Ship hit profiles

[bitmode]

It has been simple enough to mod away, but still I got to ask. Hit profiles have been wrong for half a year now, and five months since the last attempt to fix them. How are you guys playing naval warfare?

For background, the naval rebalance developer diary for patch 1.12 included this problem analysis of the prior state of the game:

Combat revolves around exploiting oversights

and went on with (emphasis mine):

Currently the live game calculation for a hit profile is the ( (visibility * 100) / speed) .

So a ship with a high hit profile will be easier to hit than one with a small hit profile.

A change to the hit profile calculation is aimed to reduce the impact of speed on hit chance and should flatten the effect of speed for much slower ships. The current but not final working formula is:

( (visibility * 100) / ( (speed/2) + 15) )

In other words, the effect of speed was to be curtailed by averaging it with 30 as an "anchor speed". But since, the formula continuously had oversights with an effect opposite of what was intended.

 

[Alexander 'The Grape']

Honestly it's not too unbalanced currently. The main problems is that navies retreat too easily against non-carrier fleets, and that speed is now even stronger than before.

I actually don't mind the slower combats overall,. It makes smaller navies with air and carrier supremacy able to defeat larger ones, and means that when deathstacks clash its less armageddon-ey. You actually get multiple engagements over the course of a war now, rather than one side getting insta-deleted.

But the retreat speed issue does make naval raiding very toxic to deal with.
IMO fixing this issue should come with some deathstack limit and maybe not have combats be quite as fast as it was pre-bba.

The problem with fixing it and nothing else would make navies almost entirely dependent on who has the most IC, and without the ability to retreat easily, the victor could then surface raid against nerfed navs with impunity.

 

[TheMeInTeam]

The problem with fixing it and nothing else would make navies almost entirely dependent on who has the most IC, and without the ability to retreat easily, the victor could then surface raid against nerfed navs with impunity.

i observe NAV still sinking ai ships pretty easily. are players designing ships in a way where there's enough aa to block that or something?

 

[Alexander 'The Grape']

i observe NAV still sinking ai ships pretty easily. are players designing ships in a way where there's enough aa to block that or something?

Navs target capital ships first, so refitting AA onto your battleships means that Navs aren't cost effective, too many get shot down.

They're still good at killing subs and carriers though.

In order to kill fleets with air now, you need to use your Navs and carriers to kill their carriers, then use your carriers to kill the rest of their ships, retreating to restock your carrier planes when too many get shot down.

 

[TheMeInTeam]

makes sense, ai doesn't do that so i didn't realize it would gum up nav to that extent.

it seems odd that carrier nav would fare batter than land-based, if too many land-based nav get shot down. i would expect that if aa makes no longer cost effective, that players would shift into maybe nav bombing carriers, then trying to clear enough screens with something like massed light attacks to clear screens faster and get some torpedo hits.

if the exact same plane is getting shot down differently depending on the runway of origin, i guess that's another thing we could add to the list about naval combat weirdness/problems.

 

[Alexander 'The Grape']

if the exact same plane is getting shot down differently depending on the runway of origin, i guess that's another thing we could add to the list about naval combat weirdness/problems.

idk it makes sense to me - carrier navs being more effective represents all the intangible benefits of response time, coordination, positioning and attack angles that land based navs lacked.

 

[Harin]

idk it makes sense to me - carrier navs being more effective represents all the intangible benefits of response time, coordination, positioning and attack angles that land based navs lacked.

Also, and maybe my memory if failing me, but in real life I thought carrier bombers did better against fleets at sea, than land bombers did. By a wide margin actually. Did land bombers catch up to carrier bombers sometime during the war?

 

[bitmode]

Honestly it's not too unbalanced currently. The main problems is that navies retreat too easily against non-carrier fleets, and that speed is now even stronger than before.

