Intermezzo: Naval Primer.
Most nations, at some point, will benefit from a good naval strategy. This goes without saying, but in Hearts Of Iron 3, this has always been a difficult concept. What constitutes a good fleet composition? Which type of ship excells at what task? All of these, to a new player, are hard to grasp.
I have never been a very good naval player myself, having fallen in love with the power of the Wehrmacht early on. Germany can do very well without building a single ship, unless you’re planning an invasion of the British isles or to attempt an invasion of the USA, but that’s a whole different discussion.
So why talk about it at all?
At some point, everyone has tried a US, Japan or UK game. These three nations, along with Italy, depend largely, if not wholly, on their navy. This being a tutorial, I would be somewhat lacking if I didn’t adress the navy at all.
Besides, if I can understand the basics of a good navy, anyone can.
First, though, the terms I use should make perfect sense, but I’m going to explain them anyway, just to be on the safe side.
Navy: This is the grand total of all ships a nation possesses.
Fleet: this is a group of squadrons, usually grouped geographically. It might have a whole bunch of missions to perform at any one time.
Squadron: this is the basic unit for me. A squadron is always composed of ships which I feel are best suited to a single mission. It always has screens and usually at least 1 capital ship.
For instance, the Royal Navy, in my games, is composed, early on in the war, of Home Fleet and Mediterranean Fleet. Each of these has at least 1 squadron dedicated to naval warfare (i.e. combat against other surface squadrons). Other types of squadrons might be dedicated to ASW (anti-sub warfare), or troop transport and so on.
With that out of the way, let’s talk speed. This is another one of those things that will often trip up new players, and it bears keeping in mind when deciding on squadron composition later on.
There are two speeds, as far as ships go.
When a squadron is moving from one seazone to the next, the squadron will move at the speed of
the slowest ship in the squadron. In other words, a squadron composed of, say, a battleship (speed 18) and 3 destroyers (speed 42), the squadron will move at a speed of 18.
In combat, a squadron uses
the average speed to determine positioning, chances to withdraw or advance on the enemy and so on. That same squadron, in combat, will have a speed of (18+42+42+42)/4=36.
In other words, grouping slow ships with fast escorts will make them more efficient in combat.
At the other end of the scale, if you need to get to the hotspot
right this very second, you might group fast capital ships with fast screens. For instance, battlecruisers are very fast, and make excellent emergency intervention ships.
Yes, that does mean that composing your squadrons depends on what you want them to do. You didn’t expect there to be a single answer to solve all your problems, did you?
Ship types.
There are 2 kinds of ships. You have capital ships and screens. Capital ships are your big guns, either literally (battleships, for instance) or figuratively (carriers don’t have any real guns; it’s their CAGs that do the damage). These are the ones you depend on to get the killing blow. Screens are mostly damage soaks, protecting your capital ships so that these can do their job. That does not mean that they cannot hurt your enemy. They can and will sink their share of enemy ships. It’s just not their main purpose in combat.
Mixing different types of capital ships is heavily discouraged because screens will tend to fall back if there’s a carrier in the squadron, leaving your battleship to surge on ahead without the protection it requires. In other cases, the battleship will pull your carrier forward to within range of the enemy’s guns, where a carrier has no business being, leaving it more heavily damaged than it would be otherwise. This is less of an issue if you want to combine battlecruisers with battleships, but I prefer to keep them separate if I can afford it. Germany, for instance, may not have enough capital ships to keep them separate and still be effective.
Capital ships.
Carriers (CV): these are potentially the most powerful weapon in any navy, but they are also the most vulnerable ones. They are very fast and practially no ship can catch a carrier in full flight. They always stay at the extreme range of any combat, well out of range of enemy ships. A carrier depends on these two factors for survival in combat. Fighting is done by the Carrier Air Groups (or CAGs). A carrier can carry 2 CAGs. CAGs can perform any kind of mission that other planes can, such as supporting a landing with ground attacks, but they are build for one specific type of mission: CAG Duty. This means they will attack enemy ships, trying to sink them before they can reach the carrier itself, while also protecting the carrier from enemy planes. Combining several carriers in a single squadron gives you tactical options. You could, potentially, use some of the CAGs to support a landing while keeping others on CAG Duty, in case enemy ships or planes show up.
The pros include the abilty to strike enemy ships from extreme range while being able to make a run for it without anyone being able to catch them.
The main negative is the fact that Carriers are expensive to build, because you’re not just building the ship, you’re also building 2 CAGs to go with it.
CAGs can be grounded by extreme bad weather, just like other planes can. This can be a problem in combat and is just about the only reason you’d ever want to check the weather mapmode in the game.
