Thoughts and Concern about Fleets

[Salatmander]

So i watched some HoI3 Multiplayer matches recently (only played MP together with 1 or 2 friends till now) and noticed that in MP it seems to be common that the most effective fleets are only consisting out of some Carriers and lots of Destroyers.
So everyone just produce those and nothing else there.

Thats something really sad in my eyes because i really love Sea fights and the marine is allways a big priority for me.

So I just want to mention this in the hope the balancing of ships will become a bit deeper in HoI4 (and maybe to bring this up in the head of any developer =D) that each types speciality becomes more important so you have to mix your fleets more and can´t just "steamroll" your enemy with spamming 1 type assisting some ships of 1 other.

What are your thoughts about this guys?

 

[kviiri]

I too like naval combat, including the battleships that were rendered obsolete in the HoI 4 era, and I somewhat share your concern. As far as I've understood the devs went for an idea that the countries should rack practical understanding on using navies (naval experience) before they'd understand the superiority of carriers and were able to produce actually powerful variants of them. Not sure whether it'll be properly balanced in practice.

 

[SchwarzKatze]

It's the same thing as in HoI3 and 2.

 

[Victor Cortez]

I suppose naval XP will help.

Carriers at start shouldn't be too good and the player will need more advanced carriers + mods of them to be effective.
So, in order to acquire that XP the player should send lots of other vessels in combat.

 

[LordOfWar16]

the idea is that CVs only coem into their own towards the end.

Johan is currently doing very well in his home-game as Italy using battleships.

Carriers this time around arent allrounders either. There are no more Carrier Air Groups that basicly do any job pretty well. You have to assign an composition of individual fighters, dive bombers and naval bombers to the carriers. One carrier might be good at hunting ships, while being weak defending against enemy planes and vise versa.

You no longer have those stacks of ships fighting each other in one seatile either, but rather have your fleet spread out over one or multiple sea regions which consist of several seatiles. The spread depends on the fleets mission and some naval doctrine. That means you basicly need something that can take a beating and bind the enemy untill the reinforcements are there. Not all ships will be there at the same time and take some time to reach the battle. That means of course, if your navy only consists of carriers and destroyers the enemy might slip away way before the reinforcements arrive or worse the screenings get sunk and your carriers get into range.

 

[Jamey]

This concern has been brought up in several DDs, and the Devs have the plan of necessitating you to have multiple ships due to having multiple needs in a sea zone.

For example, you may want cruisers and destroyers on patrol missions, so that they are dispersed to locate enemy ships. The cruisers provide the weight of guns and armor to threaten the enemy fleet enough to force a real fight, where an all destroyer fleet would just crumple to big guns.

Meanwhile, you'd want a heavier fleet or a carrier group concentrated in another mission (the name escapes me) to sail to contact and engage what your patrolling fleets have found.

The idea is that you'd build different fleets with different ships for different roles in the same sea zone. How that works in practice remains to be seen, but it sounds good to me.

 

[WeissRaben]

The problem is that the war in the Pacific, which largely shaped the conception of CV over BB, was greatly distorted by the Japanese lack of decent AA; a Iowa-class was and would have been an absolute meat grinder for planes. Good, numerous, and effective (proximity fuse, RADAR) AA fire would deter enemy planes enough to make carriers cautious and not so dominating on the seas, limited to better-calculated strikes - just like BB could attempt attacks in weather that discourages flight. Japan had none of this, plus planes that lost their few edges quickly, and skilled pilots who died and left no viable substitute behind.