Naval Ideas

[Jorgen_CAB]

That is why I hope for detection to be possible outside the sea zone ships are in, at least for cruisers and carriers that carries planes as the primary scouting asset. That, coupled with a better system for what happens when two fleets actually detect each other, it should not be automatic combat most of the time.

 

[De Savage]

HOI 3 naval war was better than HOI2's, but still far from perfect. I hope for better damage model for ships. Org / strength damage doesn't feel always right. 1% strength battleship will retreat to port full speed and repair fully in few days. Also if ship takes damage it should slower it speed too. Even better would be critical hits like engine, propeller, weak spot hit (like happened to Bismarck vs. Hood), disabled guns, etc. Repairing ships should take much longer (specially heavy damage to big ships). Big ships need big shipyards, they cannot be repaired in every port. Same for building/deploying ships, I want to see them in shipyards not to be deployed freely.

Also armor should be more important factor in ship-to-ship battles. Heavy armored battleships are almost immune to smaller caliber guns, but destroyers could fire torpedoes against them. Make carrier battles more realistic. Fighters escorting and making combat patrol, torpedo and dive bombers attacking ships or ports. Abstract submarines to ports and flotillas. I dont want to micromanage them.

Naval detection should be easier, specially near coasts. HOI3 lacked sea patrol planes, these should be somehow included. Also code breaking would make spotting enemy fleets and subs possible. Maybe land warfare's plans could be used at sea too?

 

[Cybvep]

BTW with the equipment pools in place, I hope that we won't have a generic "CAG" unit and that it will be possible to set the ratio of bombers and fighters on carriers.

 

[dizzle3]

My wish- make the AI good at fleet composition and concentration decisions. At the moment it either spreads too thin or clumps all it's units together.

In real life navies generally formed large task forces and the larger your force was the more likely you were to win. To prevent some ahistorical megafleet there needs to be some game mechanic to encourage splitting into task forces . I see two options:
1. Some strategic reason to split your fleets, like for example the UK had to split between the Med, the North Sea and the Far East. This requires a very smart Axis naval AI that will only sortie if it has local superiority and will tear convoys to shreds as a punishment for not blockading
2. Stacking penalties like in hoi3

Honestly I prefer the first, and would probably accept omniscient AI in the naval war to get it. IRL both sides had a reasonable idea of naval movements anyway

 

[Mjarr]

My wish- make the AI good at fleet composition and concentration decisions. At the moment it either spreads too thin or clumps all it's units together.

In real life navies generally formed large task forces and the larger your force was the more likely you were to win. To prevent some ahistorical megafleet there needs to be some game mechanic to encourage splitting into task forces . I see two options:
1. Some strategic reason to split your fleets, like for example the UK had to split between the Med, the North Sea and the Far East. This requires a very smart Axis naval AI that will only sortie if it has local superiority and will tear convoys to shreds as a punishment for not blockading
2. Stacking penalties like in hoi3

Honestly I prefer the first, and would probably accept omniscient AI in the naval war to get it. IRL both sides had a reasonable idea of naval movements anyway

#1 could be also reinforced by simply making more ships in a fleet the less it has overall range and consumes more supplies and oil. Individual ship range becomes somewhat pointless when you have fleet actions, manoeuvres and screening, formation, communication etc to consider in the long run as well as not simply running all over the place. Thus you could form megafleets but they would be limited to only short ranges.

And maybe give them extra vulnerability against [insert unit types here.]

 

[Secret Master]

That and the fact that losing a destroyer is simply not as crippling as losing a capital ship. If a DD is hit by a lonely torpedo, it's a small setback. If a CV is hit, well, that's an entirely different matter. Screens were simply more expendable.

As stated above... One thing that bothered me about the naval mechanic as a whole and the importance of capital ships are detection of enemy fleets/ships and planes. There need to be a better model for this.

I have asked this question before, and no one has really been able to answer me: how large is a sea zone?

