Artificial Harbors

[nerdymidgetkid]

Will artificial harbors like Mulberry be included in the game, either as a tech or national focus? If not, I think they ought to be, since they were a very important part of the invasion of Europe. Without them, the Allies would have had to directly attack a port, which would have made it much easier for Germany to defend.

 

[Axe99]

We haven't heard anything, and there was a recent dev diary on invasions, which 32 days out suggests they won't be in at launch. This isn't the end of the world though - Mulberries weren't in the vanilla versions of HoIs previous. With the new logistics model, they're likely to be fairly easy to work into the engine down the track for a DLC or similar (have units that increase the supply cap in a region, for example), so I'd bet that this, combined with PDS' new approach to continuous development, increases the odds for Mulberries making it into HoI4.

 

[The Nothing]

Errrrr.... In Hearts of Iron 3 you had the possibility to build ports off map and then deploy them on click. You could only deploy one level of port in each province, which in my mind seems quite accurate to represent artificial harbors.

 

[nerdymidgetkid]

Well, it ought to be noted that each Mulberry harbor was the size of Dover harbor.

 

[potski]

In Hearts of Iron 3 you had the possibility to build ports off map and then deploy them on click.

And to be clear, this was in vanilla HOI3.

 

[Axe99]

Errrrr.... In Hearts of Iron 3 you had the possibility to build ports off map and then deploy them on click. You could only deploy one level of port in each province, which in my mind seems quite accurate to represent artificial harbors.

Aye, sorry, I was talking HoI3 TfH, no way I can accurately recall vanilla HoI3 (and no way I'm going back there ), although I think it may have been possible to build one-level of port buildings in TfH and deploy them, but it would have been far smaller than the throughput of supplies that came in through the mulberries, and there was no risk of them being sunk during the invasion (or damaged by large storms not long after), so not really the same thing.

 

[Paglia]

Errrrr.... In Hearts of Iron 3 you had the possibility to build ports off map and then deploy them on click. You could only deploy one level of port in each province, which in my mind seems quite accurate to represent artificial harbors.

Totally right and it does act as a proxy to mulberry ports

 

[ringhloth]

You can build harbors in places that don't already have them.

 

[yogi86]

You can build harbors in places that don't already have them.

Yeah I believe they said in one of the WWW that you can in fact build a new harbor but it takes "A VERY LONG TIME"

 

[LordOfWar16]

I dont think they should include artificial harbours in the game. It would basicly make invasions way too easy, since the invasion itself is acutally the easiest part. The hard part is to secure enough supplies and if the allies for example could simply bring in their own harbours instantly it would really hurt the gameplay and make invasions much easier to execute and much harder to defend. Another thing is that this wasnt really a common thing for naval invasions anyway. As people already said you could build a new harbour, which would of course take its time but in the end is better than having no port whatsoever if you dont manage to take existing ports yourself.

 

[Denkt]

You can build new naval bases at any costal province you control (including occupied territory which was mentioned by DDJake).

An naval base level cost about as much as a military factory or dockyard, the first harbour you control during a naval invasion should be one of the existing one but you may need to build more naval bases to improve supply throughput if you are making a large invasion.

 

[Axe99]

I dont think they should include artificial harbours in the game. It would basicly make invasions way too easy, since the invasion itself is acutally the easiest part. The hard part is to secure enough supplies and if the allies for example could simply bring in their own harbours instantly it would really hurt the gameplay and make invasions much easier to execute and much harder to defend. Another thing is that this wasnt really a common thing for naval invasions anyway. As people already said you could build a new harbour, which would of course take its time but in the end is better than having no port whatsoever if you dont manage to take existing ports yourself.

It's a bit early to say one way or another how things are balanced. From what we've seen on WWW, invasions are actually pretty hard to be successful with, so I'd say the evidence we've had is that artificial harbours would perhaps make things more fun/plausible, not less. We'll see in a month .

 

[3ishop]

I'd also guess they could have the cost of making them rather expensive and time consuming to build.