Dev Corner | Hydrodynamics

[ruhrbaron]

i love all of these but i do not think the range issue is sufficiently addressed. Hoi4's map projection is at least part of the equation and should be accounted for. the mid atlantic gap and most of the pacific sea zones are far, far, far too small and the northern and southern most sea( and air zones) are far too large. this makes the naval battles far too instant and makes fleets supremely vulnerable to air. the building limit on islands is a good quick fix, but i dont think itll be enough to actually represent the real world strategic, tactical and operational challenges in game, which would also make the naval game far more relevant to the outcome of the war

 

[Dimmie_Dumm]

3. Land based trade is possible over huge distances, which was not possible in reality. There is even already a define to set a maximum distance for land based trade, so easy to change.

Absolutely! That said, altering this define alone is insufficient as trade flows by land with distance determined by a straight line and e.g. would make curves around the Med, the Baltics etc. As a result, as weird as it sounds it is simply impossible atm to prohibit over the land imports of the Swedish Steel for Germany while still allowing the latter to trade with Italy: purely formally, Berlin to Stockholm distance (~810 km IRL) is shorter than Berlin to Rome (~1,180 km).

By that logic, it's unclear why we aren't allowed some Deep Core Mining right from the Lower Mantle, though; which starts merely 660 km below the surface.

Seriously, given its historical importance and how it's messed up in the game now, any "naval and naval-related changes" not addressing Trade one way or another would be a wasted opportunity.

 

[HeartsofHearts147]

Looking forward to all the changes. Thank you devs.

Hopefully reworking the air end will eventually happen. The air wings etc (especially the icon bug) should be addressed or revamped.

But once again, thank you.

 

[Haresus]

The air base limits on tiny islands and fleet range based on homebase are fantastic changes, I've been hoping to see something like that for years now. Carriers should actually feel very impactful in the Pacific now, instead of being at the mercy of land-based naval bombers.

Keep up the good work.

 

[Sourlol]

One thing I would like to see is the ability to dynamically break apart and reconstitute fleets.

For example, say I am the Americans and I need to invade the Solomon Islands. I want to have my Task Force, a components of the Pacific Fleet, be able to breakout a squadron of destroyers and a couple cruisers to move into the what-will-come-to-be-named Iron Bottom Sound. I want to be able to do it quickly and painlessly. I don't want to send in the CVs and BBs--nor their escorts.

My dream would be to have a Task Force made up of Capitals and their escorts and destroyer/cruiser squadrons. Id like to be able to quickly combine them into the TF to move out as one, and just as easily be able to cleave off USS Colorado and her 4 escort DDs for a duty, or break out Destroyer Squadon IV for a different duty.

You can do this now, but its a lot of clicking, and for roleplay purposes its beyond agrivating trying to select the same specific ships to keep squadrons and such consistent across a campaign.

Also a Naval Chain of Command would be well implemented in this sort of system.

 

[leastfire]

oh about task forces, I hate it when admirals randomly decide to leave and then be en route for 14 days, despite of me merging two fleets (one with admiral, one without)

 

[Death_Hussar]

One of the reasons why I prefer keeping CTRL-RIGHT-CLICK as switching Home Base over RIGHT-CLICK, is that player can always select just a single taskforce out of the fleet, and now by right clicking would switch the home base for the entire Fleet, instead of just sending it to repairs or move to avoid a specific thing. Things that can have a potentially more annoying effect by 'accidental' clicking IMO should require a bit more than just 'right click'. For the people that would not know about the ability CTRL-RIGHT-CLICK, there will be a selectable list of the naval bases that you can open by clicking on the Home Base button on the Fleet/Taskforce view.

On second question - you are allowed to switch naval bases even if technically they are out of range. Ships will move to that port / base, and will be able to operate in the new place after they arrive. Blocking this, would result in more often than not, requiring players to do some kind of weird rebase dance everytime they would have to move their fleets just a little bit farther than they could reach initially.

So how would you unassign a sea zone as it uses the same hotkey combo?

 

[Zwirbaum]

So how would you unassign a sea zone as it uses the same hotkey combo?

The same way as it used to be as they are different context. Sea zone is sea zone, port is a port. (Otherwise there would already be a 'conflict' by right clicking on a port is the same as assigning the sea zones to the missions.)