I bring it up because I actually think the sea zones are fairly large. They become "knife fights" because two fleets in a sea zone just start fighting relatively close to each other.

Either the ocean needs 2000% more provinces, or naval warfare needs to be changed so that being in the same sea zone might place fleets 300 km away from each other, rendering surface combat impossible this time around.

But you also need to change CAGs so that they can't run an infinite number of naval strike missions for days on end, too. Running multiple naval strike missions per day was always a big deal during the Pacific War. Rearming and refueling planes took time, and we all know what happens if your planes are caught on deck by opposing aircraft while rearming, don't we? And we also know what happens if you don't send attack wave #3 on a port strike, don't we Nagumo?

Another problem with HOI3's naval mechanics is something that's not even naval. The game runs in segments of hours. This works great for land combat, but it causes real problems with naval combat. In the space of an hour, CAs can get into range to fire against battleships that should enjoy a huge range advantage. The BBs get to fire maybe one whole broadside before the CAs get in range, turning it into yet another knife fight.

My wish- make the AI good at fleet composition and concentration decisions. At the moment it either spreads too thin or clumps all it's units together.

Yes, the AI needs to understand fleet mechanics better. When I tag switch without pausing the AI (in tests for naval combat), I notice the AI reorganizing my perfectly good fleets into insane compositions.

In real life navies generally formed large task forces and the larger your force was the more likely you were to win. To prevent some ahistorical megafleet there needs to be some game mechanic to encourage splitting into task forces . I see two options:

If surface raiders were more dangerous to unprotected convoys, then you'd have to make tougher choices.

Right now, Bismark and Tirptiz together with a few DDs can sink almost as many tons of unprotected shipping per day as a submarine flotilla. So, the Germans sortie Bismark and Tirpitz, and I sit back in London, sipping tea. When I get notification about a convoy being attacked, I have a round of gin with Churchill and the First Lord of the Admiralty and send the Royal Navy out to sink them, using a fully staffed fleet. After three weeks of searching, we sink the Bismark and Tirpitz, and I receive the news playing a round of Cricket, because I don't really care about the meager convoy losses.

In the real war, you have to put some capital ships on convoy protection duty in case Bismark slipped out into the North Sea. If a convoy was attacked by a battleship or two without any capital ship escorts at all, it would be massacred and Churchill would be reviled on the floor of Commons worse than Neville Chamberlain.

The same problem would crop up in the Pacific. If you end up with using just a single doomstack, the enemy will reply by using Jeune École methods against you.

That's the thing that's kind of missing in HOI3. Either you commit fully to Mahan-style decisive battles (using carriers in the same role as battleships) or you commit fully to convoy raiding along submarine/NAV lines. No navy in the game really has to prepare for multiple contingencies. Because there can be no devastating convoy losses in a single engagement, no matter how unprotected convoys are or what ships engage them, there is no operational need to spread capital ships out at all.

I'm not sure how you fix that, aside from redoing convoys, too.

 

[dizzle3]

I agree that there could be some logistical drag of fleet range/supply/fuel consumption, but this is secondary to the real reason that fleets were split.

Suppose that surface ships sank 10 times as many convoys per week as submarines , so that a couple of BBs would sink half your merchant navy in a couple of weeks if left unattended.

Now fleet in being doctrine of Italy and Germany poses a real threat, and the maritime empires of Japan, UK and US have to split up their fleets to guard their sealanes, since even a brief incursion by a SAG into your shipping lanes can cripple your economy.

Giving incentives like this means less arbitrary "stacking penalty" silliness. By the end of the war, with Italian and German naval threats gone, the optimal US strategy should be a doomstack, it's what happened in real life.

It's the same as the air stacking penalty, there is no reason for twice as many planes not to be twice as good. Battle of Britain was won by Radar, pilot rescue and bad choices from germany, not by a stacking penalty.

 

[Jorgen_CAB]

I have asked this question before, and no one has really been able to answer me: how large is a sea zone?

