• We have updated our Community Code of Conduct. Please read through the new rules for the forum that are an integral part of Paradox Interactive’s User Agreement.

HOI4 Dev Diary - Naval Updates

While Waking the Tiger and Cornflakes were not supposed to focus on the naval part of the game, we actually ended up doing a few things anyways :D So today’s diary is going to be about that!

First up: We got a new screen in the Navy Overview Screen that gives you a breakdown of losses and kills. These can be filtered by nations and faction.
Screenshot_2.jpg


You can for example see that France has lost 42 destroyers and sunk 67 Italian destroyers during the last year. The interface also lists convoys, so it’s much easier to keep track on how much of the enemies shipping you have taken out and to see how its changed between current and last month. If you click on an entry here it will give you a detailed breakdown of the ships:
upload_2018-2-7_16-25-18.png


Speaking of convoys: we have changed how raiding works and how losses in convoy efficiency is handled. Convoy sinkings is now tracked by strategic area rather than route, meaning that if several routes go through an area that is being raided, they will all be affected rather than single routes randomly being hit. This makes things much more predictable and you can’t get around efficiency hits by suddenly stopping a trade or a change in supply situation. The actual effect of a sunken convoy depends on how many are active (so if there are two convoys shipping stuff and one gets sunk thats a big impact, but if it’s 50 then it is pretty minor). The efficiency itself reacts slowly a bit per day to avoid jumps and weirdness. This solution means that it’s possible to keep convoy efficiency for the enemy low as long as you raid enough.

Screenshot_3.jpg


To help illustrate this to the owner of the convoys, we color routes that end up with lower efficiency due to raiding orange. Any area that is hit badly enough gets a special texture and is colored red. You can then focus your anti-raiding efforts on these areas.

We have also been tweaking the detection logic of submarines and how fleets engage. Fleets usually had a really easy time to find submarines due to some strange code thats now been keelhauled (a destroyer could more easily find a submarine that could find itself very easily...it was very philosophical), so we hope that part of naval warfare is going to feel better. Naval combat is an area that has been a bit neglected since launch, so we will be giving it some higher priority in future development.

Development wise the team is now in full polish and bugfixing mode, which means pet peeves like this one get addressed. I bet everyone who has played China or Japan has noticed this at least once:
Screenshot_5.jpg


Ships no longer go across land in the Yellow sea (and other tricky places) :)


We have also changed how transports interception is handled. Before it was possible to send a sacrificial transport first, and have it get caught by the enemy fleet as the rest of your transport fleet sailed past to invade the enemy. Now ships in combat are still able to detect transports for this case and “suck” them into the same combat. This should fix multiple exploits :) The way it looks on map (as the later transports may get caught in a different location) is that we show a special combat indicator over them and clicking on that sends you to the main combat in the zone.
Untitled-1.jpg


Next week we will be taking a look at achievements and nation forming, and some neat new UI changes.

Don’t forget to tune into World War Wednesday at 16:00 CET. Today we are going to start a new session (because Daniel was losing so badly vs Japan >:-D) as historical Germany, to show how it plays differently now.

Rejected Titles (due to popular demand):
What were we sinking!?
Loveboats II - The sinking of the Scharnhorst
Adding depth to the naval game
This DLC comes with free shipping
So the DLC is the Titanic and this bug is the iceberg...wait
Finding Nimitz: The Game
 
Last edited:
A little navy improvements! Yay! I hope future developments with the navy are not connected to another DLC and will included in a Patch 1.6 ^^
 
Interesting! Very, very interesting and welcome changes.

But as naval warfare is the subject, any chance we can get some way to estimate how many of what ship types another country has? It probably wouldn't be that hard to find out how many battleships or carriers a nation might have, at least in peacetime.
 
Really nice work!

Just 2 more things that would help to get subs in better shape:
  • One big issue with raiding right now is that all submarines join the same battle ( where they all get sunk by the enemy main fleet ), and that these battles take weeks before subs reach the convoys giving the enemy plenty time to reinforce with all they got.
  • Another big issue is that very few DDs, even lvl 1 DDs without any doctrines/upgrades can find and sink better subs (lvl 2 or even lvl 3) very effectively.
Anything about these done or something that's planned in the near future?
 
First: The Office of the Admiralty and Marine Affairs denies that the Royal Navy ever sucked German Army into anything.

Second: Allied planes in air zones is great.

Third: Please say you've done a tweak to stop strategic bombing ping pong.

very hot.jpg
 
question-->

does the "naval losses" screen also show losses due to naval plane strikes, or just losses from ships in naval combat?
 