 

[Veselyp]

Naval intel does do that. With enough, you can see information on fleets that are operating in an area, with a scaling factor based upon the level of naval intel. The game already has this.

Information about where each fleet was and what was in it, was absolutely not known at all times. The Battle off Samar, a late war battle where the US had RADAR still had a Japanese fleet ambush an American force.

I dont mean it in a tactical scale! But in a stategic scale! they knew what was where In the scale that hoi represent.

 

[DaReal-BurningDeath]

The same way as it used to be as they are different context. Sea zone is sea zone, port is a port. (Otherwise there would already be a 'conflict' by right clicking on a port is the same as assigning the sea zones to the missions.)

Another one can you slighlty adjust the sea zones so it is easier to see which seezone a port belongs too

 

[ItemDiversity]

While you guys are at it, are you planning to take a look at ship refitting cost and speed? Perhaps more investment into ships/tech providing a better refitting speed would be nice. It would also be nice if the costs weren't extremely high or sometimes higher than just building a ship outright.

A really nice use case would be like small naval powers or just powers with outdated slow capital ships being able to convert them to some somewhat useful carriers, without costing an arm and a leg.

 

[styroler]

One thing I want to see from Naval Warfare is more ways for smaller nations to compete locally in their home waters. A big problem with naval warfare as it is now is that it’s mainly oriented around big powers which start with massive navies. Nations with giant navies like Britain, the US, or Japan hardly have to compete with any nation achieving naval dominance other than with each other. To some extent this makes sense, these are the dominant naval powers of their day and they should get something for that. Domination of the high seas is completely reasonable for them. But this largely disincentivizes smaller nations from making from building more reasonably sized coastal navies because these will just get destroyed the second they face off against one of the Empires. But it’s one thing for the Empires to dominate the high seas vs just competing locally in the fringes of the Caribbean or the Baltic. Coastal waters should be more difficult for bigger fleets to operate in and dominate, but this is just not reflected well in hoi4.

Historically there were many nations in the world which did compete regionally in the naval sphere with more coastal based fleets. Most of the Scandinavian countries maintained coastal fleets, and it was more luck than anything else that the Germans managed to pull off Operation Weserubung without a hitch. South American nations participated in a naval arms race to dominate the costal waters of each other and South America more generally. Hoi4 does introduce some basic coastal fleet options with coastal ships and coastal fleet companies, but these are honestly of limited use due to the fact that most nations do not automatically have these available and there’s very little incentive to build these ships over their long range counterparts even if small and short range is your goal. I hope for some sort of rebalancing of this, making coastal fleets cheaper and maybe introducing some cheaper light ships like patrol boats to limit the need to build massive battle fleets just to protect your coast. I’m not expecting a country like Mexico or Romania to become a naval power, but it should at least be able to build something to hold its own in the Gulf of Mexico and the Black Sea.

How I’d actually achieve this is a little bit up in the air, but I do think there’s a few things which can be addressed. Adding some cheaper light ships like patrol boats to be an alternative for coastal fleets building whole naval destroyers and cruisers, adding some more advanced coastal vessel hulls for nations with the tech so that even if you are limited in range and speed your not stuck building in some outdated hull in 1944. Lowering the cost of these somewhat so nations with few dockyards can build a somewhat decent coastal fleet in a reasonable time. Also lowering the XP cost for designing a coastal ship since most small navy countries do not have enough XP to actually design their fleet in the first place. Making the coastal fleet company more widely available (this I think would be the easiest to implement, since it already exists, it just isn’t available to most countries meaning countries which would actually find it useful tend to not have it available and thus not used). Finally, rebalancing land based naval aircraft which are a little bit op right now and the biggest killer of a coastal fleet. Maybe even a whole coastal fleet doctrine would be worth it, since even trade indirection is not that useful if I’m for example Greece and I don’t intend to go very far from my shores.

