That's quite a bunch of questions and, you surely guessed it, especially when I use terms like "might" or "most likely" I think it is that way but i don't know for sure as for example with the missions "Naval Interdiction" and "Naval Combat Patrol".
As mentioned, NAVs are best after you have defeated a fleet and it has retreated into a port with no defenses. There the NAVs always find ships.
When you want your NAVs patroling along a coast or a straight, it quite often really pays off to check the distances from sea regions to land regions to figure out which region is the best to put down some airbases and where to base your NAVs = in the land region where many interesting sea regions can be reached according to the range fo your NAVs. Obviously the more sea regions along a typical sea route you can patrol with NAVs, the higher the chance to detect a fleet. If distances allow it, combining NAVs (which have a lousy sea detection) with fighters helps a lot, too.
An example for the Strait of Gibraltar:
Gibraltar is always an annoyance, especially if there is no way to conquere it. Well, in this case China (yellow) can theoretically conquere Gibraltar with the help of air-transporters, airborne units and perhaps some help from TAC or STRAT but I realized that only quite late and it will take still quite a long time until the necessary techs are researched and the approbiate units built (unfortunately I completly skipped those techs before).
So, what I did instead as a workaround: 6 HSubs are constantly on a naval interdiction mission in the Costa del Sol sea area (yellow), just 2 sea regions because the Strait itself is closed. 2 NAV-1 plus 1 Fig-6, based at Oran, are patroling the same area (and for them the Strait is not closed). Additionally, on the Atlantic side of the Strait, some NAVs are patroling the Cap St. Vincent sea area (light brown). The patroled areas are rather small, so each region gets scouted quite often. Any British ship trying to enter the Mediterranean needs to cross at least 3 checked sea regions, depending on the route perhaps even more.
In practice this proved very efficient to more or less close the Strait or rather to sink each ship trying. Except bigger fleets but at least I get a good warning, they might get already quite some damage and I get to know the fleet composition.
Btw: The Fig-6 might look a bit weird, escpecially since Figs have no naval attack at all... but they have astonishingly good sea detection (Fig-6 with 4 in comparison to 1 for NAV-1)
Historically, though, before radar was invented and/or trustworthy enough, sighting a fleet AND properly detecting how many and what kind of ships it was composed of... was really very difficult. And often enough it was "sighting and engaging", and then figuring out what all you were actually fighting. And every Captain only sighting and then not fighting had a difficult job to explain the admirality why he hadn't engaged and wether he was really sure that it wasn't "cowardice in the presence of the enemy". Taken this into account, the DH mechanic to auto-battle but with an option to leave the battle after 4h is... ok. Even better was when also speed was taken into account and giving you only a chance to "disengage".
In vanilla DH I usually make it dependent on how old they are and wether their operational range and max firing range can be of any use. The firing range can be tweaked with float planes and fire control but the operational range can't. If that's too low, the best you can really do is to convert them to convoy escorts.
And to be honest, I think CAs are the most useless ship type in DH. DDs are cheaper, lower visibility and important for sub-defense. CLs have a good role to enhance anti-air abilites of your fleet. CA's are neither good vs subs nor vs air but the most expensive escorts. In my DH beginner time I thought it fantastic to bring CAs with float planes and fire control up to the firing distance with the BBs they were escorting and deemed those fleets quite powerful. Later I realized, what I really did, was intentionally lowering the possible max firing distance of my BBs and that's not really smart.
To avoid that my fleets move to home base due to too low org, I usually set the slider for org to zero. Org regain is rather good even at sea and it really isn't effective to sail back to base just to regain org.
The damage slider I usually set to 50%... but since I have settings on pause for sea battles and sea battle results, it isn't really of importance because in 90% of the cases I decide manually wether a fleet sails to a base for repairs especially since there might be a closer naval base for repairs than the fleet's home base.
Well, 9 CVs will surely stomp 9 CVLs but I'd try to avoid such a sea battle anyway and rather send in my HSubs then.
And... yet I've never even had 9 CVLs in 1 fleet. Always too many tasks for this highly useful CVLs that I can't find enough idle CVLs to concentrate them into just 1 fleet... nor that I ever found the patience to wait that long until CVs are finished building while I could bring havoc to the enemies long before with CVLs *grin
It depends... mainly on availabilty of coastal regions with air bases. In the operational examples of this guide, NAV had a huge success as "finisher" in the battle vs Japan but were nearly useless in the first 6 month of hard fighting vs the UK+allies.Also, it sounds like you rely a lot on NAVs to finish off damage ships, but you also mention they're bad at locating fleets at sea unless a battle is on- do you make an effort to time your NAV mission deployments to coincide with battles starting, and if so how?
As mentioned, NAVs are best after you have defeated a fleet and it has retreated into a port with no defenses. There the NAVs always find ships.
When you want your NAVs patroling along a coast or a straight, it quite often really pays off to check the distances from sea regions to land regions to figure out which region is the best to put down some airbases and where to base your NAVs = in the land region where many interesting sea regions can be reached according to the range fo your NAVs. Obviously the more sea regions along a typical sea route you can patrol with NAVs, the higher the chance to detect a fleet. If distances allow it, combining NAVs (which have a lousy sea detection) with fighters helps a lot, too.
