HOI4 Dev Diary - Naval Access

[Walderschmidt]

Can you guys make it so that the AI asks permission before taking up space in my airports?

It’s really annoying when fellow faction members fill up my airports close to France with their shitty planes.

Wald

 

[Alex_brunius]

Show me in a real historical document where a US destroyer could not move from San Diego to Oahu on its own in 1936.

That would be pointless because US Destroyers move from San Diego to Oahu just fine in HoI4 on it's own when you rebase them...

The only limitation on the hatches on the map is for running combat missions ( which includes zig-zag and high speed or even combat speed maneuvers ). This is something a 1922 Destroyer could not do 3000 km away from friendly ports ( like in the middle of the Atlantic ) without access to refueling.

Destroyers running at high speed were real fuel guzzlers historically, and if you read any historical document you will find them having to stop and refuel or "top of" almost constantly to have as much fuel as possible ready for combat when getting close to an enemy.

 

[vivear]

Sound good, I think all this can be usefull

 

[podcat]

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)

 

[Fulmen]

#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

What's your opinion on splitting rubber and oil plants like in Arsenal of Democracy?

Currently synthetic refineries are very OP from a historical perspective: in multiplayer the Axis can easily become self-sufficient in oil and rubber in 1939, while still having hundreds of MIC on planes and tanks. And even in singleplayer without its European allies churning out synthetics, Germany can easily reach autarky in oil and rubber early in the war.

Splitting them while still retaining a relatively high cost (not necessarily as high as now) would mean they'd cost double the build slots and at least provide somewhat of a nerf.

EDIT: Or do you think that'd be a bit too much, especially now that we'll also have silos to worry about?

If so, then synthetics should IMO be nerfed in some simpler way like reduced resource gain, more costlier techs and construction, etc.

 

[donkadoo]

Would be fun if the weather affected the move from ex Leningrad to Murmansk, wasn’t the reason for Stalin wanting Königsberg to have a warmwater port in the west? Making Poland have Stetin instead.
Forcing Russia to use Leningrad or another “warm” port for the cold months to have effective transportation.
Might be wrong about this though!

 

[Fulmen]

wasn’t the reason for Stalin wanting Königsberg to have a warmwater port in the west? Making Poland have Stetin instead.

Yes, that was the primary reason.

 

[SuiciSpai]

so if you want to get rid of ships operating there you will need to draw the harboring nation into war also.

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?)

 

[SnakeInATopHat]

;

 

[DerAstrophysiker]

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.

What about being able to manually draw invasion plan so you can set the route yourself? The amount of convoys necessary and/or planning time could scale with the length of the route to discourage overly "intricate forms" while at the same time fixing issues like landing on Iceland from Scotland and needing one more naval area than necessary (therefore stretching your navy thinner).

 

[Axe99]

Cheers for the DD Podcat . While it may not seem super-sexy, at the end of the day things like being able to tell convoys where not to go is super important - naval warfare is all about sea lines of control (SLOCs), and without control over where those SLOCs go, things can get pretty wonky. That solution looks near-perfect . Docking rights are also good - while the example given was Portugal and Spain (Spain was a funny old situation, I don't think they had formal docking rights, but they were able to come into port and resupply from German ships in port in a "let's all pretend this isn't really happening" situation - so Germany couldn't base flotillas in Spain, but they could do some limited resupply), by far-and-away the most important example was docking and repair rights for Allied ships in US ports prior to the US entering the war in Dec '41.

An explosive diary next week sounds intriguing . Here's an explosive pic - Schleswig-Holstein opening up on the fort at Westerplatte at the beginning of the War in Europe!

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.

Bar fight mechanics for MtG confirmed!

Na, I hope it refers to giving the community explosive diarrhea due to how awesome it is.

What will happen with the British decision to get the Azores? Will they now just recieve docking rights from Portugal?

The Azores were more important for aircraft than ship basing, so it's probably still better for them to receive the province proper, rather than docking rights - although that's just my 2 cents ant totally ignorable .

Ah, you want e.g. Allied planes to fly out of Russia while both are at war with the Axis, or Axis planes to fly out of Japan, while both are at war with the Allies. Now, do me a favour and name a single instance that actually occurred IRL, excluding one or two instances of small foreign volunteer squadrons (e.g. the Normandie-Niemen) that cannot be handled through decisions. Actually, even the Normandie-Niemen was in practice a part of the VVS and thus under Russian control.

As well as the shuttle runs mentioned previously, at least one raid was carried out on the Tirpitz by Lancasters based in the Northern USSR. I'm in two minds about this - historically, the number of examples are far too small to make it a sensible inclusion into the game, but one of the reasons the numbers were so small was because of the large ideological differences between the sides (both sides had expectations of being at war with each other not long after the end of WW2). Were the factions involved less hostile to each other then it's a lot more plausible. I'm just spitballing here though, I don't think it's something that would be a high priority.

would enable the stationing of thousands of Allied aircraft in Russia to not only be possible, but to become the norm. IRL this simply wasn't possible due to logistics and politics.

