Naval Rebalance | Designer Corner

[Kizzaris]

Will historical ships designs be correct in line with real life? This's the in-game design of the Admiral Graf Spee:

In the actual designer it was impossible to put a heavy gun battery in the stern. In reality it was different. Based on the in-game ships designs, Graf Spee is twice as weak in firepower as Dunkerque. Here's historical design of Graf Spee:

P.S.
Waiting for the pack with ship models xD

 

[eastcoastceojam]

Suggestions:
• AI strategy for “Naval Avoid Region Surface Ship Only”: similar to “Naval Avoid Region” but applies to surface ships only. For example: When entering the war, this prevents the US AI from suiciding their surface navy into the home waters around Japan, but still allows submarines to operate in those naval regions.

I wanted to add my +1 to this idea, as this would be a huge improvement over the current all-or-nothing approach for seazone access.

Even better would be if we could use a command like this to block a seazone for trade and supply, but leave open the possibility for offensive naval actions.

 

[Haresus]

This looks fantastic, especially the change to convoy screening and hit chance since that was something that mods couldn't tweak.

Will convoy screening factor be moddable? Let's say someone wants a convoy to be screened by only 0.25 ships per convoy, would that be possible to change?

Thoughts on introducing a "combat width" for naval combat? I understand that the penalty for having a larger fleet was increased, but at a certain point having a deathstack fleet still becomes the optimal strategy, while a combat width might avoid that entirely.

As a final question, could the "avoid naval region" button be moved from the Man the Guns DLC to the base game? It's a bit strange that such a core mechanic is locked behind a DLC, and completely unnecessary since MtG still has plenty of interesting content to offer without it.

 

[End Sieg]

The rework looks good however is there going to be a way to address the way naval production currently works? Maybe new techs to add more naval production or maybe even making the naval dockyards work more like mills in the sense of adding a production progress bar like in mills? Right now and even with this rework I still have reason to believe carriers and battleships and maybe even battle cruisers still wont be built due to the current metas revolving around production cost, and what you get out of your capital ships. Even just giving a like a naval part to the industry may be enough to help out, or adding the production bar to naval dockyards.

 

[Secret Master]

Do you have one example of a 1000 NAV operation in the entire war? And it's not because it was impossible to gather 1000 planes in one operation, there were 1000-bomber strategic raids. I can give you more examples when they were ineffective. Let's look at Operation Pedestal (Malta convoys) in the Mediterranean. Hundreds of German and Italian bombers in an enclosed area, the Mediterranean in-game is perfect for NAVs. In real life, however, the British lost in Operation Pedestal only 1 CV, 2 CLs and 1 DD out of a massive force. Of these losses, the carrier and a CL were lost to submarines, another CL was sunk by a motor torpedo boat. Axis NAVs employed in the operation managed to sink one measly destroyer and not for the lack of trying.

I think you misunderstand what I am saying and how the mechanics work in the game.

If you put 1000 NAVs (or TACs even) on naval strike unopposed over, say, the Channel, and the enemy sailed through the area, the ships are getting hit. But a single naval strike isn't probably going to sink the entire fleet. That's not really how HOI4 works. The damage will somewhat spread around, and not all 1000 NAVs are committed to any individual strike. The fleet's width/frontage limits how many planes can be committed. This limits how much damage can be directed in any particular naval strike.

But...

If you keep the fleet in the Channel for more than a day, it's going to get hit more than once. And as long as it sails in that sea zone, I have no problem with it receiving increasing amounts of damage. And while the fleet's AA will remove some planes every strike, with 1000 planes in the area, they will always be enough to fill whatever possible frontage/width the fleet has.

So, when I say I have no problem with 1000 NAVs being able to destroy the RN, I mean it in the context of naval strike mechanics and ships that keep sailing around the targeted sea zone. I bring it up because both human and AI players will order ships to patrol sea zones even when naval strike is taking place.

It's not "one Operation Pedestal should wipe out the RN" but "Operation Pedastal, all day, every day, should delete the RN if it keeps sailing there."

Fleets should be rightly frightened of land based air crewed by competent pilots and with solid aircraft.

 

[sailorbilly]

In your naval rebalance can you put in a homeport button. This is so when you split your ships they will have a dedicated homeport. I hate it when I am training my ships and when done they all go to the same port.

 

[anbeck]

Wow, this looks really great and interesting, although I will have to read it a few more times before I understand it.

This just shows how lessons from the not-so-perfect original Man-the-Guns system were drawn to then make a better tank designer, and how these lessons are now applied to the ship designer. It goes to show how grouping together a few techs (like the armor techs in this example) together with a little bit of de-cluttered presentation makes a huge difference. Already at first glance the tech trees look more intuitive now, and I love researching not-so-important techs in a package with major techs (like the tank guns in the artillery tech tree).