I had one additional idea which I think might fix one of the core issues with Naval Warfare: Spotting. The issue with spotting is that current patrol mechanics make the system somewhat wonky and unintuitive. Your ships are functionally doing two missions at once: spotting and search and destroy. This is a core part of Naval Gameplay, but it’s often the system that usually causes the most losses for players and is among the more annoying parts of gameplay. When performing the spotting mission, ships are sailing around, trying to pick up traces of the enemy fleet group before locking on and engaging. The problem is unless your patrol groups are well armed, any engagement with them results in a larger battle, where whichever side gets their strike force or naval bombers up first usually wins. This leads to a lot of needless losses, which is why more experienced players have learned you can bypass the “engagement” part of the mission by simply setting your patrol groups to “do not engage” which results in them spotting only (this is even recommended in the wiki). The end result is a very gamey solution where players set one ship patrols on specially designed “spotting cruisers,” rather than use the mission as designed by creating proper patrol groups (the other problem being that spotting values are just too high for individual ships over whole fleets, making the single ship groups viable in the first place).

So my solution? Why not build this into the game by splitting the patrol mission in two: Search and destroy and patrol.

The new patrol missions are an assigned region based mission which use efficiency based on the total spotting value of the entire group. They spot slow, but with substantial boost from supporting radars and air missions (which boost efficiency in the regions they cover). This eliminates the need for single ship fleets, since now patrols can be assigned to multiple regions at once, and the combined value of all the ships improves the mission efficiency of all the ships assigned (they can still only spot one fleet at a time though, so you may still want multiple groups for an active region). Ships on this order no longer start engagements on their own, but rather wait for a strike fleet to arrive or naval bombers to hit before they engage (or never engage if on do not engage). Ships on this order are also really difficult to spot themselves (since they’re all spread out patrolling), making them really low risk to enemy bombers and patrols.

Search and Destroy is the old patrol mission, and it functions exactly the same as it does now. It is oriented around larger aggressive ship formations which are expected to be large enough to engage on their own or at least hold their own against enemy fleets until reinforcements arrive. They also spot the fastest since they’re operating in a single sea zone. This is better for highly contested regions where two large fleets are trying to provoke a battle (like the English Channel or the straights of Malaya). I envision you really only use this mission if you’re trying to set up some sort of Naval Blockade or No Approach Zone.

I would then add a third spotting option to convoy escort missions. The reason I think this is needed is because the mission has a big weakness right now: convoy escorts are sitting ducks. Currently, escort missions engage whenever a convoy fleet is attacked, which makes sense when facing enemy submarines but makes the fleet a sitting target to other potential dangers such as air strikes and ships based strike missions. On their own this is not a problem, they are after all on defense. The issue is that these fleets kind of get “ambushed” by these missions, being unable to call in defensive strike groups or other friendly ships until they are already engaged. Historically though, convoy escorts weren’t just passively waiting to be attacked, they were constantly sending out patrols and searching for dangers before they got attacked. Escort commanders were very proactive of identifying and alerting their fleets about if a danger was spotted, either bringing in friendly reinforcements before they’re attacked or directing combat fleets to destroy encountered enemies. Gameplay wise, convoy escort fleets would slowly spot enemy fleets operating in their assigned zones. They would not engage these fleets unless attacked, but they would call in strike fleets or naval bombers to do the dirty work. This would also ensure that if the convoy fleet is the intended target, friendly reinforcements are already in bound or on scene to defend them. Because spotting is not their primary mission, they would spot the slowest of the three patrol missions (though with a slight bonus to fleets targeting them).

The final suggestion I have is an improvement to Strike Force: being able to prioritize which spotted fleets get responded to first. Currently the ai makes this decision, and while sometimes it’s fine, other times you get two strike fleets respond to the same enemy fleet while another larger enemy fleet slips through or attacks your escorts. I envision a system where the player can prioritize which fleet gets responded to first (and by which strike fleet): so for example escort fleets get responded to first, a really high priority search and destroy group (say one which is blockading the enemy fleet in their port) is responded to second, and your patrol groups are responded to only when all other enemies have been eliminated.

By giving this level of control to fleets, engaging in comprehensive naval warfare can be easier and more fun.

One final naval feature I’ll throw in at the end for the aircraft designer: Flying Boat Modules give range bonuses that only apply when the plane is on air patrol missions (since the plane can land in the ocean to refuel or observe the enemy fleet before flying back to base).

 

[MR2]

"there is totally nothing hidden under that Hearts of Iron IV logo." said Obi-Wan to a few Stormtroopers...

Ok, this is the first Dev Corner that I've had a pretty good understanding of what you are trying to accomplish in several years. That said, I'm thrilled.

