Naval Invasions/blockades/supply better be fixed in HOI IV

[Alex_brunius]

You're forgetting the (mostly British) blockade of Tunisia in the closing stage of the North African campaign, which was total.

It is a good point and should probably be added to the list of the few times this happened. It was however only possible due to the very small number of effective and combat ready axis airplanes, ships and submarines in the Mediterranean at that moment. And due to the monumental Allied efforts in establishing forward airbases and deploying large number of airplanes to cover the entire area.

Counting the entire retreat however many sources still state that more axis troops were able to retreat compared to those that were forced to surrender. For example Germany was able to send about 70 transport aircraft every night each capable of evacuating dozens of men.


Edit: Another point I only thought about just now, In this case here this is not a problem at all in HoI (any version). You can totally already make a blockade to prevent the enemy from retreating 10 divisions from the shores of north africa home to fortress Europa. The problem in that scenario is that the AI normally won't even attempt to evacuate the troops even if you leave the port undefended.

 

[Aszhalinde]

I'm not sure about it. Sounds like a great way of adding more micro and reducing the game's performance. You have some convoy lines, what's needed is a realistic way of blocking/reducing convoy traffic and of course, cargo should be lost when convoys are sunk (I heard that technically that's the case in HOI3, but the effect is so ridiculously small that it's totally insignificant). Don't know why you need convoys as on-map units.

We need convoys as on-map units because it'd be historical, interesting gameplay and it'd fix the doomstack-conquers-all model of HoI3 by forcing players to realistically defend their convoys. Every Allied convoy to Murmank/Archangelsk in 1942 was a major operation. The Germans put the Tirpitz and other capital ships in Norway to harass the arctic convoys which forced the British to use their own capital ships that were desperately needed elsewhere to defend the convoys, or lose them. Similarly, every convoy to resupply Malta up until Torch was a major British naval operation. This kind of naval cat and mouse game is impossible in HoI3.

I'm not buying the performance argument for abstracting submarines/convoys. The game already has thousands and thousands of units updating in real time, I don't see why modelling a few hundred sub/convoy ships per major and a much smaller number for minors is going to noticeably affect performance on any semi-modern machine.

 

[Bluestreak2k5]

We need convoys as on-map units because it'd be historical, interesting gameplay and it'd fix the doomstack-conquers-all model of HoI3 by forcing players to realistically defend their convoys. Every Allied convoy to Murmank/Archangelsk in 1942 was a major operation. The Germans put the Tirpitz and other capital ships in Norway to harass the arctic convoys which forced the British to use their own capital ships that were desperately needed elsewhere to defend the convoys, or lose them. Similarly, every convoy to resupply Malta up until Torch was a major British naval operation. This kind of naval cat and mouse game is impossible in HoI3.

I'm not buying the performance argument for abstracting submarines/convoys. The game already has thousands and thousands of units updating in real time, I don't see why modelling a few hundred sub/convoy ships per major and a much smaller number for minors is going to noticeably affect performance on any semi-modern machine.

I have an I7, 6GB RAM and 2GB video card and I definitely have seen performance issues in HOI3 due to massive amounts of units. I can't run the game on max settings (1920 X 1080) past 1941 due to this. I don't want even more issues in HOI4.

However we could make this simpler by "attaching" real naval units to convoy routes. Say you want the convoy between Malta and UK to be protected, you can attach 2 aircraft carriers to this convoy, and they are taken off the map and assigned to the convoy.

Also ways to prioritize convoy routes, say the Malta route is very high priority, you mark it as such and then it gets say 10 destroyer escorts instead of 3.

 

[Aszhalinde]

I have an I7, 6GB RAM and 2GB video card and I definitely have seen performance issues in HOI3 due to massive amounts of units. I can't run the game on max settings (1920 X 1080) past 1941 due to this. I don't want even more issues in HOI4.

I have a rig similar to yours and the only performance issues I've seen at any point are that HoI3 takes forever to load the first time, due to creating 10000 quad textures. I had a rig previous to this one with an i5 and didn't see performance issues on that one either.

Once the war actually kicks off though, I don't play on max speed anymore. Max speed itself obviously slows down, but it's still too fast to play the actual war in... (I also micro everything)

However we could make this simpler by "attaching" real naval units to convoy routes. Say you want the convoy between Malta and UK to be protected, you can attach 2 aircraft carriers to this convoy, and they are taken off the map and assigned to the convoy.

There would still be no realistic way to intercept and destroy that convoy, so defending it in that way would be pointless.

Also ways to prioritize convoy routes, say the Malta route is very high priority, you mark it as such and then it gets say 10 destroyer escorts instead of 3.

You can already do this.