Battleships (BB): these are all about guns and armour. They do a tremendous amount of damage when they hit, sometimes being able to sink obsolete screens with a single hit, while being able to take an amount of punishment that would send any other ship to the bottom of the ocean.
On average, building a battleship, depending on practicals, can take 2 to 3 years. This means that you have to start building them long in advance of when you think you might need them.
They are the slowest type of capital ship and are the easiest to hit (big, slowmoving target), but getting to them means finding a way to stay out of range of their guns or to close fast enough. In other words, in good weather, a carrier squadron will usually be able to send a battleship running, while a battlecruiser might be able to get close quickly enough before those big guns can take full effect if there are not enough enemy screens.
Battlecruisers (BC): The idea is to outgun small ships and to outrun big ships. They are very fast and have good firepower, but not enough to go toe-to-toe with a battleship. When grouped with other cruisers as screens, the combined firing range of the cruisers make them deadly in combat. Battlecruisers are the only ships with any hope to catch a carrier (and even then, they need some luck). People have tested this on previous versions of the game, when carriers were even faster than they are in TFH, and the BC failed. I don’t know of anyone that has tested this in the current version of the game, so take this with a grain of salt.
Battlecruisers’ main problem is simply that, on their own, they don’t have the firepower that a battleship offers. If you’re looking for shore bombardment or to maximize damage potential, you’re probably better off with their bigger, slower brothers. This is mitigated somewhat by the fact that they don’t need quite as many ICdays. In other words, if your focus is on the army or the airforce, BCs offer reasonable damage for a reasonable price.
As an additional note, battlecruisers have excellent convoy raiding ability, but their higher visibility, compared to submarines, makes them less than ideal for the job if you expect enemy squadrons to come looking for you.
Heavy Cruisers (CA): A heavy cruiser offers the best IC efficiency of all capitals. They don’t need a lot of time or IC to build. This makes them perfect if you can’t afford the other kinds of capitals (a nation like Romania, for instance), or if you want to take advantage of their low hull to combine more CAs in a single squadron than the enemy can match with his bigger ships (comparable to a zerg-style strategy).
Their other main benefit is the fact that a properly teched-up CA offers the very best anti-air protection of all ship types,which might be useful if you’re going up against carriers but don’t have any of your own.
They can be quite good in a number of roles, such as convoy raiding, but don’t expect them to stand up to any other capital ship unless you have a tremendous numerical advantage.
This brings us to their downsides, and I’m going to come out and say it like it is: I don’t like heavy cruisers. They don’t have enough firepower or armour, and are not-quite fast enough to escape in many cases. To me, they are only good enough to serve as capitals in otherwise quiet sectors, or to protect weaker ships on non-combat missions, or to add some damage soaking to the real capitals. They do work well with BCs, where their firing ranges are close enough to add to the whole.
Other experienced players may have another opinion on CAs, and I would be most interested if they would post something.
Escort Carriers (CVE or CVL): they are small, slow carriers that are not really intended for combat. As the name suggests, they are better suited to escort transport ships or to offer some airborne firepower to an ASW-squadron, for instance. They only carry a single CAG, giving them half the firepower a full-sized carrier provides.
Main benefits include the fact that they are a lot faster to build than carriers, allowing you to build up some Carrier Practicals with escort carriers while you research more modern fleet carriers, and to use them as a “poor man’s carrier”. Due to their slow speed, they tend to work well with transports and landing crafts, where the transports’ slow speed is less of a hindrance.
Screens.
Light Cruisers (CL): Light cruisers are long-range screens with a fair amount of resilience, making them excellent combat screens. Compared to destroyers, their longer firing range allows them to work well with carriers. A squadron composed entirely of battlecruisers and light cruisers, with some heavy cruisers thrown in, has the ability for all of their ships to fire at once. This will often make up for weaker individual firepower. Because every ship in this type of squadron has a reasonably high speed, they are fast both in movement and in combat.
Light cruisers are most often used with carriers in the game because they share the same naval doctrine.
Light cruisers also share Practical with heavy Cruisers (but not with Battlecruisers), so if ICdays are a factor for the nation you’re playing, this might work vey well for you.
As for downsides, the main thing is that they are still only screens. Don’t put them against capitals on their own, because they can’t win such a confrontation.
Another downside is that their detection stats are not quite as developed as those of a destroyer.
Lastly, they are a little slower as well, but, like I said, they make up for this with excellent mission range.