This bodes very well for the plane designer, hehe! I want small, medium and large airframes, and whether I put heavy guns into a small frame to make an Fw-190 ground attack variant or make a heavy fighter or tac bomber out of a medium frame should be up to me. And I'd love if some of the tech (especially machine guns, but also radios or photo equipment for scout planes) were part of already-existing techs, so that the actual plane-only research tree can be kept to a minimum.

The only downside is: I am not going to try and master the current naval system now, only to have to learn it again later this year (let's hope it will be this year, otherwise early next year). So I'll continue postponing my naval US playthrough once more....

 

[Dimmie_Dumm]

I'm possibly missing something, but going by the "received air damage" formula,

It's basically impossible to get the damage reduction down to anywhere near the set cap of 50%. You need a fleet of 110 ships with three top-of-the-line anti-air modules EACH to even hit it.

You're most likely reading it right. If my calculations are correct, a ship of 20 AA sailing within a fleet of 570 AA in total receives a 40% damage reduction. The problem is that getting 30% only takes 10 AA with 100 within the fleet. That's why I said it effectively caps out fast.

The drawback of getting AA extensively from the fleet by extra ships is increased air frontage, though. And exposing oneself to extra damage to then receive a marginal damage reduction factor is counter-productive, obviously Also, never forget other ships contribute merely 20% of their air attack to be added to the one getting all the beatings, while the latter is receiving linear increase in damage in return.

"Discard logic and get HoI4".

IRL, proximity fuse is said to have had increased AA efficiency by some 300-400%. In HoI4, getting dedicated 1943 AA (DPs are worse for sheer AA duty) will maybe grant a 10-30% boost in IC trade efficiency. (And 0*X is still 0, that's what I was tought at school).

 

[James_of_Sparta]

Scrap ship hulls, or significantly reduce their tiers. Tbh, noone is going to build and start producing a design based on a 1944 hull, especially for capital ships. When these hulls become available, the sea battles of the war have already happened, esp. with historical focuses. This is the main reason ppl play the current meta (capital ships with light guns), refit is the only meaningful update for capital ships, refit with light guns is faster than refitting with heavy guns, and naval bombers will kill everything anyway. In addition, the actual differences between 1936 hulls and 1944 hulls are trivial, as the modules are what makes the difference. Instead, give more upgrade modules, or even introduce generic upgrades like the Engine/Armor buttons of the tank designer, and eliminate all hulls except early ones, and 1944 ones, but make the latter researchable by 1942. Two hulls, with significant base differences, coupled with a set of Engine/Armor-like upgrade levels would be far more preferable to what we have today.

Reduce torpedo damage, a single convoy has 60 hp. Only the latest torpedo, with full upgrades should be able to one-shot a convoy (remember, convoy ships are actually freighters with significant displacement, often exceeding that of even heavy cruisers). That way, the meta of filling all screens with torpedo launchers will be lessened, as their impact vs enemy capitals would be reduced, and friendly screens would kill fewer enemy capitals until they are destroyed. Right now, spamming destroyers with torpedos (esp. with Torpedo IV) is the most feasible way to attempt to fight enemy capital groups, if you don't already have capital ships. And of course, making sub deathstacks.

Put a cap on how many naval bombers can join a battle, just like with CAS and ground combat. If that does not change, building a navy will continue to be pointless as 2,000 Naval Bombers II with just two upgrades in Trade Inerdiction (Carrier Operations) will continue to sink every deathstack conceived.

Reduce the cost of refit significantly, especially for capitals. Most HoI4 enthusiasts recommend in their videos that ppl don't bother to refit their ships. Capital refit takes months and sometimes years, and even light ship refit can take a few months. Within the context of HoI4, this is just not practical. Coupled with the even more time required to build new capital ships, and the ease of naval bomber spamming, means that noone really needs to bother with their navy.

These are what I can come up with off the top of my head. None of your proposed changes fix the above shortcomings. The changes are welcome, and look good, but still fail to address several core issues. Thank you for trying.

 

[Axe99]

Graf Spee is twice as weak in firepower as Dunkerque.

This seems fair - looking at my notes, the throw weight (weight of shells in one broadside) for the Graf Spee was roughly half that of the Dunkerque (a little less than that, but well within HoI4 bounds of accuracy). The 330mm/52 M1931 fired an AP shell weighing 570kg, while the AP shell for the 28cm SK C/28 weighed 300kg. The Deutschland's had a faster rate of fire, but most engagements didn't take place at full rate of fire for a range of reasons, and the Dunkerque's had eight barrels to the Deutschland's six.

Fleets should be rightly frightened of land based air crewed by competent pilots and with solid aircraft.