I bring it up because I actually think the sea zones are fairly large. They become "knife fights" because two fleets in a sea zone just start fighting relatively close to each other.

Either the ocean needs 2000% more provinces, or naval warfare needs to be changed so that being in the same sea zone might place fleets 300 km away from each other, rendering surface combat impossible this time around.

This is actually not that hard to figure out. Just click on a coastal province and drag your mouse around in the sea and you quickly get a feel for how large those sea-zones really are. Even better if you take a carrier out to sea and select a CAG and look how far it needs to go. The range probably are from the center of the province you selected to the center of the province you hover the mouse above. A sea-zone are probably about 150-200km wide, sometime smaller sometimes larger, it depends on its shape and where it is. Zones closer to land tend to be smaller while those at sea tend to be larger.

I would call sea zones to be at "knife fighting" distance if two task-forces are in the same zone. If it is during the day and you have enough planes (enough cruisers and/or carriers) there is very little chance they are going to miss each other. Carriers would have patrol-zones between 200-300 miles (350-450km) radius, that is several sea-zones in HoI3. In the Guadalcanal campaign the carrier battle took place at about 350km distance (or some such). Cruisers with sea-planes can theoretically detect ships at the same distances, but since they usually had less overall planes to search with (unless a large group of cruisers) they had to suffice with a smaller area, but at lest to the next sea-zone without problem. Even advanced radar could theoretically detect a larger ship at up to 80km (that is basically one sea-zone in one fell swoop), but don't quote me on that since I read that on WikiPedia... ...just think what radar equipped air-craft could find once they became more common.

 

[Beagá]

BTW with the equipment pools in place, I hope that we won't have a generic "CAG" unit and that it will be possible to set the ratio of bombers and fighters on carriers.

Good luck programming an AI that does choose that well...

Make CAG size reliant on ship size and hangar and with fixed ratio of bombers/fighters, that is good enough. No more 1 CAG for CVL and 2 CAGs for CV.

 

[Cybvep]

I agree that there could be some logistical drag of fleet range/supply/fuel consumption, but this is secondary to the real reason that fleets were split.

Suppose that surface ships sank 10 times as many convoys per week as submarines , so that a couple of BBs would sink half your merchant navy in a couple of weeks if left unattended.

Those were not the only reasons. IRL the UK, the USA and Japan had to protect various places - sea lines and territory - and leaving them totally undefended was not really an option, while in HOI3, as the UK, for example, you can concentrate everything in Europe - and I mean, *everything* - send every single brigade, ship and aircraft there and leave everything else totally undefended without consequences. Even if Australia, India etc. are lost, you simply do not have to care and as long as it allows you to beat Germany quicker. Things simply didn't work like that IRL. The game should heavily encourage the player to defend distant territories and fight in several theatres, if necessary. Total force concentration in once place shouldn't be so damn easy.

And convoys should definitely be redone. When I lose merchantmen, I should care about that. It should hurt. Secret Master has a good point here.

Stacking penalties of some sort are good, because they encourage the player to create sensible fleets and curtail gamey stragies. Remember that a game won't be able to simulate RL perfectly, especially a land-focused game, and that the player will have a much greater amount of control over the navy (or everything else, for that matter) than RL leaders or even admirals, because the player embodies the whole nation. Note that naval stacking penalty in HOI3 TFH isn't a flat combat maulus, but a positioning penalty, which is more subtle and makes a bit more sense. That being said, every thing that's not just an arbitrary modifier is welcome. I just think that we should be realistic here - HOI4 won't be a simulator.

 

[jju_57]

Actually make night time and bad weather result in no combat except for very specific situations like a surprise sub attack or rare naval gunfire exchanges.

No CAG or CV attacks in stormy weather or at night. And in fact no combat for stormy weather of any kind.