Destroyers (DD): The other kind of screens are destroyers. They have the best detection values of any ship type, they are the fastest ships of them all and they are the hardest to hit. Destroyers excell at finding submarines, especially if you research the ASW tech, and late-game destroyers can usually sink most submarines on their own.
Very versatile and very handy to have.
Their only real weakness is their lack of staying power and firepower. This is somewhat mitigated by the fact that they are quite hard to hit, but they can’t take a lot of damage or do a lot of damage.
Another weakness is a rather limited mission range, which, in the Pacific, makes them less than ideal, unless you have/grab an island near where you want them to operate.
Lastly, I feel I should point out that a single unit of DD in the game represents a group of individual destroyers. Most people agree on an average of 4-8 destroyers per in-game DD unit. If you want to try following RL production schemes, remember this fact.
Others.
Transport Ships (no real abbreviation that I know of): The basic type of ships used for transporting troops around the world. Each ship can carry 40 units of weight. They have excellent range.
Transports are slow, unarmoured and unarmed. A transport in combat WILL go down, unless you’re really lucky and can pull them out in time.
You can use them in naval invasions, but they are not as good at it as Landing Craft.
Transports are never researched. There is only 1 class of transport in the entire game. As such, they are perfect for serial production runs, because with them, you don’t run the risk of having obsolete ships being produced.
Landing Craft (LC): Landing Craft are used mostly for amphibious assaults. They offer better protection for the troops trying to disembark. Disembarkation goes faster as well. They even have some (very limited) ability to fire back. Each CL can carry 60 units of weight.
The main downside is that they are 1940 tech. Japan and UK start with the ability to produce them, so you might be able to buy a production license from either of them if you need them before 1940.
Landing Craft have additional research, so don’t plan on long serial runs if you’re going to research them further.
Of course, they are still not meant to be in combat against other ships of any kind.
Submarines (SS): The convoy raider of choice. They are cheap and fast to build, so you can really maximize your Submarine Practicals with them.
Their extremely low visibility makes it hard to find them, which makes them a good choice for recon missions (ie: run them along the enemy’s coastline to find a weakness in his coastal defenses). Visibility can be further reduced by additional research. It is usually after the 1940 tech is researched that they can be really silent hunters of the deep.
In theory, a submarine has an increased chance to surprise an enemy ship in combat on the first round of combat. In practice, however, this is completely negated by their extremely short firing range. During the first round of combat, they will be busy getting into range, which completely wastes the opportunity.
This brings me to their main weakness. Subs sink. They have very limited firepower and no armour/hull to speak of. Any capital or screen is usually safe from a single sub. Don’t bring them into combat. They die. Period. Submarines should always be on Passive Stance in order for them to survive any encounter with anything other than a transport or a landing craft.
Another weakness is the fact that early versions (pre-1940) have a short mission range. A 1937-tech sub based in Wilhelmshaven in Germany can reach the coast of Portugal but not much more than that. You need 1940 tech if you want them to operate in the middle of the Atlantic or the Pacific.
One last thing to keep in mind. Ships, once build, don’t fully upgrade. A 1937 battleship will retain the same engine, armour and guns for its entire existence. Radar, Anti-Air and ASW do upgrade, but you will have to keep them docked long enough to finish the process, which might take a couple of weeks or longer. It is often best, if its not an emergency, to build just enough to keep Practicals cooking until you get modern techs.
Squadrons.
This is where it gets complicated. How do you decide to combine ship types in function of their strengths and weaknesses? You have to look at mission types, both present and future, speed, practicals, and so on, plus combining their stats to maximize their ability to do the job you set for them. I think that it would be easiest if I do it by mission type.
In all cases, you should add the hulls of all the ships in the squadron. Each point of total Hull Size above 16 will give a 4% Positioning Penalty. This penalty can be negated by the admiral in command. Each skill point he has, will give a 10% Positioning bonus, but keep in mind that this is also used to counter the effects of lousy weather and so on. The limit, with skill-5 leaders (Dönitz, for instance), is around 18 total Hull size. This leaves plenty of the admiral’s skill points to counter other effects.
Do I still have to remind you that you should always have at least 1 screen per capital? Well, I just did, so there.
Combat: Most people will combine Battleships with Destroyers and Carriers with Light Cruisers. You make a choice early on which doctrine to focus on. This will tell you which ships to build. Don’t get me wrong: a battleship or a carrier is never a bad thing to have, regardless of chose doctrine, but a good navy depends on a good buildup.