I expect Naval Basing and Supply will be the most difficult to balance, followed by Dominance. I wish you success there. Thank you.

 

[COMV99]

Came here to second the sentiment. The problem especially with the Panzerschiff is that the tech doesn't evolve, there is no Panzerschiff 2, 3, or 4 hull, so the original concept the Germans had (which was to have a lighter/faster hull with higher firepower, but lower armor) never goes anywhere. Already the 1936 cruiser hull offers better benefits at a lower price.

The game has battlecruisers. The window where you can differentiate large cruisers from other ships is very narrow, and wartime experience demonstrated they were a dead end. Up gun them and you get the Alaska class which are not remembered as effective warships.

I'd also like to use this opportunity to mention something with regards to range, since that now plays a bigger role. We currently can outfit modern carriers and battleships and subs with nuclear engines. That's great and I love it.

But you can't really benefit from their range, since the destroyers and cruisers are still limited, as they cannot have nuclear reactors.

The range of a naval task force is going to be dependent on it's supporting fleet. There simply haven't been nuclear task forces with infinite range. There could be some interaction with underway replenishment, reducing the number of ships required, though.

One thing I want to see from Naval Warfare is more ways for smaller nations to compete locally in their home waters. A big problem with naval warfare as it is now is that it’s mainly oriented around big powers which start with massive navies. Nations with giant navies like Britain, the US, or Japan hardly have to compete with any nation achieving naval dominance other than with each other. To some extent this makes sense, these are the dominant naval powers of their day and they should get something for that. Domination of the high seas is completely reasonable for them. But this largely disincentivizes smaller nations from making from building more reasonably sized coastal navies because these will just get destroyed the second they face off against one of the Empires. But it’s one thing for the Empires to dominate the high seas vs just competing locally in the fringes of the Caribbean or the Baltic. Coastal waters should be more difficult for bigger fleets to operate in and dominate, but this is just not reflected well in hoi4.

The big navies also had masses of smaller vessels like PT boats, corvettes and frigates. Letting smaller navies "compete" runs the risk of being very unintuitive and ahistorical. Either is forgivable, but not both at the same time. Sending the US fleet in and watching it unable to gain supremacy against a smaller Mexican force would be an excercise in frustration.

I’m not expecting a country like Mexico or Romania to become a naval power, but it should at least be able to build something to hold its own in the Gulf of Mexico and the Black Sea.

Archipelagos and fjords are better for a coastal navy, but even a shallow sea would be difficult to defend against a larger force. The best tool would be to reduce visibility, making the destruction of the fleet more difficult, but even then, the role the navy could play would be minor. The best case scenario to giving a relatively minor coastal navy enough supremacy to prevent naval landings, but there just isn't historical precedent, and having to find out that coastal ships are just ahistorically sneaky doesn't seem like it would leave major players with good inpressions.

Lowering the cost of these somewhat so nations with few dockyards can build a somewhat decent coastal fleet in a reasonable time. Also lowering the XP cost for designing a coastal ship since most small navy countries do not have enough XP to actually design their fleet in the first place. Making the coastal fleet company more widely available (this I think would be the easiest to implement, since it already exists, it just isn’t available to most countries meaning countries which would actually find it useful tend to not have it available and thus not used).

There already is the Jeune École Sprit of the Navy. It lowers Naval XP cost by 60%.

It would be easy enough to delete the coastal defense ship tech and just unlock them with the basic cruiser tech. You could do the same with the base destroyer tech and add a patrol boat hull. No reason to make it hard to build them.

Well with patrol boats, there are corvettes, frigates, and torpedo boats. They were also manufactured in large numbers by the Allies.

Black Ice has them, but I don't know how much the player base would like to see an extra ship class that's a poor mans destroyer, when there already is a coastal fleet designer.

Patrol Boats also hamper U-boat deployment. Even if they are coastal, they free up ships with more range to patrol other areas. Banning them from the US and UK could be possible(albiet totally ahistorical), but they could have access to allies that have them. They could also be limited to Axis/neutrals only, but that starts looking even more artificial.