I actually don't mind the slower combats overall,. It makes smaller navies with air and carrier supremacy able to defeat larger ones

In my opinion, battles should actually be much faster. A maximum duration would be welcome too. But either way such a change requires rebalancing a bunch of surrounding variables as well, which clearly did not happen here.

Battles can now literally be reinforced from continents away if strike forces are manually ordered. And as you say, everything that bypasses ship hit profiles like naval strikes or attacking convoys (fixed profile) just got a 4x buff.

You'll have to admit even if you are okay with the change, none of that is what the developers were announcing. Cutting hit profiles to a fraction of what they were has far more sweeping scope than "flatten the impact of speed".

and means that when deathstacks clash its less armageddon-ey. You actually get multiple engagements over the course of a war now, rather than one side getting insta-deleted.

You could buff retreat speed. Or remove the bug/feature that a task force remains spotted after disengaging until it leaves the area. Or nerf strike forces by giving them less time to join the battle.

 

[TheMeInTeam]

Also, and maybe my memory if failing me, but in real life I thought carrier bombers did better against fleets at sea, than land bombers did. By a wide margin actually. Did land bombers catch up to carrier bombers sometime during the war?

what was the reason for this, though?

i presume a lot of this can be explained by less time to react to incoming carrier nav than from inland. but that's because in the real war, navies didn't make a habit of sailing near enemy air bases with thousands of nav. also, were they really using the same plane setup in this comparison? it's not clear to me that's the case, when trying to look it up.

comparing nav usage in pacific at those extreme ranges from land doesn't really work if you try to project that to "what would happen if someone put their entire navy in the english channel while the other side was blotting out the skies". these are *slightly* different scenarios, lol

i don't think it's healthy to selectively implicate history; if the game isn't going to model the *reasons* carrier based nav were more successful, then it shouldn't assume that reason exists. we already have partial modeling anyway; carrier nav ignores range in naval combats, while land-based nav suffers from range penalties. over the pacific, it can impact mission efficiency, sometimes greatly, to launch nav from land.

the game allows extreme idiocy by fleets, where fleets get closer to opposing air bases than actual historical naval carriers were from each other. i don't buy that naval aa would retain its advantage in this scenario. i instead assert that there's a good reason real fleets didn't do this.

 

[Alexander 'The Grape']

i don't think it's healthy to selectively implicate history; if the game isn't going to model the *reasons* carrier based nav were more successful, then it shouldn't assume that reason exists. we already have partial modeling anyway; carrier nav ignores range in naval combats, while land-based nav suffers from range penalties. over the pacific, it can impact mission efficiency, sometimes greatly, to launch nav from land.

The game cannot ever be complex enough to model everything. In these cases, you need to make abstractions to make the game feel right.

Classic example - combat width. A complete abstraction, but one that is crucial to making the game work.

I'd prefer historically accurate gameplay for the ""wrong"" reasons than unfun, inaccurate gameplay because all modifiers have to be based on intuition

 

[TheMeInTeam]

I'd prefer historically accurate gameplay for the ""wrong"" reasons than unfun, inaccurate gameplay because all modifiers have to be based on intuition

what i was saying in prior post questions the "historically accurate" part.

we don't have a lot of ww2 data points of large fleets intentionally sailing near hundreds-to-thousands of land-based naval bombers where we get to see how well their naval aa performed compared to when the planes were launched from carriers. to me, this is evidence that they did not want to find out...that the trades in production and lives would not favor the warships. hoi 4 already penalizes nav operating at long ranges from land bases

as for "wrong" reasons, it's worse than quoted. if a mechanic does not hold up to causality in the game's model, it can't be historical. that's not a matter of opinion. you might nevertheless prefer a particular implementation, but calling that preference "historical" becomes objectively inaccurate. whatever the reason for the preference is, it's something other than historical accuracy.