 

[Tormodius]

I am also hoping for some working coastal forts this time. It is a known fact that coastal forts blew up ships. If this blockade and supply is going to be modelled better, yes i agree it wasnt good in HOI3, than it needs to be passive coastal forts that actually can damage ships.

It could do much damage on ships in narrow straits, or lane into a port. But not hit ships on adjacent zone always, because the ships would just stay out of range, so it must be programmed wisely! For example make forts shoot at ships depending on the fleet mission type. An offensive mission like invasion or blockading a port, or a port strike would order ships to close in at shores, would make coast artillery guns fire at the ships of course and quite possibly sink many, but the coast artillery guns could never fire into some sea-zone on ships travelling thru there (far out of range) because the concenpt in games with adjacent zones are very much larger abstractions and in such games its perhaps not possible to position ships accuratly within a zone.Blockading of trade could occur other places than a port tho, like outside ports where the trade-lanes go. So, it just need to be programmed wisely if coastal forts are gonna be in the game.

Edit: Its possible i think but then you need to redraw maps and put an extra seazone half-circular out of every port to reflect the lanes in and gun batteries range out. I have seen it in some other games, long ago. Might it be a cool idea for Paradox?

Historical Note: When Germany invaded Bergen, which is at the coast, we had a network of torpedo and gun batteries out of the islands around the port, so any ship sailing in would be sunk, but german commander threatened with bombardment if the batteries would not surrender and let the thru. At the same time in Oslofjord they lost Blücher to coastal battery fire at Drøbaksundet, which is a sound. They could have lost more, but the Kvarven batteries around Bergen did give up when threatened by destruction of the entire town.

 

[Bluestreak2k5]

Once the war actually kicks off though, I don't play on max speed anymore. Max speed itself obviously slows down, but it's still too fast to play the actual war in... (I also micro everything)

Well there you go, I'm usually at max speed for most of the game, and only once war with USSR kicks off do I actually take the speed down. It's simply too big of a front and too much going on to be at max speed. However, even at the speed 1 below Max speed there is a very significant performance hit, like 5 times slower then what it was.

I also noticed that (since I played most games at max speed) that there is a HUGE memory leak or something somewhere in the game. Max speed would literally start coming to a crawl for no reason, and eventually the game would end up crashing if you didn't save and exit. Then you load up the game and start again and would be good for another year or so in game past 1941. I could literally see a difference in performance by annexing countries as anyone, at max speed and the speed below that. Once the USSR was annexed, the game performance dramatically increased. Something about 1500+ units fighting for the glory of their countries bring the game to a crawl...

 

[Aszhalinde]

Max speed is literally that, the maximum speed of processing your CPU can actually do the game in. Of course it slows down as the game progresses and there is more to compute--that will happen on any CPU, no matter how powerful. You can't really call that a performance hit. I still think it's too fast to play manually without doing a mediocre job, but maybe that's just me, or there are other large mitigating factors in our hardware setups.

Buggy memory leakage notwithstanding, a modern machine that can't run HoI3 on second-to-max speed without slowing down to a crawl has something wrong with it, I would wager. Or, there's something specifically in your hardware configuration that doesn't play nice with the game.

 

[keynes2.0]

2nd. You CANNOT use Crete as an "example" of how hard it can be to "parachute" troops in and capture targets. The german paratroopers were "slaughtered" by disorganized men because ENIGMA had been broken. Those "disorganized" men had the exact landing points and targets of the partroopers already known to them... that is hardly disorganized.

Maybe you have a different definition of the word disorganized then I do? Cracking the opposing forces codes aren't related to organization AFAIK.

There is good reason HoI3 doesn't model this, and like so many times before it is called the AI.

If a "hard" blockade can effectively sink every single convoy going towards a port the player in HoI3 would just be able to put a surface fleet outside an remote UK island/port (say hong kong) and wait until all their convoys are gone.

A blockade wouldn't sink the enemy fleet, it would force the enemy fleet to sit in harbor and not sail in the first place.

Counting the entire retreat however many sources still state that more axis troops were able to retreat compared to those that were forced to surrender. For example Germany was able to send about 70 transport aircraft every night each capable of evacuating dozens of men.

I have never heard anything remotely on those lines. Given that the axis lost nearly a quarter million men as prisoners, to say they had another quarter million they could evacuate would beg the question why they would evacuate with such numerical superiority.

 

[TheDeamon]

Also, related question: 1) how many days could an army last without supplies IRL? I'm talking completely, 100% out of supplies. Would the army simply starve to death/surrender within a week or two? In other words, were WW2 armies capable of foraging (or overrunning another army and taking their supplies) effectively?

question 2) is this the time frame that's measured in HOI3?

The two should completely match up for HOI4. If someone muffs up an invasion and fails to supply a landed army, that army should die (or surrender) exactly as swiftly as it would have in real life. I haven't played HOI3 in a while, but if I remember correctly it feels like armies last longer without supplies than it feels like they should.

