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Archangel85

Content Design, HoI4 [Retired]
Paradox Staff
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Jan 27, 2005
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Hello, and welcome back for the first in a series of dev diaries that will showcase the changes to the naval system beyond just building and designing new ships (aka the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Game Mode).

Today we will look at new mission types and changes to the naval interface. As we are still in development, you may see some stuff that is not strictly speaking finished (no matter how much Dan wants the hot pink coder art to go into the final build!)

As part of the rework, we have changed the Patrol as well as the Search & Destroy mission. While patrol still does mostly the same thing, Search and Destroy is gone and has been replaced with Strike Force. In the old system, the main difference between the missions was how many ships you had at the start of the battle.

Screenshot from 2018-11-21 14-58-58.png


Now that is gone, and the primary difference is that Patrol sends the ships out to, well, patrol, while Strike Force makes the ships sit in harbor until a patrol has found an enemy. This is particularly useful if you want your fuel-hungry battleships to remain in port and not use up your precious fuel until you know there is actually something out there to sink.

Finding the enemy is the main purpose of the Patrol order, so you’ll want your ships with good surface detection values to make up the bulk of your patrols - particularly destroyers and cruisers, ideally equipped with Radar and/or floatplanes. If there is an enemy in a zone you patrol, you’ll gain spotting on them, which essentially goes from “there is something out there” to “It’s the Bismarck and Prinz Eugen!” (at this point HMS Hood sorties to destroy them, in an easy and painless victory for the Royal Navy). Weather, terrain and the amount of ships committed all affect how fast you gain spotting. If you time it right, your big ships might be able to break out into the Atlantic before the enemy knows they are there. Depending on your engagement level and enemy strength, your patrol group might just decide to deal with the enemy directly, without even calling in the big guns.

image (4).png


As we mentioned before, your fleet is now made up from several task forces, each of which can have its own mission. Fleets are organized in Naval Theaters. While you can assign any number of sea zones to a fleet, a task force can only ever be in one place (with a few exceptions), so in order to cover all the zones, you should aim to have at least as many task forces as you have zones assigned. However, a single Strike Force can support several patrol task forces except that it can only support one combat at a time, so your poor little patrol force may find itself severely outgunned because your main force is off helping another patrol.

germany icons.jpg

(Art is not quite completely totally absolutely final on this one)

Every fleet can be led by an Admiral, and can only control a certain number of task forces. Since every task force usually only covers a single zone, you’ll want to make sure you have different fleets covering different parts of the globe. Particularly as a raider you will also want to cover a larger area to force the enemy to spread out more.

bottom admirals.jpg


You can customize your fleets and task forces with insignias and colors to keep track of them, much like with armies:

customize.jpg


Convoy Raiding still works much as you are used to. However, we have changed the convoy raiding impact to be a weekly tick rather than a flat modifier, so sinking convoys will bit by bit reduce war support for the country that loses them. More info on this comes in a future dev diary dedicated to raiding and subs.

Convoy escort task forces can be assigned to cover several zones and will try to defend any convoy in them. If you are too spread out and subs catch the convoys, few if any escorts will be available to defend it.

escort.jpg


Beyond that, we have added Invasion Support. A task force set to Invasion Support will defend transports in the area and remain off the beaches to provide naval gunfire support - ideal for your old battleships that just don’t cut it anymore against more modern opposition.

invasion support.jpg



In addition, mine warfare is conducted by mine laying and mine sweeping missions (although mine sweepers also provide a passive bonus to moving through minefields so you might want to add them to your other task forces as well), and naval exercises give ships experience as well as provide Naval Experience to design new ships with - at the cost of fuel.

Newly built ships are automatically added to a Reserve Fleet, which exists on the theater level. Ships in that fleet reinforce other task forces in the same theater. You can set up Task Force templates that the game will try to create from the available ships in the reserves, and will try to keep up to strength as best it can. If you don’t want to reinforce a unit because, say, it is the US Asiatic Fleet and the Japanese have just declared war, you can disable automatic reinforcements for each individual task force.