---

calling things "unfun, inaccurate gameplay" also makes some presumptions, while disregarding any need to justify those presumptions. you can call anything "unfun", and it might even be subjectively true for at least one person. it doesn't make for an argument that distinguishes itself from any other random preference, though.

nobody made a claim "all modifiers have to be based on intuition". i prefer internal consistency to intuition, the latter of which is frequently bad for both history and gameplay...such as people unironically claiming that "strike forces that can't engage can still block naval invasions with superiority is historical". i've seen players claim that, despite that history can't possibly support it, and that it's toxic/not defensible in gameplay terms.

The game cannot ever be complex enough to model everything. In these cases, you need to make abstractions to make the game feel right.

indeed, abstractions must be made. what "feels right" is often arbitrary. i have yet to see a reason mission efficiency as an abstraction is insufficient for example, despite already pointing out that it covers the historical scenarios of carrier nav working better than land based.

similarly, if i were to claim that, as a special exception, amphibious tanks attacking across a river should get 5x combat width to work with for "historical accuracy", you might want some evidence or gameplay reasoning to support that. you might rightly ask why the otherwise-functional combat width mechanic isn't sufficient in that particular case, why the game needs to first establish a level of abstraction, only to special case it. you might ask those things. but then we'd be back to actually supporting the reason carrier nav outperforms near-base land nav

 

[Dimmie_Dumm]

How are you guys playing naval warfare?

I personally don't, but last time I played it left me really concerned as hitting anything w/o obligatory full 'screening bonus' felt like winning a lottery, and that over-reliance on pre-defined fleet ratio composition to just shoot is another pet peeve of mine, largely because it has no historical foundation (I'd be fine with a modest purely positioning bonus, though).

And it's not just the retreating speed, I do agree naval battles should resolve far more quickly for many reasons, one of the obvious ones being NAVs insta-travelling into the battle along their entire route. Even re-basing an entire air wing while the naval battle rages on and still managing to get it in is not that uncommon. Arguments of them [allegedly] becoming then too decisive because of power concentration and whatnot really only tell that the whole naval mechanics lacks incentives to maintain naval presence across the globe, thanks to 'streamlined' trade and other shameful omissions, which in fact historically were the very reasons navies emerged in the first place.

(But honestly, naval warfare is so far from reality that at times it feels almost pointless to cherrypick anything. I.e., destroyers have higher detection than battleships, submarines enjoy exteme ranges while implying they travel submerged, fleets at coasts provide lesser shelling impact than a single railway gun on the other side of the gulf and so on and so forth. And I'm still not sure why SH BB armor increases torpedo hit penalties, contrary to any other one). Rant off, sorry for the offtopic.

 

[Herennius]

And I'm still not sure why SH BB armor increases torpedo hit penalties, contrary to any other one)

It has been reported several times, but haven't received a dev tag yet; still a bug is likely - in this report

HoI 4 - Super Heavy Battleship Armor appears to have a wrong value

Description of issue Super Heavy Battleship Armor appears to have a wrong value What platform do you play on? Steam Game Version 1.11.4 Enabled DLC Do you have mods enabled? No Description Super Heavy Battleship armor (like...

forum.paradoxplaza.com

@Commissar Obvius explained both how to fix it and correctly mentioned that in the pre-BBA DD on Naval Rebalance the armor had still a bonus here, which hints on it being a bug ( https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/developer-diary/naval-rebalance-designer-corner.1528743/ , 2nd last pic in starting post)

 

[Corpse Fool]

over-reliance on pre-defined fleet ratio composition to just shoot is another pet peeve of mine, largely because it has no historical foundation

Could you tell us a bit more about this? It might not be correct, but I can at least imagine a scenario where being screened would increase accuracy.

 

[Secret Master]

In my opinion, battles should actually be much faster.

This is something that's just baked into the design of the game. And it has odd results.

Most big naval battles in the period lasted 1 to 5 days at the most. Convoy battles were sometimes longer, but these also are of the "convoy attacked in multiple running battles" variety.

It's worth pointing out that when capital ships were involved, longer naval battles were problematic simply because they burned so much fuel when fighting. But we don't have to worry about that in HOI4.