I think 30 days is too much too.

Well, playing with stuff that came around after World War 2, the Vietnam Era Amphibious Assault/Support Ships(some of which dated back to WW2), which are actual combat ships, rather than simple supply ships, could either carry troops to the shore, or carried the means of getting to shore with them, and all the supplies necessary to fight for up to approximately 1 month of "significant combat" before needing a resupply. During which time the ship they attacked from would be serving as a command post and supply depot for the troops. They wouldn't actually have most of those supplies on them in the field, at least to start with the ship would still be holding them, until the situation was such that they deemed things as stable enough to offload them to a secure location(at which point those ships could presumably leave to resupply and bring back another month's worth of supplies, presumably in much less than a month's time).

So the answer to #1 is "it depends" with the answer being contingent on how large is the defending force vs what are they being attacked with, and how much time did the defenders/attackers have to "stockpile" supplies prior to their supply line getting cut? What kind of facility do they have to take refuge in? There are historical examples of sieges that literally lasted for decades. For a less outrageous one, British forces held up against a combined siege from France and Spain for roughly 3.5 YEARS at Gibraltar with only the very rare chance for any supplies to get through from 24 June 1779 to 7 February 1783.

Basically, if the Navy is able to land troops somewhere, they're going to be able to get supplies to them in sufficient quantities to support them. Even if the means of getting supplies to those troops lies outside the scope of more traditional methods(a seaport or road/railways). Modern "untraditional" supply methods range from airtransports doing airdrops(or landing and unloading, kind of an option in WW2), the large cargo helicopters performing ferry services(not an option for WW2 era), to LCAC's(again, not really an option for WW2, although possible with a jet turbine engine), to the WW2 version of the LCU(Landing Craft Utility, which according to wiki would have been the LCT, LCA, LCM and NL), the LST(Landing Ship Tank --which were predominately WW2 era beasts designed to be run aground on sandy beaches for the purpose of unloading tanks(and transporting the previously mentioned earlier iterations of the LCU) and serving as a beachfront command and control post), Amy Ducks(many of which are still used as aquatic touring craft in many locales today), and the various and sundry hodgepodge of (shallow) watercraft they employed during D-Day and other invasions to shuttle material between ships and shore.

It should be noted that the LST, unlike the others mentioned above, was a ship in its own right, and not dependent on another ship in order to make an oceanic transit, although it's ability to defend itself at sea would be obviously limited, so escorts would be a good idea when loaded if nothing else.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landing_Ship,_Tank

So to be more "historically accurate" it would be "if an ampibious assault ship is operating off the coast of a territory with a shoreline of _____ types, the assault ship(s) should be able to provide supplies to the adjoining troops on land." (up to its rated "carry capacity" anyhow, so long as it is likewise in range of its own resupply chain) But that goes back to naval and air supremacy kind of being important. That assault ship isn't going to last very long if an enemy battleship or enemy Air Wing starts gunning for it and nobody else is around to protect it.

 

[Big Nev]

Someone correct me if I’m wrong, as sources vary, but on D-Day the troops carried three days of supplies.

Three days of food, two or three grenades & about 150 rounds for their long arm. Not much water but loads of sterilising tablets.

Anyone who’s ever been paintballing will know that 150 rounds is f^c!< all. Enough ammunition to last maaayyybeee an hour of actual fighting.

It’s interesting to note, although not surprising, that parra’s carried significantly more equipment & supplies than the troops wading ashore.

AFVs were, perhaps, a little better off. The typical M4 Sherman had enough fuel to travel about 200km (4 or 5 hours diving), up to 90 rounds for the main gun and 300 rounds for their machineguns.

So, it’s clear from this that if you don’t capture a port (within 200km?!) pretty quickly, you have to either bring your own or use sufficient small craft that can land on a beach (and get back off again) to keep your troops supplied.

There’s a pretty good article here http://www.usmm.org/felknordday.html for those who aren’t familiar with the problems involved and how they were overcome.

The technology required for Mulberry didn’t just involve pouring concrete. It was mostly about researching the characteristics of where they were going to be placed. Such “craft” would, therefore, be useless just about anywhere else. I could see them being a possibility in the Mediterranean, but they would need to be built “quite close” to their intended deployment area. Due to the need for all the (50+) seperate pices to be towed in to possition and assembled. Probably while being bombed. So, for the most part (and the majority of amphibious operations) we should be relying on landing craft and (later in the war for the Allies) assault ships.

Once again, it seems that Japan was a world leader and should start the game (1936) with Assault Ship technology. Although Japan was incapable of landing armour on a beach as only the British had the equipment necessary to perform this particular circus trick.

Note though the significance of the word "beach". Front-ramp style landing craft can't off-load anywhere else.