Iirc, thousands of allied aircraft were stationed in the USSR, but flown by Soviet pilots .

Germany sank 14 mio tons.
The US alone built 38 mio tons of convoys (2,710 vessels).

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.

The price of Liberty ships was about $2 million USD a piece, at displacement of about 14000 tons. Price of Fletcher class destroyer was about $6 million USD a piece, at displacement of about 2000 tons. Safe to say, steel spent on hull is not exactly the biggest part of the costs, as weapons systems, radars, ammunition, crew facilities etc. are going to cost much more. So do the engines for destroyer, in comparison to those of merchantman.

EDIT: If really necessary, increase steel cost by one. But anyway ship costs will change significantly with expansion, so not sure how it will be then.

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 .

 

[Explode]

Will any minor nations get focus trees in man the guns? I was hoping for Spain if possible

 

[Lord Hoosier]

This seems good, but I'm worried MtG will not fix naval like Mandate of Heaven did not fix China in EUIV

 

[Armacalic]

Will any minor nations get focus trees in man the guns? I was hoping for Spain if possible

They already mentioned that 2 (still unnanounced) minors will get focus trees. Here's to hoping it's not Mexico, there's a really good Mex mod out there already that's already too cool to not use over vanilla.

 

[DarkLight]

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.

According to International Law at the time, a belligerent warship could, with the permission of the host country, visit a neutral port for the purpose of replenishing supplies and making minor repairs. However. such a visit was limited to three days. This is precisely what happened to the Graf Spee at Montevideo. No docking rights were involved.

 

[llib]

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 .

The 14K tons comes from wiki:
Displacement: 14,245 long tons (14,474 t)
Capacity: 10,856 t (10,685 long tons) deadweight
Checking further, it seems first value is max., fully loaded. So about 4K tons as you mention is probably right.
As for actual ratio, we don't know what is it supposed to represent. But probably many of the ships (both cargo and military) that constituted (not insignificant)part of the tonnage built are not represented in-game at all.
Anyway, from late games, I recall as UK I was using well over 1000 convoy ships late in the war. If that would be sunk, I would be hardly able to even run all the shipyards, I would not have oil, so my production would be severely hampered. In lot of situation it would be end of the empire(but it's hypothetical as of now since AI isn't all that great).

 

[Delpheus]

My fleet should be able to push through a "blocked port" because telling me "no" isn't going to stop anything. It didn't stop the Germans from invading Poland or France. Unrealistic things like this are annoying. Most of all, the uselessness of nukes...

 

[Idle America]

Docking Rights: Finally, I can take down Totalist Liberia in Kaiserreich, without having to wait four years for my carriers to get that range!

 

[Axe99]

The 14K tons comes from wiki:
Displacement: 14,245 long tons (14,474 t)
Capacity: 10,856 t (10,685 long tons) deadweight
Checking further, it seems first value is max., fully loaded. So about 4K tons as you mention is probably right.
As for actual ratio, we don't know what is it supposed to represent. But probably many of the ships (both cargo and military) that constituted (not insignificant)part of the tonnage built are not represented in-game at all.
Anyway, from late games, I recall as UK I was using well over 1000 convoy ships late in the war. If that would be sunk, I would be hardly able to even run all the shipyards, I would not have oil, so my production would be severely hampered. In lot of situation it would be end of the empire(but it's hypothetical as of now since AI isn't all that great).

Aye, I swung by the wiki article (which is actually quite good generally - that'd be something like a "heavy load" displacement for a warship, although the difference between light and heavy for cargo ship would generally be much greater than your average warship) and the figure was referenced to the PDF so, as you say, it looks like the "absolute max we can stuff into it" - I'm only guessing here but I'd say that includes stuff parked on the deck and what-have-you (given it's 4K more tons than the DWT displacement).

You're not wrong that many of the ships in WW2 aren't represented in the game. From memory (I did these calculations an age ago), as at 1.5.3, only 40% of warships (including amphibious and mine warfare ships) in WW2 by tonnage are actually included in HoI4 as units.

Going from even ropier memory, I think (and this is pretty ropey, so take this as very rough) Britain's merchant marine was around 20 million tons (I'm guessing GRT, but I can't remember which type) and the Commonwealth (mainly Britain and Canada) built about 1 million a year during the war - so if playing as ENG one lost all their convoys, they'd been in a good deal of trouble, and it should take years to recover, but realistically sinking that many ships should not be easy!

 

[Nevrion]

I am a little late for the thread, but can someone tell me what are the requirements for docking rights? Will an democratic state, that is not in any faction allow a fascist state to use their port? What do I need, that an AI says "yes" for letting my ships on their docks?