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HOI4 Dev Diary - Naval Terrain

Today we are going to talk about Naval Terrain and start talking about some of the core changes to the naval game.

We felt that we wanted to make where you fight more important, and where possible give advantages to people fighting in home waters. The sea in HOI4 has previously generally been either “ocean” or “ocean in range of enemy land based aircraft”, and otherwise mattered little. That’s about to change!

To do this we are introducing several terrain types for seas. These impact what ships work best there, how mines function as well as some other stuff. In total seas are divided into 4 types:
ocean.jpg

Regular Ocean has no special effects, so its similar to plains on land.

Screenshot_4.jpg

Fjords & Archipelagos come with some hefty penalties to big ships, but make it easier to hide (all numbers still quite work in progress btw!)

Screenshot_3.jpg

Deep Oceans on the other hand are not good for light ships. They are also not good place to mine due to their depth and vastness. Subs like this area (mid atlantic gap = bae) because it is also easier to hide here.

Screenshot_5.jpg

Shallow seas are a bit harder to maneuver well in, and not a great place for submarines.

There is also some possible modifiers on them:

Screenshot_6.jpg

Arctic Water is a general bad area to operate in, wearing your ships down and causing potential accidents. It also increases casualties if ships sink for any reason. This modifier works much like Extreme Cold on land so it depends on the time of year and temperature.

Screenshot_7.jpg

Some places in the world have quite a lot of sharks and there are a lot of stories of heavy casualties after the sinking of ships due to sharks. The USS Indianapolis is a famous example where due to several reasons, sharks among those, something like 75% of the crew were lost. It is honestly mostly a cool flavor thing though we wanted to have in ;)

Your performance in these are also affected by Admiral Traits. As we have shown a bit before your Admirals can now gain traits for different terrain types.

Screenshot_2.jpg

  • Cold Water Expert reduces the impact of arctic waters
  • Inshore Fighter gives combat bonuses and speed when operating in Fjords and Archipelagos
  • Blue Water Expert gives combat bonuses and speed when operating in deep oceans
  • Green Water Expert gives combat bonuses and speed when operating in shallow seas
You might have noticed some strange colors in the screenshots above. We are adding some more mapmodes, but it’s mostly all pink and full of coder art at the moment, so you are going to have to wait a bit more to see all those. I am pointing it out because I need to show the terrain mapmode a bit to more easily show off the naval terrain across the world
Screenshot_8.jpg


Around the Dutch East Indies several of the terrain types are visible (the colors on land in this mapmode are still in need of some tweaking btw). The brightest there is archipelagos with the other shades of blue being shallow seas and regular ocean and the darker areas is deep oceans.

This is what the Atlantic and Europe looks like:
Screenshot_9.jpg


Notice the deep ocean in the Atlantic and the fjords around scandinavia.


That’s it for this today, next week we are going to start going over some of the more core naval changes. Seeya then!

Rejected Titles:
  • Naval “terrain” is an oxymoron, like “Military Intelligence”
  • SHARKS
  • Fjords, or how to make Scandinavia relevant this DLC
  • Not from the creators of Sharknado, comes SharkBlizzard
  • Podcat read a book about how horrible it was being on a destroyer in the arctic
 
Are there any changes to the shapes/sizes of sea zones? It seems a bit odd to me that the zone between Labrador and Greenland is fjord territory, yet it still counts as fjord territory when it juts out into the Atlantic.

We have added a few new sea zones (the Aegean Sea and the Red Sea come to mind) but there will probably be another pass on naval zones before release. We are just waiting for a good point to break save games again.
 
One way mining was carried out was to put a minefeild around your shores with safe lanes through it that you would know but hopefully the enemy wouldnt. Is there any way of simulating this ingame?
 
Nice changes so far, though I would tone down the green water areas as they are quite jarringly bright - maybe about 20% darker. I see you guys took my advice on the brownwater! Though I got a lot of flak for it, I think greenwater, especially as an admiral trait is much better.

I think it came from a number of angles, yourself and myself included. I think they wanted to avoid references to brown water (both scatologically speaking and for riverine craft).
 
Deep Oceans on the other hand are not good for light ships. They are also not good place to mine due to their depth and vastness. Subs like this area (mid atlantic gap = bae) because it is also easier to hide here.
This seems like it will have an interesting impact on submarine warfare. Destroyers have generally been the best at ASW, but it sounds like they will be operating at a disadvantage in deep waters while subs will be operating at an advantage.

Shallow seas are a bit harder to maneuver well in, and not a great place for submarines.

There is also some possible modifiers on them:
On a related note, this seems brutal to submarines. Since it looks like the North Sea as well as the English Channel are Shallow Seas, I expect that holding Western France for basing submarines will be quite important.
 
Does the penalty for submarines in the shallow waters make for coastal subs to be a thing now?
 
So if you route around the deep oceans in the Atlantic, will there be a higher convoy requirement? It seems like this is already in the game, IIRC, when lend-leasing (lend-leasing from farther away requires more convoys) but it would be helpful to have that impact more readily visible, and to have it impact troop supply as well.
 
You made great modifiers to represent manpower loss. Though, as of now, manpower is so much available that manpower taken by the navy is almost irrelevant. Almost, since when you play UK, you have very few manpower at the beginning of the game.

So do you plan at one point to add navy manpower (and perhaps air manpower) ? This was a limiting factor for some countries, like Germany when building up their navy.
 
Excited, great dd but was really hoping for next focus tree.

I'm calling the Mexico thing a bluff on PDS's part.
 
When you are making a focus tree for a nation, what sources do you use to find historical events and people?
I think the is more of a "it's own thread" question. You'll be more likely to get an answer there than hidden in a Dev diary. Also your I can tell your new thanks to the Recruit rank you have so welcome to the forums :)
 
One way mining was carried out was to put a minefeild around your shores with safe lanes through it that you would know but hopefully the enemy wouldnt. Is there any way of simulating this ingame?


In the naval mining dev diary it was implied that you aren't affected by your own mines (the picture there refers to "enemy mines", implying at least in my mind that there are "friendly mines" that do not count).
 
Great dev diary, its shaping up to be an awesome naval expansion.

I hope there will be new and specialized types of naval units for these terrains, like for example Motor Torpedo Craft (S-Boots, PT Boats, MTB, etc...), Coastal Minesweepers, Armed Merchant Cruisers/Raiders, Armored Cruisers, etc...

Also, please revise the starting naval OOB's, introducing more tech levels sorting the starting ships by antiquity (pre-WWI, WWI, Interwars, etc...).

Best Regards, guys.
 
I really liked how this will influence fleet composition from country to country and what your main objective will be. Question: is there any difference between naval terrain where i highlighted or the light blue in the coast is because of fog of war? (US coast)
WQELxVK.jpg

That's because the background used for the (ocean) map tries to be realistic in terms of depth, and from a satellite's point of view the sea there becomes clearer because the continental plate is shallower. (Just like off the coast of Irland)

*flies away*
 
So its a bit like EU4 now, where Light Ships are more effective in seas like the Mediterranean (forgot the term, but its a sea surrounded by land). While larger ships like Battleships are more effective in open oceans like the Atlantic.