If you don’t want to micro-manage your task forces to this degree, we have added an auto-balance function that splits your existing task forces into several, trying to maintain a strike force and one or more patrol task forces.

That is all for today. Next week we will focus on a different part of the naval rework. Don’t forget to tune in for the stream at 1600 hours CET, where we continue with Mexico for another week.

Rejected Titles:


It has been 0 days since someone made fun of the HMS Hood

Reserve your fleet today

Strike Forces are very usefuel

USA naval organize start: now 100% less ragequit
 
Can a TF on patrol track more than one enemy fleet at once? If the enemy has only one fleet on patrol, can I send out a sacrificial TF first to be spotted and then push my raiding TF through unmolested?

When it comes to invasions/transports it does that, but not for other task forces. it might be something that changes tho

Looks awesome! Is there a setting to put strike forces on to prevent them from attacking if they have to many damaged ships or haven’t been replaced up to strength?
oh yeah, there are aggression settings that control that stuff. there is also a separate setting for when to go and repair.
 
Can you add this "choose insignia" logic for Task Forces also for choosing a new profile for ships (techs) in the ship customizer for modders? :)

Would be awsome!!!
Thanx
you mean like this?
upload_2018-11-21_16-35-47.png

sinec last DD we added the ability to change tech icons etc
 
The UK actually has a fleet called the Reserve Fleet based at Portsmouth. It'll be interesting to see whether it's possible these ships can actually be put into the actual in-game reserve fleet mechanism instead.
yeah, we havent yet changed the history setup for that, so I am not sure if they can be on start. otherwise I think a rename is in order
 
Nice additions. As you mentioned shore bombardement will destroyers be able to do this aswell? During WW2 destroyers were much more effective to give beach parties and land forces fire support due to them having better response time and streamlined communications with land forces than battleships (which could only provide support when it was too late) and a e.g the US destroyer Aulick had 5 127mm cannons, more than enough to give land based forces a good pounding.

Will escorts be able to provide fire support (which they did IRL) or is this still only for capital ships?

For gameplay reasons (range is quite long after all) only ships with heavy guns can do bombardment (and ships with heavy guns automatically classify as capital ships. the smallest being a heavy crusier)

What about naval routes?

Is it possible change convoy routes? Like re-routing UK convoys to avoid the Med Sea? (For Malta there should be an emergency supply order. Think of Tokyo Express).

Any chance that those more ... exotic routings are changed? Like UK - Gibraltar via Western Med, or USA - PHIL via Japan?

check this diary out that covers that https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/index.php?threads/hoi4-dev-diary-naval-access.1114924/

What happens if you have two strike forces in one port? Will they both sortie to help the same patrolling task force, or might one hang back to support another patrol?

It will only send both if it evaluates it as necessary based on its aggression settings. since overkill costs more fuel, and the second one can come in handy if something else happens at the same time.

Good DD, actually looking forward to this DLC.

Maybe this has already been covered, but will there be a more extensive 'ship history' window then just a body count? ie. When a specific ship was constructed, of what class/subclass, maybe battles it fought in, when it was refit and how (to what template) ect., possibly even some of the critical damage it's taken and when?. I think it'd be pretty interesting and actually make them feel a bit more real.
not planned, but I like your idea. Maybe one day :)
 
This looks great. One question though: What is to stop me from simply amassing all my fleets in one place? I mean we can all think of the logistics and fuel required to send out the entire Royal Navy into the eastern North Sea but let's just take that as an example. What's to stop us from just sending all the task forces in the same place?

But as I said, I really like the stuff you're showing here!
- Fuel cost
- Then they arent somewhere else
- The bigger the enemy is the easier it is to avoid for a smaller enemy
- Reinforcing with more forces after the initial engagement comes with limitations, especially if given with manual overrides to try and doomstack as it gets harder to join
- combat wise there are also advantages to smaller fleets

see next 2 diaries for details on some of those points