The qualifier here is whether or not they have effective radar-coordinated fighter protection (preferably based in the fleet, but it doesn't have to be - by late war, methods for coordinating land-based aircraft from ships were fairly well developed, IIRC) - the big difference between Pedestal and Crete (there were a similar number of sorties for both, again iirc) was a small number of well-coordinated fighters breaking up attacks. The air battle off Formosa in 1944 (I think - going from memory - always a little dangerous, chance it was early '45) is probably the high point of this, when a large, land-based attack on a fleet was more-or-less negligible in impact, but the attacking aircraft were (again, from memory) heavily mauled, because the fleet had good numbers of well-directed defensive fighters.

 

[Alexander 'The Grape']

Trade Interdiction has it's surface visibility reductions removed, undecided if and what will replace them.

Just so long as the base visibility is lowered to compensate! There is very little reason to add Engines III for Battleships if you're stuck at 100% hit chance modifier due to high visibility, and it removes all the interesting tradeoffs of adding guns vs keeping ships light and fast. If speed can't help you dodge, it removes the main tradeoff of the ship designer.


Ideally if you're removing Capital Ship Raiders vis reductions and/or Concealment Expert vis reductions, BBs and BCs should just have a base visibility of 17

 

[Alexander 'The Grape']

If you put 1000 NAVs (or TACs even) on naval strike unopposed over, say, the Channel, and the enemy sailed through the area, the ships are getting hit. But a single naval strike isn't probably going to sink the entire fleet. That's not really how HOI4 works. The damage will somewhat spread around, and not all 1000 NAVs are committed to any individual strike. The fleet's width/frontage limits how many planes can be committed. This limits how much damage can be directed in any particular naval strike.

You can still sink numerous capital ships within days/hours, before any player has a realistic chance to respond. And since virtually every seatile in the game is at risk of being swarmed with NAVs at a few hours notice, it is a completely ahistorical exaggeration of the power of land-based air

 

[Ringers]

These updates look promising but without the XP to actually build ships these changes won't help. So I hope you are significantly increasing the naval XP rate gain.

 

[Axe99]

On the airpower vs ships thing, one other thing to keep in mind is that in HoI4 it's far, far easier for aircraft to spot ships (and when the spot ships, it seems that all the aircraft spot the ships), and that only so many aircraft can effectively attack a ship at once (so while it is possible to saturate the AA defences, it should be an asymptotic relationship where past a point there's only so many aircraft can be attacking the ship (and being shot at by the ship) at once. Ie, it wouldn't be fair if it was "one role" of 1000 NAVs vs 1 BB, and only 1 AA role of that BB vs those 1000 NAVs.

 

[kctc]

Appreciate the effort that try to improve in game naval experience
But I would like to have a smarter AI instead. AI couldbe a little more random, more "reasonable", more flexible on different situation, yet has its own style (to build elite ship instead of random research, and focus on its doctrine, not suicide)
I know its very difficult but t is the most valuable part to invest time on it

Many mod can already do this "rebalance". I will also do a little bit rebalance of numbers in my own.

 

[robomax]

I mean, if you are looking for realism then that is exactly what would happen. If you come into the battle with a standard battlefleet and I enter it with 46 carriers, 65 battleships, 200 destroyers and 94 submarines one would expect that I would win and quite comfortably at that, no? That's kind of the whole point of overwhelming an otherwise unbeatable enemy with just sheer numbers. Now imagine just how much more difficult it would be for you (let's say as Italy) to defeat a nation like the UK at sea if not allowed to use sheer numbers to your advantage...chances? NEVER! At least, not without a god mode cheat. That's why that is there. To allow those of us who are mere mortals to stand a chance against what can only be considered as an extremely overpowered AI. I mean, even on civilian difficulty with Germany getting MAX boosts via custom settings and overpowered admirals via console you still can't gain control of the English Channel without overwhelming air superiority AND submarines being stationed in said channel 24/7 from the very start of the war. Come with anything less? Total defeat. Between their ships and ludicrously overpowered airforce you'd never so much as glimpse Britain. So no, definitely do not nuke the current system to the point that overwhelming numbers can no longer work as well or else that'll permanently lock the more casual players (like myself) out from playing anything but the most broken nations in the game and that's no fun.

Sending Battleships into the English Channel is a bad Idea. 46 carriers, 65 battleships, ? That's un realistic. A Standard Fleet Task Force comp is 2 Carriers 2 BS or BCs 4-8HC 10-12 LC 20Dessies Subs are not apart of a Battle fleet . Subs are for Raiding or spotting. You don't need Carries or BSs or BCs in the English Channel a few HC and mostly LC and Torpedo Boat Destroyers. Subs kind of do their own thing

 

[DG745]

Seems to me like there's going to be a focus on south america this time around

 

[NoComment's opinion]

Pretty interesting, but all i see (aside from the reduced research time) are nerfs: cruisers can now only fight heavy ships or light ones but not fight both and according to ma this is quite unrealistic since at the end of the war it was clear that cruiser were more advantageous than battleships thanks to lower production cost and overall good performance, so my question is what will Paradox do to incourage players to use cruisers now that they are either more powerful DDs or low cost BBs?

