HoI4's looking tops, but it feels to me a bit like it's lacking in naval detail (and did in HoI3 as well, but HoI3's AI was never good enough to make me want to mod it), and I've been collecting (and continue to collect) some warship data for a naval mod, and thought I'd bounce some ideas off the forum. Ignore/pillory as appropriate. Obviously, a lot depends on how the final game looks, but I think we've seen enough to know that the things suggested below won't be in it.
Thoughts are:
Key things (that are hopefully fairly straightforward to do):
- Adding Frigates and Corvettes and other similar-sized escorts into the game - the reason I started down this path. Will depend a bit on how convoy raiding and escorting works as to how this'll be done.
- Improved naval tech tree. Add in levels for earlier BBs at the very least, probably ditch the 1944 BC designs (and possibly the 1940 as well, as it could be argued that by 1940 BB speeds made the concept of BCs obsolete).
- Improved accuracy of starting forces (hard to say exactly what needs doing until we get the game and can go through it, but most of the countries so far seem to be missing a few ships here and there, or have other ships that aren't representative of their actual abilities, like Germany's two Deutschland BBs).
- Adding ships to the build queue at game start - eg, the Ark Royal and the Scharnhorsts, and a bunch of smaller ships.
- If capital ship build times stay as they are, reducing them to something a dash more plausible.
- Adding in a few of other 'easy' ship classes, like anti-aircraft cruisers, monitors, torpedo boats and coastal defence ships.
- Submarine cruisers.
- Deck parking for CVs - US starts with, Japan and RN have to work for it (with it hard to achieve pre-1943).
Other things, that are more dependent on how much modding flexibility we have:
- Adding in motor launches, motor torpedo boats and motor gunboats.
- Adding in minefields and minelayers/minesweepers.
- Adding in dedicated amphibious invasion ships (as it looks like convoys are used for invasion battle plans in the base game).
- Seaplanes and seaplane tenders.
- Ships use fuel.
Pie-in-the-sky thoughts, not likely to be possible, but I can dream:
- using the framework of the division designer to create a capital (and possibly other) ship designer.
- Adding in river gunboats.
- Naval treaty systems (possibly easier than pie-in-the-sky if it's possible to limit how many variant 'pips' can be added through experience, as a proxy for tonnage limitations, or if we can make a ship designer work).
- Refitting ships (big reconstructions, like the Italian BBs).
- Decommissioning old vessels.
- Ships taking wear and tear over time.
Edit: Adding things in as they come up.
Thoughts are:
Key things (that are hopefully fairly straightforward to do):
- Adding Frigates and Corvettes and other similar-sized escorts into the game - the reason I started down this path. Will depend a bit on how convoy raiding and escorting works as to how this'll be done.
- Improved naval tech tree. Add in levels for earlier BBs at the very least, probably ditch the 1944 BC designs (and possibly the 1940 as well, as it could be argued that by 1940 BB speeds made the concept of BCs obsolete).
- Improved accuracy of starting forces (hard to say exactly what needs doing until we get the game and can go through it, but most of the countries so far seem to be missing a few ships here and there, or have other ships that aren't representative of their actual abilities, like Germany's two Deutschland BBs).
- Adding ships to the build queue at game start - eg, the Ark Royal and the Scharnhorsts, and a bunch of smaller ships.
- If capital ship build times stay as they are, reducing them to something a dash more plausible.
- Adding in a few of other 'easy' ship classes, like anti-aircraft cruisers, monitors, torpedo boats and coastal defence ships.
- Submarine cruisers.
- Deck parking for CVs - US starts with, Japan and RN have to work for it (with it hard to achieve pre-1943).
Other things, that are more dependent on how much modding flexibility we have:
- Adding in motor launches, motor torpedo boats and motor gunboats.
- Adding in minefields and minelayers/minesweepers.
- Adding in dedicated amphibious invasion ships (as it looks like convoys are used for invasion battle plans in the base game).
- Seaplanes and seaplane tenders.
- Ships use fuel.
Pie-in-the-sky thoughts, not likely to be possible, but I can dream:
- using the framework of the division designer to create a capital (and possibly other) ship designer.
- Adding in river gunboats.
- Naval treaty systems (possibly easier than pie-in-the-sky if it's possible to limit how many variant 'pips' can be added through experience, as a proxy for tonnage limitations, or if we can make a ship designer work).
- Refitting ships (big reconstructions, like the Italian BBs).
- Decommissioning old vessels.
- Ships taking wear and tear over time.
Edit: Adding things in as they come up.
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. I think that's a good idea. At this stage, I'm still plugging my way through Conways getting everything into Excel as classes, and then after that expand the appropriate classes to get the names and classes of the ships that'll be there in 1936 and 1939. Conways does have scale line drawings for pretty much every class that's torpedo boat and larger, so I was hoping to scan them in and use them as templates to build tech tree pictures from. The 3D modelling I was going to leave until last, because I've got no idea what I'm doing, and I'm personally more focussed on gameplay than how it looks, but the idea would be to get models in there at some stage.