The problem is unless your patrol groups are well armed, any engagement with them results in a larger battle, where whichever side gets their strike force or naval bombers up first usually wins. This leads to a lot of needless losses, which is why more experienced players have learned you can bypass the “engagement” part of the mission by simply setting your patrol groups to “do not engage” which results in them spotting only (this is even recommended in the wiki). The end result is a very gamey solution where players set one ship patrols on specially designed “spotting cruisers,”

How is this gamey? Having to interact with a game mechanic that you don't normally use? This is basic logic. If there is a risk to my scout fleets, I don't want them engaging the enemy. I want my destroyers shadowing the enemy fleet while remaining out of range. This is do not engage.

Gameplay wise, convoy escort fleets would slowly spot enemy fleets operating in their assigned zones. They would not engage these fleets unless attacked

This is actually a pretty cool idea. I would allow them to engage, just as long as they follow engagement rules. I'm not sure how well it would play with the current spotting/escort mechanics though.

One final naval feature I’ll throw in at the end for the aircraft designer: Flying Boat Modules give range bonuses that only apply when the plane is on air patrol missions (since the plane can land in the ocean to refuel or observe the enemy fleet before flying back to base).

Floatplanes didn't really refuel in the ocean. Mid ocean water was often too choppy. They could operate off of calmer coastal
waters, but this was more of being able to operate where there weren't runways.

 

[Ossiv]

Floatplanes didn't really refuel in the ocean. Mid ocean water was often too choppy. They could operate off of calmer coastal
waters, but this was more of being able to operate where there weren't runways.

The German diesel-engined flying boats did refuel in the middle of the Atlantic. They used the same fuel as U-boots.

The Japanese used floatplanes from coasts of small Pacific islands that did not have an airport. That could be reptesented in game by allowing seaplanes to use harbors, as they did IRL.

 

[styroler]

The game has battlecruisers. The window where you can differentiate large cruisers from other ships is very narrow, and wartime experience demonstrated they were a dead end. Up gun them and you get the Alaska class which are not remembered as effective warships.

The range of a naval task force is going to be dependent on it's supporting fleet. There simply haven't been nuclear task forces with infinite range. There could be some interaction with underway replenishment, reducing the number of ships required, though.


The big navies also had masses of smaller vessels like PT boats, corvettes and frigates. Letting smaller navies "compete" runs the risk of being very unintuitive and ahistorical. Either is forgivable, but not both at the same time. Sending the US fleet in and watching it unable to gain supremacy against a smaller Mexican force would be an excercise in frustration.


Archipelagos and fjords are better for a coastal navy, but even a shallow sea would be difficult to defend against a larger force. The best tool would be to reduce visibility, making the destruction of the fleet more difficult, but even then, the role the navy could play would be minor. The best case scenario to giving a relatively minor coastal navy enough supremacy to prevent naval landings, but there just isn't historical precedent, and having to find out that coastal ships are just ahistorically sneaky doesn't seem like it would leave major players with good inpressions.


There already is the Jeune École Sprit of the Navy. It lowers Naval XP cost by 60%.

Well with patrol boats, there are corvettes, frigates, and torpedo boats. They were also manufactured in large numbers by the Allies.

Black Ice has them, but I don't know how much the player base would like to see an extra ship class that's a poor mans destroyer, when there already is a coastal fleet designer.

Patrol Boats also hamper U-boat deployment. Even if they are coastal, they free up ships with more range to patrol other areas. Banning them from the US and UK could be possible(albiet totally ahistorical), but they could have access to allies that have them. They could also be limited to Axis/neutrals only, but that starts looking even more artificial.

How is this gamey? Having to interact with a game mechanic that you don't normally use? This is basic logic. If there is a risk to my scout fleets, I don't want them engaging the enemy. I want my destroyers shadowing the enemy fleet while remaining out of range. This is do not engage.


This is actually a pretty cool idea. I would allow them to engage, just as long as they follow engagement rules. I'm not sure how well it would play with the current spotting/escort mechanics though.

Floatplanes didn't really refuel in the ocean. Mid ocean water was often too choppy. They could operate off of calmer coastal
waters, but this was more of being able to operate where there weren't runways.

Hi I just wanted to address some of the points you made on some of my comments because some of them seem to be not considering the larger concept of the Naval Rework.