An example for the Strait of Gibraltar:
Gibraltar is always an annoyance, especially if there is no way to conquere it. Well, in this case China (yellow) can theoretically conquere Gibraltar with the help of air-transporters, airborne units and perhaps some help from TAC or STRAT but I realized that only quite late and it will take still quite a long time until the necessary techs are researched and the approbiate units built (unfortunately I completly skipped those techs before).
So, what I did instead as a workaround: 6 HSubs are constantly on a naval interdiction mission in the Costa del Sol sea area (yellow), just 2 sea regions because the Strait itself is closed. 2 NAV-1 plus 1 Fig-6, based at Oran, are patroling the same area (and for them the Strait is not closed). Additionally, on the Atlantic side of the Strait, some NAVs are patroling the Cap St. Vincent sea area (light brown). The patroled areas are rather small, so each region gets scouted quite often. Any British ship trying to enter the Mediterranean needs to cross at least 3 checked sea regions, depending on the route perhaps even more.
In practice this proved very efficient to more or less close the Strait or rather to sink each ship trying. Except bigger fleets but at least I get a good warning, they might get already quite some damage and I get to know the fleet composition.
Btw: The Fig-6 might look a bit weird, escpecially since Figs have no naval attack at all... but they have astonishingly good sea detection (Fig-6 with 4 in comparison to 1 for NAV-1)
From a gamer's perspective I'd completly agree.An ideal system I guess would be for all fleets to have some sort of "engage/do not engage" toggle you could flip at will- perhaps with an option to have a pop-up happen when a navy sights a ship but does not engage.
Historically, though, before radar was invented and/or trustworthy enough, sighting a fleet AND properly detecting how many and what kind of ships it was composed of... was really very difficult. And often enough it was "sighting and engaging", and then figuring out what all you were actually fighting. And every Captain only sighting and then not fighting had a difficult job to explain the admirality why he hadn't engaged and wether he was really sure that it wasn't "cowardice in the presence of the enemy". Taken this into account, the DH mechanic to auto-battle but with an option to leave the battle after 4h is... ok. Even better was when also speed was taken into account and giving you only a chance to "disengage".
If am playing with a Mod that allows it, I always upgrade CAs to CVLs and BBs to CVs.By the way, when you start the game as a major power like Japan or the USA that already has a lot of CAs and battleships, what is the best way to use them? Or should you just turn them all into convoy escorts?
In vanilla DH I usually make it dependent on how old they are and wether their operational range and max firing range can be of any use. The firing range can be tweaked with float planes and fire control but the operational range can't. If that's too low, the best you can really do is to convert them to convoy escorts.
And to be honest, I think CAs are the most useless ship type in DH. DDs are cheaper, lower visibility and important for sub-defense. CLs have a good role to enhance anti-air abilites of your fleet. CA's are neither good vs subs nor vs air but the most expensive escorts. In my DH beginner time I thought it fantastic to bring CAs with float planes and fire control up to the firing distance with the BBs they were escorting and deemed those fleets quite powerful. Later I realized, what I really did, was intentionally lowering the possible max firing distance of my BBs and that's not really smart.
I think, it is not really the distance but the number of sea regions which needs to be crossed that determines the number of needed convoys. There is a base default number of needed convoys, then multiplied with the sea regions... and if the convoys carry supplies the number of convoys is again mulitplied by 2.Question about convoys: how, if at all, does the amount of convoy transports needed to supply an overseas army vary with the distance the convoys must travel?
Can't remember it for HoI2 but in DH you can move both sliders independently from each other. You can lock or unlock them with a right-click.Speaking of mechanics, did HOI2 ever let you set the STR and ORG thresholds for missions separately or were they always forced to be the same value? It's hella annoying when some escort ship chips my raider's paint and also drops them to near-zero org, causing the whole fleet to sail back to port and back out in a several-week round trip.
To avoid that my fleets move to home base due to too low org, I usually set the slider for org to zero. Org regain is rather good even at sea and it really isn't effective to sail back to base just to regain org.
The damage slider I usually set to 50%... but since I have settings on pause for sea battles and sea battle results, it isn't really of importance because in 90% of the cases I decide manually wether a fleet sails to a base for repairs especially since there might be a closer naval base for repairs than the fleet's home base.
My pleasure.Thank you for this extremely comprehensive write up. Glad people are still doing science with this game. What surprises me the most is how viable CVL are. I thought the light carriers would get stomped by normal carriers unless outnumbering them several times.
Well, 9 CVs will surely stomp 9 CVLs but I'd try to avoid such a sea battle anyway and rather send in my HSubs then.
And... yet I've never even had 9 CVLs in 1 fleet. Always too many tasks for this highly useful CVLs that I can't find enough idle CVLs to concentrate them into just 1 fleet... nor that I ever found the patience to wait that long until CVs are finished building while I could bring havoc to the enemies long before with CVLs *grin
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