kind of standard, since they were produced in larges numbers as far as I know. To represent this, the cost for the convoys should increase 70 --> 300. If one ship in game represents several ships in reality, it would have to be even by that factor higher. Comparing real number of merchant ships at beginning of the war with the numbers in the game insinuates this, by the way. This would increase the importance of the naval warfare to a more realistic level, since you really would have to look after and protect the convoys and also build some naval factories, which can be neglected in current gameplay.

You've reminded me of another thing I've read:

One ton of warship was estimated as the equivalent of around five GRT in terms of shipbuilding and engineering work content (Warship Building and Repair, p. 7)

This is a rough figure, but the idea is to have some kind of discounting factor that reflects how much easier it was to make a ship to mercantile standards than it was to warship requirements. So taking the GRT of the Liberties (which were initially based on a British design and of a similar size, iirc, the British 'Empire' freighters built during the same period) of around 7,200 tons, and dividing that by five, gives us a 1440 'warship' ton equivalent. So around the same IC cost as a DD_1 (but with perhaps twice the steel required)?
 
what about the length of the route, does it impact the time to deliver lend lease or trade, i think it should, safer route but longer route, seems pretty reasonable for me, what do you think about ?