Standard squadrons are
4 BB + 6 DD or 3 BB + 1 or 2 CA + 6 DD for a battleship fleet, or
6 CV + 6 CL for a Carrier Task Force. If you can’t afford these, you might try putting as many cruisers of various types together as you can, so long as you have at least 1 screen per capital. The battleship fleet can switch to having light cruisers as screens if you need the destroyers for something else (UK, anyone?), but remember that this will influence the squadron’s average speed in combat.
Maybe a side note on the types of missions that typically involve combat is in place.
A mission to “Patrol” an area, means that the ships will move around in their patrol area without coming back to dock on their own. This means that you will have to make sure after each combat that the squadron is still in any shape to continue or if they have to come in for repairs. Note that a squadron on this type of mission will sometimes follow another nation’s squadron. This is called “shadowing”. If you ever wondered how your ships in the Mediteranean got past the Dardanelles and ended up in the Black Sea (or even stationed in Sevastopol when you don’t have military access), that probably happened when they were “shadowing” a Soviet squadron. You want to break this off, because there’s no telling how much trouble they can get into or how far they will sail off-course.Naturally, this requires at least some amount of naval superiority and a minute amount of micromanagement.
“Sortie”, which I hardly ever use, means that the ships will leave their base, move to the seazone you want to investigate and return to base if there’s nothing to see. You use this if you think there might be an enemy squadron there but lack any other means of seeing them (even sending planes on naval strikes will highlight enemy ships if they can find them).
“Intercept” means that you’re reasonably sure that enemies are present. Again, your ships will leave their base, move to the designated seazone and engage any enemy found. They usually head back to the naval base after the fight, but sometimes they can be caught into a “shadowing” action. Again, break this off and send them back to base manually. If you’re intercepting, and not patrolling, that might mean that you don’t have naval superiority and shadowing can become especially dangerous.
Anti-Submarine Warfare: For getting those damnable subs off your shipping lanes. Destroyers are an absolute must for finding the subs. Add carriers, escort carriers or cruisers to enhance firepower and to protect the destroyers if they run into anything larger than a rowboat.
1 CVE + 4 or 5 DD is fairly standard, I think. Barring carriers, a good alternative is
1 CA or CL + 4 or 5 DD. Just make sure to have some real firepower on standby, in case they encounter an enemy surface squadron.
A lot more comes into play when hunting subs, but I will adress this fully next chapter. What I can tell you right now, is that this is where it pays to have Naval Bombers and large radar stations nearby. What the squadron doesn’t sink, the bombers will.
Transport/amphibous invasion: Obviously, the number of
transports or LC depend on
the total weight of the landing force (40 or 60 weight per ship). You can safely add
a CVE and a couple of older screens for added security.
If your squadron gets into combat, and you measured it so that the carried weight more or less equals the carrying capacity of the squadron, then any transports/landing craft sunk, will take 1 random land unit they are carrying with them. It is therefore always safest to have at least 1 empty transport in the squadron. In other words, if you are carrying 160 weight (needs 4 transports), you might want to use a minimum of 5 transports. If you do this, the transports sunk will be considered “empty” if the remaining ships can still carry all the divisions, and you will not lose that valuable division along with it.
Convoy Raiding: Subs are the go-to guys for this kind of mission. The more subs you have in your squadron, the more firepower they have, but the easier they are to detect. Most people agree on
1 or 2 SS per squadron. 1 SS has the lowest visibility, but by adding another one, you greatly improve the chances of survival, especially since a sunk squadron will take it’s admiral with it. There’s a reason why, in Take Two, I assigned Dönitz a surface squadron. Who wants to lose their best admiral when a single sub is sunk?
In HOI 2, you could abuse the rules by having your subs sail around in squadrons of 16 SS, which pretty much gave them enough firepower to sink anything short of battleships or carriers, but I have never tried it is HOI 3. Fairly certain it wouldn’t work, so experiment with it at your own risk.
Always keep your subs on Passive Stance, to further increase their chances of survival. That way, they will try to break off combat first chance they get.
Recon: Sometimes, you just want to sneak around and take a quick look at the enemy’s defenses and such. In this case,
a single sub on a “move” mission (on passive stance, of course) is the perfect ship for the job, especially if you’ve researched the tech that lowers their visibility.
These are the standards that I think most people use. You can, of course, experiment. Like I said, a pure cruiser fleet (say
2 BC + 1 CA + 4 CL) is fast and has a surprising amount of total firepower. I seem to recall some people using pure DD fleets (since each DD only has about 0.5 hull, you could have
30 DD in a single squadron without real problem), but these are all experimental builds, and I suggest you wait until you’ve gotten your feet wet first (pun intended).
That’s all for now. If you have any further questions, ask them and I will gladly try to give you an answer when I come back, playing as the UK. See you then!