 

[dizzle3]

Stacking penalties of some sort are good, because they encourage the player to create sensible fleets and curtail gamey stragies. Remember that a game won't be able to simulate RL perfectly, especially a land-focused game, and that the player will have a much greater amount of control over the navy (or everything else, for that matter) than RL leaders or even admirals, because the player embodies the whole nation. Note that naval stacking penalty in HOI3 TFH isn't a flat combat maulus, but a positioning penalty, which is more subtle and makes a bit more sense. That being said, every thing that's not just an arbitrary modifier is welcome. I just think that we should be realistic here - HOI4 won't be a simulator.

I tend to prefer to be doing things for the historical reason, and I don't think it needs to be insanely complicated to make it happen. The hoi3 model isn't a disaster, except the stacking cap which causes all kinds of problems. I don't like the high amount of friendly fire that happened with megafleets, it's just not realistic.

I guess what is missing is some historical incentive systems to behave historically. Lose India and your government gets overthrown and you are forced into an unfavorable peace with Japan for example., considerably weakening your ability to fight Germany.

Otherwise it's just a game of mopping up your enemies one at a time as the UK

 

[Sinbuster]

My wish- make the AI good at fleet composition and concentration decisions. At the moment it either spreads too thin or clumps all it's units together.

This is the biggest problem I find. Watching unescorted TPs going from California to Manilla or, at the opposite end, seeing superstacks of Carriers with few screens. The same issue applies to air and land battles where penalties are put in place to stop superstacks but the AI ignores them.

As far as convoys go, I'd love it if you could prepare specific convoys as the need permits and be able to see them complete their task (or not). PQ-17 and Operation Pedestal spring to mind. In some ways it is like the Strategic Bomber Campaign, where endless bombing runs by 1 or 2 STR units was totally unrealistic, whereas waiting and conducting singular 800+ bomber runs was not. However, for a player, conducting one bomber run every 3 months or so would be a complete waste of time. Of course, this would mean a different way of modelling convoys (and strategic bombing) which other threads, and posters, have spoken of at length.

One last point, I'd really like to see fleets visibly shadowing other fleets and the engagements themselves being more swift. The shadowing part should take a few days so you can respond and bring other fleets (potentially) into play, but the battle itself should not last for days on end. If there are multiple contacts over the course of the few days that's fine, but they shouldn't be locked together. Ultimately, using one system to mimic land and sea conflicts just wont work.

 

[ladner]

Alright, there some things I´d like to see:

I. Production and ports
I Think there should be different types of shipyards or at least a connection between portsize and Production´s capacity: e.g. CA´s, BB´s an CV´s can just be build AND DEPLOYED in the mentioned shipyard or a level 8-10 Port and NOT build parallel unless you researched prefabrications. And even then there should be a limitation to number of produced ships. Building 10 CV at one seems to be ridiculous…
Maybe a level 6-8 Port could produce CL´s and DD´s and transports, a level 3-6 Subs Auxulary ships and Mtb´s .
And everything beneath could just be able to shift supplies or to load and unload troops on transports.
That would define a nice target for strategic bombings by the way…

II. Convoys and subs
For heaven´s sake put convoys on the map and let us change the convoy routes if need be.
I like the idea of having a subflotilla HQ in Port X, assigning amount Y of subs to it and defining a patrol area on the map. The AI then should deploy the subs in that area automatically. Limiting the number of Torpedoes a sub can carry and thereby force them to withdraw after all have been fired would be a nice thing too.

III. Mission types
We should be able to tell small ASW squadrons to do just this and nothing else. “Attack sub´s but don´t engage anything else” for example… Same goes for other formations, just to avoid suicide missions. An alternative would be a small pop-up: Fleet spotted, number and type of own and hostile ships, engage? Yes or No? I know it´s already more or less abstracted by the stance, but anyway…

IV. Amor/Piercing, damage system for ships
It´s been mentioned that da CL or CA wouldn’t do much damage to a BB. So a certain hull armor should just be pierced by large shells or torpedoes. On the other hand superstructures were quite vulnerable even to smaller guns which could be reflected by a loss of org and maybe firepower if gunturrets are hit…

V. CAG´s
I would like to differ between buildable INT, CAS and NAV ones and then to decide which ones are assigned to the carriers according to the given task.