1. Naval Supremacy - as per the main Dev Post for this Thread “Dev Corner | Hydrodynamics” Naval supremacy is a mechanic which is going away and being replaced by Naval Dominance. As per the Devs Post, ships sitting in port on Port Strike will not be a source of providing Naval Dominance, only actively sending your ships out on Patrol and such would, so I don’t see any way that a coastal navy like Mexico could prevent a big navy nation like the USA from achieving Naval Dominance in a Zone without Combat ensuing unless the U.S. refuses to send their ships out to fight (which in that case it is entirely fair for Mexico to maintain Naval Dominance because there ships are there and the USA’s ships aren’t). This change is to prevent nations from arbitrarily maintaining Naval Supremecy in regions they aren’t active in because they have a fleet in port on Strike Fleet somewhere. This also eliminates the “bathtub” navy strategy so no more cheeky bypasses to avoid naval combat.

2. In terms of making Coastal Fleets more competitive, I don’t see how creating a Coastal Fleet would be OP. A Coastal Fleet would just be a cheaper alternative which sacrifices long range and speed for combat abilities and cheaper production cost. A country like Mexico shouldn’t have to build a SH battleship and cruisers to defend the gulf. Of course larger nations like the U.S. and the UK had smaller naval vessels too, but that’s because they were so large that they could afford to set up Coastal Fleets in other regions like the Mediterranean or the East Coast of America. They were still functionally the same core Coastal Defense fleets built by smaller nations, they were just used as a sort of local coast guard while their long range fleets were on the high seas. Coastal fleets absolutely did exist in the time of WW2. Examples include the Norwegian Coastal Fleet, which was the main threat to the Germans during Operation Weserübung. While it did fail in this instance, this was more because the Germans got lucky and were able to bypass the fleet undetected. The German High Command at least was convinced that had they actually been spotted by the Norwegian Coastal defenses, their invasion force would have been destroyed. The British considered it such a threat that they also maintained their own defense plan to destroy the fleet should war break out. And Norway was hardly the only example of a nation with a large coastal fleet, as many South American nations, other Baltic countries, and Middle Eastern countries maintained large coastal navies of their own.

Even the true naval powers like the USA and the UK maintained large coastal fleets (like the Coast Guard and the Home Fleet) which were separate from their own fleets, which should absolutely be modeled as well. The US Coast Guard was the core of its eastern seaboard defense, while the British maintained large Coastal Fleets in their Home Ports. Not to mention their colonial empire mostly relied on coastal fleets too, such as the Coastal Fleet of Malta and the Australian and New Zealand Navies (which were mostly frigates and PT Boats). Large ships like destroyers and cruisers were almost exclusively reserved for deep sea operations.

Coastal fleets should be a viable strategy in Hoi4, that shouldn’t be relegated to a single outdated cruiser model (which is more expensive than an actual cruiser). And more importantly coastal navies should get more advanced models too. Costal fleets didn’t diminish over time as the war waged on, they increased as ship killing weaponry became smaller and easier to put on a small ship. In the WW2 era, most Coastal Defense ships were converted older Cruisers which when they reached the end of their life as cruisers (because they were too slow) were upgraded into light battle ships. Additionally, older smaller classes of ships like Corvettes and Frigates, which had gone out of disuse in the late 19th century, were reintroduced to become a new generation of Littoral Combat Ships. The fact that small states could build small vessels which could take on a battle ship is what caused big navies to stop building large expensive capital ships and instead switch to inexpensive light escorts and carriers to replace them. So progressively more powerful costal fleets and smaller vessels would be more, not less historically accurate.

Mechanically the disadvantages of a coastal fleet would still be apparent: they would still be overall weaker than a full navy, they would have low range (so no Mexican battles of the Atlantic), and of course nations like USA and the UK already start off with huge production advantages which would make them navally dominant throughout the game. The point here is not to make it so smaller nations outcompete larger nations. The point is to make it so smaller nations have a reason to compete at all navy wise (which they did in real life) so that players don’t just ignore the navy unless your playing a USA, ENG, or JAP game (remember, the devs are asking for suggestions because actually want players to use the navy system every game, they don’t want it to be unused in 90% of games).

3.

How is this gamey? Having to interact with a game mechanic that you don't normally use? This is basic logic. If there is a risk to my scout fleets, I don't want them engaging the enemy. I want my destroyers shadowing the enemy fleet while remaining out of range. This is do not engage.