All of this means that I've seen naval battles that suck all fleets in the area into a weeks long battle where both sides clobber each other in various iterations of the game. Ships that retreat can't usually rejoin the battle, but new ships can get added. This kind of gameplay means that I can hunt down Bismark with ships from Alexandria and Singapore as long as I drag her into a battle in the North Sea.

But if battles weren't so long, they'd probably end up being like NAV strikes. You just get a marker on the game screen with losses and be like "Oh, I guess we just won Midway. And I missed it."

I've wondered if the game might benefit from a major an minor naval battle system where there's a fundamental difference between small battles and big battles mechanically.

 

[Happy Trigger]

This is something that's just baked into the design of the game. And it has odd results.

Most big naval battles in the period lasted 1 to 5 days at the most. Convoy battles were sometimes longer, but these also are of the "convoy attacked in multiple running battles" variety.

It's worth pointing out that when capital ships were involved, longer naval battles were problematic simply because they burned so much fuel when fighting. But we don't have to worry about that in HOI4.

All of this means that I've seen naval battles that suck all fleets in the area into a weeks long battle where both sides clobber each other in various iterations of the game. Ships that retreat can't usually rejoin the battle, but new ships can get added. This kind of gameplay means that I can hunt down Bismark with ships from Alexandria and Singapore as long as I drag her into a battle in the North Sea.

But if battles weren't so long, they'd probably end up being like NAV strikes. You just get a marker on the game screen with losses and be like "Oh, I guess we just won Midway. And I missed it."

I've wondered if the game might benefit from a major an minor naval battle system where there's a fundamental difference between small battles and big battles mechanically.

What I'm gonna say may be controversy, but maybe removing the manual control of the navy would be for the better.

As an example: You'd give a order to Bismark convoy raid in the Atlantic, and once the ship left port, all you can do is pray for the best.

Of course, some changes would be needed, like: after a battle, the ship needs to return to port (to simulate refuelling), maybe add more naval orders, and solve some balance stuff.

With the player out of the way, these inconsistencies are easier to deal, and the player can aim his focus where it really matters: land and air combat.
___

Another thing that I don't like, is that there's no difference between a lvl 10 port and a lvl 1. Your ships can dock in any of them. I think that BBs and Carriers should only be able to operate at the range of lvl 6 and above (with a limit of ships that this port can dock).


That would change battles in remote places like the Pacific. Especially if islands had a limit on port, airfield and infrastructure construction. Maybe islands should have these 3 unchangeable the entire game, if they have, only, plain terrain (without mountains and so on).

 

[Harin]

I wished naval battles had a replay feature and that it was persistent, as in, the player could decide to delete the replay or keep the replay for additional watching. This way players could save games with the replays still accessible and send them to friends and forums to ask what the heck happened.

*Edit On a personal note, I would just like to see the naval battles I worked so hard to participate in. I miss so many, it gets to the point I don't build navies.

 

[Spikeosx]

How are you guys playing naval warfare?

I havent been because Naval Warfare is so bugged (along with a bug I submitted regarding 20% loss of resources every time I go back to a saved game since 10.11 [it has to not be affecting others maybe because they have later expansions] or I would play a land nation).

Naval battles should not last days since they did not last that long historically (some would re-spot then re-engage later) and additional forces continents away can get to it and join is ridiculous. Speed should not be so overpowered over armor, as the original DD had.

Also a game breaking bug is they buffed battleships by reducing the visibility to 20, thus making torpedoes miss more often that the damage is low enough that it is not worth having any screens at all and go without the positioning penalty that having all those screens were doing.

 

[Spikeosx]

I have to clarify that I meant speed should not be so overpowered over armor was referring to guns only. Speed was a huge factor for torpedoes and aircraft hitting. Then again, this is just a game that trying to compare to actual naval warfare would be a joke.

 

[vermicious knid]

If all the ideas in this thread were a menu I'd order shorter battles with an option to replay them.