Any changes to the cost of Mechanized? Or they will still have the same production cost as a Tank, and no1 builds them?

Really nice work!

Just 2 more things that would help to get subs in better shape:
  • One big issue with raiding right now is that all submarines join the same battle ( where they all get sunk by the enemy main fleet ), and that these battles take weeks before subs reach the convoys giving the enemy plenty time to reinforce with all they got.
  • Another big issue is that very few DDs, even lvl 1 DDs without any doctrines/upgrades can find and sink better subs (lvl 2 or even lvl 3) very effectively.
Anything about these done or something that's planned in the near future?
1) this is a fundamental issue with the naval combat model. you kinda have to pile into a combat with how things work now
2) not sure yet, still tweaking detection logic changes
 
This is very welcome and should add an extra layer of ambience to the game. It's going to be like learning a whole new game when this comes out. There is an awful lot to contemplate. But I can't wait to play as China. Cheers
 
Quick, somebody wake @Axe99 up. There's a NAVAL update DD!

Nice and very needed changes. Only concern regarding the change allowing multiple transport missions being drawn into battle is the ai losing even more divisions in the Channel and Med now.
 
You mean ... submarines might not be useless AND the Italians won't be able to zerg past 100 British Warships and land troops in North Africa?!?!? Christmas in February!! :D
 
@podcat

Nothing to do with this diary, but:
=> it seems, the trait "commando" doesn't work at all
=> terrain-traits don't work allways, if another Commanders leads the battle (often seen with the Ranger-trait)
 
question-->

does the "naval losses" screen also show losses due to naval plane strikes, or just losses from ships in naval combat?
Yea air losses should up as well

I forgot to point out that clicking entries give you more details too:
upload_2018-2-7_16-25-59.png
 
One way to avoid the problem that Alex referred to would be to have convoy losses connected with submarine raids not be handled in the standard combat routine. In fact, I would go further and have the entire strategic warfare part of the equation taken out of the standard combat routine. That wouldn't prevent subs from being found by escorts and engaged via normal combat procedures, but it would reduce the dog pile battles that inevitably come from using subs as convoy raiders.
 
While I appreciate the convoy raiding/submarine tweak, are troops also going to be able to live off local supply/alternate supply caches? Because otherwise a blockade on either the British or the Japanese is going to completely screw a war effort halfway across the world, that should rightfully be supplied from closer bases, .e.g India.
 
Any changes to the cost of Mechanized? Or they will still have the same production cost as a Tank, and no1 builds them?

Yeh I would like to see mechanised costs decreased by 2 for all of them. Mech 1 from 12 to 10, Mech 2 from 13 to 11 etc. Right now Mech 1 is more expensive than LT 3 which doesn't make sense.
 
Last edited:
IsXJitZ.png


Please make the create new fleet list sort by class/variant instead of by alphabet. Currently it's a serious pain every time one plays ENG, USA or JAP in multiplayer and tries to set up optimal submarine and ASW fleets where you want all the ships in the stack to have the same speed value, or when you want to create a fleet of just older ships in a less important theatre.

We have also changed how transports interception is handled. Before it was possible to send a sacrificial transport first, and have it get caught by the enemy fleet as the rest of your transport fleet sailed past to invade the enemy. Now ships in combat are still able to detect transports for this case and “suck” them into the same combat. This should fix multiple exploits :) The way it looks on map (as the later transports may get caught in a different location) is that we show a special combat indicator over them and clicking on that sends you to the main combat in the zone.

Have you fixed the exploit where you can save a division being convoy raided at sea just by pressing H or re-routing it to another port than its original destination? With this exploit the convoys can still get sunk, but the division will lose nothing. It's standard in multiplayer and there's no real way to ban or counter it.
 
Yeh I would like to see mechanised costs decreased by 2 for all of them. Mech 1 from 12 to 10, Mech 2 from 13 to 11 etc. Right now Mech 1 is more expensive than LT 1 which doesn't make sense.
I can't actually remember when I messed with it but in development version the costs are:
8 - 10 - 12

I am going to show the patchlog off before release (day before or week before depending on how it fits in) because at this point I cant remember all the things we've changed ;D
 
Have you fixed the exploit where you can save a division being convoy raided at sea just by pressing H or re-routing it to another port than its original destination? With this exploit the convoys can still get sunk, but the division will lose nothing. It's standard in multiplayer and there's no real way to ban or counter it.
yes