It’s gamey because it promotes the use of single ship all float plane “spotting cruisers” which a completely a-historical strategy which completely bypasses core mechanics. Real life naval patrols were not isolated spy ships sailing on their own around the Atlantic Ocean. It’s clear that the devs don’t want this, or they wouldn’t make the new Naval Dominance Mechanic tied to patrols. Also battle wise: single Naval Skirmishes were not a 1 way suicide mission where a bunch of patrol ships located each other and called in their whole fleet to wipe each other out on a daily basis. Large naval engagements were usually months apart. Naval patrols were there to locate the big enemy fleets, not start a fight with every lone enemy patrol. There was a range of missions and aggression happening across the oceans of WW2. In some places like Jutland and the English Channel, there was an active and constant Naval blockade by the British navy trying to catch any German ship slipping through to fight in the battle of the Atlantic. In other parts of the planet like the Pacific, the U.S. navy was just trying to find the Japanese 1st Air Fleet and vice versa.

My suggestion is just split these missions into two separate missions so that both strategies can be perused properly and there isn’t one obviously cheeky way to get around it. I can think of no other area of Hoi4 in which there is such a clearly “correct” way to play the game than single ship naval patrols. It’s a strategy I hate using, but I’m forced to use because it’s just too OP compared to any other fleet design. The Devs want to sit down and fix naval warfare so it’s simple and clear to understand. If the devs want players to build proper navies to fight proper naval battles, they need to adjust the system which initiates the battles in the first place which is spotting. I and as for it being an assigned region mission, I understand why initially they want the mission to be 1 fleet per zone instead of across an entire sea zone, but due to the jenky nature of how patrol ships assigned to more regions then they can handle (which causes them to rotate in each zone part time which is basically never worth it) and the importance of having spotting at all in every sea zone rather than the effectiveness of your spotting fleets as a whole, it’s better to make this a assigned region mission than a sea zone region. Then they can lower the spotting speed of individual ships to make having high spotting and using radar and air naval patrols more important than it is now.

4.

This is actually a pretty cool idea. I would allow them to engage, just as long as they follow engagement rules. I'm not sure how well it would play with the current spotting/escort mechanics though.

The reason I suggested this change is really to equalize the field for Escorts. Right now escorts are always at a disadvantage in big battles, because they can be spotted and have a strike fleet move to engage them, but they don’t get to call their own strike fleet in as reinforcements until the battle has started. This means that the battle could already be over by the time the defensive strike fleet arrives. Under the new system, they would passively spot incoming strike fleets targeting them (and any other fleets operating in their assigned areas). This would mean that their own strike fleets would already be inbound or can even intercept incoming strike fleets before they reach them.

As for engaging other ships aggressively though, I don’t see what the point of this would be. Convoy escorts are there to defend convoys, not engage the enemy. You wouldn’t want your convoy escorts to abandon their escort duties and leave your convoys vulnerable to submarine attacks. If you really wanted that, you could always just switch them to patrol (or the Search and Destroy mission I suggested). I don’t think each mission should be combined into one, I want each mission to be separated into clearly defined separate missions. I just felt that convoy escorts shouldn’t always have to be “ambushed” by larger enemy fleets, and could instead could passively spot and call in reinforcements when they notice they’re in danger.

 

[Metz]

Could you let the player upgrade ships that are still being constructed, it would help naval gameplay be less micro intensive.

 

[vermicious knid]

The game has battlecruisers. The window where you can differentiate large cruisers from other ships is very narrow, and wartime experience demonstrated they were a dead end. Up gun them and you get the Alaska class which are not remembered as effective warships.

Not incorrect, but the Alaska class being ineffective IRL isn't a good argument to exclude it or ships like it. Some players (me included) like to try strategies that were abandoned or didn't work out in the actual war.

Heck, I want them to figure out a way to represent crazy crap like the Akron and I-400.

 

[Iva N]

Paradox Completed the "Regain Global Prestige" mission
Oh my god navy is finally fun and makes sense

 

[Zenbeast]

Heck, I want them to figure out a way to represent crazy crap like the Akron and I-400.

Special projects has really blown this out of the water. Paradox made mothership aircraft, ice aircraft carriers, helicopters, and Landcruisers usable in HOI4. Where are my submarine carriers? Incendiary balloons sent across the Pacific? Bat bombs? Etc.