 

[CommandoSchneider]

Maybe unpopular but Am I the only one, that love the exploit meta?
Because... I'm always happy if I can ignore Navy. It is unfun, annoying to build/update etc, most countries dont even need to try (cough russia navy tree) and it is most of the time a waste of research. If I got only limited research slots, why should I waste my time with a quadmillion naval modul, hulls what ever, if I could research air force.. that helps everywhere! Tanks that will kill everything on land! Even specialforces.
Why should I waste my time with navy, that just ... exists... Either you got a good starting navy (USA, Jap, GB) and you dont need to invest further in it, because it is good enough. Or you got no navy (Ger, UdssR etc) and you dont even bother because you cant catch up with the screen numbers of the other countries. EXCEPT if you WASTE your national focuses to do it.

But... need to say.. that is part fault of the unsexy research in HoI4. Most paradox games do it better (Stellaris f.e.) and I would love to see the HoI3 research back.

 

[tract]

You're most likely reading it right. If my calculations are correct, a ship of 20 AA sailing within a fleet of 570 AA in total receives a 40% damage reduction. The problem is that getting 30% only takes 10 AA with 100 within the fleet. That's why I said it effectively caps out fast.

If I were to redo the AA damage reduction formula, I'd use something like this:

q - q * ( k * exp(-1 * ship_aa * p) + (1 - k) * exp(-1 * fleet_avg_aa * p) )

where exp() is the e^x function,
p is a nudge value that adjusts how harsh the diminishing returns are, should be somewhere around 0,3 .. 0,6
q is maximum damage reduction, recommend 0,9 .. 1,0 for 90% .. 100%
k is how important a ship's AA value is compared to the fleet's, should be between 0,0 and 1,0. Sane value somewhere near 0,6
ship_aa is the attacked ship's AA value
fleet_avg_aa is the averaged AA value for the whole fleet

For example, here's what happens with k=0,7 p=0,5 q=1 with AA values between 0 and 6, plus a 20 thrown in as a silly value.

                                         SHIP'S AA
                 0       1       2       3       4       5      6       20
            +-------------------------------------------------------------
          0 | 0,00    0,28    0,44    0,54    0,61    0,64    0,67    0,70
FLEET     1 | 0,12    0,39    0,56    0,66    0,72    0,76    0,78    0,82  DAM
          2 | 0,19    0,47    0,63    0,73    0,79    0,83    0,85    0,89  AGE
 AVG      3 | 0,23    0,51    0,68    0,78    0,84    0,88    0,90    0,93
          4 | 0,26    0,53    0,70    0,80    0,86    0,90    0,92    0,96  RED
  AA      5 | 0,28    0,55    0,72    0,82    0,88    0,92    0,94    0,98  UCT
          6 | 0,29    0,56    0,73    0,83    0,89    0,93    0,95    0,99  ION
         20 | 0,30    0,58    0,74    0,84    0,91    0,94    0,97    1,00

The damage reduction will never reach 100%. Personally I think k=0,7 is set a bit high here, but it's for illustrative purposes.

It gives diminishing returns, but not so rapidly diminishing that they're useless (fifth root, hello?), and it gives the fleet AA weight while being independent of the fleet's size.

Basically, it encourages fitting each ship with at least some AA.

(If you think the damage reduction of the above table is too harsh, that it makes carriers unviable, remember that critical hits still happen.)


One of the problems with the current formula is that it doesn't fit both the big strike fleet and the small recon or escort fleet. Adjusting the constants to favour one makes the other too powerful or too puny.

This is a similar table for the current formula. Assume other members of the fleet have an AA value of 4.

                                         SHIP'S AA
                 0       1       2       3       4       5       6       20
               +-------------------------------------------------------------
           5   | 0,19    0,20    0,21    0,22    0,23    0,23    0,24    0,29
 SIZE     10   | 0,22    0,23    0,24    0,24    0,25    0,25    0,26    0,30  DAM
          15   | 0,24    0,25    0,25    0,26    0,26    0,26    0,27    0,31  AGE
  OF      20   | 0,26    0,26    0,27    0,27    0,27    0,28    0,28    0,31
          25   | 0,27    0,27    0,28    0,28    0,28    0,29    0,29    0,32  RED
 FLEET    30   | 0,28    0,28    0,29    0,29    0,29    0,29    0,30    0,32  UCT
          40   | 0,30    0,30    0,30    0,31    0,31    0,31    0,31    0,33  ION
         100   | 0,36    0,36    0,36    0,36    0,36    0,36    0,37    0,38

The current situation is, as I said earlier somewhere, that a single factory on naval bombers is enough to keep ten dockyards busy.

I think there's probably more to fix than just this one formula, but it's a start.