With regard to IV, I think the damage model needs to be further elaborated upon for naval combat to include fire and flooding damage. Torpedoes and mines are deadly, in part because the explosive causes damage below the water line, and all of the associated problems with flooding, case in point the sinking of the HMS Barham. The current org/strength loss model does not adequately reflect the lethality of WW2 naval combat.

 

[Cybvep]

System damage is a good idea, but it will work ONLY if the AI knows that damaged ships slow the fleet down and detach these ships from the main fleet (maybe with some escorts). Otherwise, that feature would have disastrous consequences for the AI and it's not that the Naval AI is good ATM (actually, it suxx).

 

[Cpack]

Some issues on convoys:

- I'm not quite sure, but do the convoy routes change if the were massively attacked in HOI3 ?
-->This should definately be the case in HOI4

- I would like to get the possibility to define myself the route for convoys through the seazones and possible change them by needs.
--> Just to avoid more micro for some people they should be possible auto generated. I think this is important especially for lend-lease routes.

 

[Barvinok]

Ok. Here's a revolutionary idea: do away with individual ship organization bars. It is quite hard to kill a ship in HOI 3 with land based bombers because the strength doesn't go down quickly, just organization. In reality, ships could be crippled and sunk much faster. Have them only be a assigned a strength bar. Strength could be regained depending on the quality of damage control and repair crews(doctrine). The fleet as a whole could have organization. The loss of organization would simulate RL cases where a mauled fleet lost cohesion and scattered.

Also, please include supply ships in the game. A very important aspect for any navy that wishes to venture far away from the home port.

 

[Chaplain]

IRL, even late-game heavy cruisers should not be able to significantly damage battleships, unless the battleships are unescorted and significantly outnumbered. The 6'' and 8'' guns simple will not pierce the battleship armor, and the torpedo is a short range weapon, and many cruiser classes didn't even have them.

Ummm ... see this:

At 01:50, Hiei activated her searchlights and opened fire on the light cruiser USS Atlanta, commencing the First Naval Battle of Guadalcanal. Though Atlanta's guns succeeded in disabling the searchlight, Hiei was able to concentrate her main batteries on the bridge, crippling the light cruiser and killing Rear Admiral Norman Scott.[28] Hiei and Kirishima then disabled two American destroyers (one of which later sank). In turn, Hiei became the target of the majority of the American firepower, with the American 5-inch guns inflicting severe damage on Hiei's superstructure at close range; Admiral Abe himself was later injured after USS Laffey (DD-459) shelled the bridge with her own guns, killing his chief of staff.[29] This concentration enabled Kirishima to evade the American barrage and cripple USS San Francisco, killing Admiral Callaghan.[19][29] However, shells from San Francisco disabled Hiei's steering machinery.[30]

Depending on the situation, 6" and 8" guns could do MASSIVE damage to battleships. Just one example.

 

[Chaplain]

I don't like the high amount of friendly fire that happened with megafleets, it's just not realistic.

The night naval battles during the Solomons campaign would suggest otherwise. Friendly fire was constant.

 

[Chaplain]

Here's my two cents:

1) Naval combat needs an overhaul, including a mechanic which is distinct from land combat.

2) The reason for this is that WW2 naval combat was a crapshoot, especially in the early to mid-war. Hood blows up on first salvo, Scharnhorst and Gneisenau dash the Channel, Prince of Wales and Repulse go down in an hour, Taranto cripples the Italians in one strike, Kriegsmarine pulls off a miracle in Norway, David truly defeats Goliath at Midway, etc, et al. So the naval combat engine needs to be short, sharp, and generally decisive. Sending your fleets in harm's way should be a decision which isn't taken lightly because the consequences are severe. As it is in HOI3, it is extremely difficult to get a decisive result in an individual battle. Just my opinion.