• We have updated our Community Code of Conduct. Please read through the new rules for the forum that are an integral part of Paradox Interactive’s User Agreement.

HOI4 Dev Diary - Naval Changes #1 - Overview

Happy wednesday! Today is going to be the first of a few diaries covering changes to naval combat and naval gameplay. The idea of this diary is to give an overview of the different changes, and then future diaries will dig into more details. We are effectively redoing most of the naval aspects of the game which is a herculean task. This means a lot of stuff might still end up seeing changes and are work in progress. My hope is that this will give you a good picture of what we are trying to accomplish. Expect that each of these sections below is probably gonna get its own diary.

Screenshot_1.jpg



Task Forces & Missions
First up let's talk about how we are changing the management of fleets. Fleets are now made up of task forces. The fleet, like before, is led by an Admiral. The fleet has one area of responsibility and each task force can have individual missions. Some of those missions are designed to cooperate as well between them. Each task force can have various settings to control its behavior (like if you want them to split off ships to repair, or their risk vs aggression stance etc). Fleets, like Army Groups on land are visible and organized into theaters. In this case naval theaters.
theater.jpg


These also has a separate section for reserves at the bottom so you have an easier time managing where newly built ships go, and which replacement ships go to where.

Your navy is likely to be the most fuel thirsty thing you have so it's important to manage things in an economic way. Putting all your battleships to patrol the Iberian Coast is not something that will make fuel-economic-sense anymore (hey I invented a word!). To deal with this kind of thing we have removed the old Search and Destroy mission and have a new one called Strike Force.

A strike force flagged task force job is to sit and wait in port where it won’t consume fuel, and to go and assist trouble your more nimble and cheap patrols locate. Search and Destroy also would not make sense to keep around anymore, as in most case the concept of the fleet spreading out is gone. We wanted your carefully assembled task forces to join as one unit and to be in one location always, rather than spread over the map in an abstract way. More details on this in a dedicated diary, but let's get back to how patrol missions can work together with strike forces when we get to the next topic: spotting!


Spotting
Before Man the Guns the way ships would engage would essentially be based on a dice roll, meaning as long as you were in a zone, no matter how hard to find you were, combat would always ensue. We also struggled with every combat essentially sucking in every ship into a giant doomstack battle. This was also made worse because combats in HOI take a lot longer than in reality, yet movement on the map is similar, making reinforcement much too easy.

To deal with this we have split up combat into essentially 2 parts. Spotting, and actual combat. For a combat to happen you must first spot the enemy fully. Below is a picture showing a patrol force of destroyers closing in on fully spotting a German cruiser group, with a strike force assigned to support. It goes pretty fast because I have built a decent radar net to support my ships.
spot.jpg



When you get a target to 100% spotting, which is the bar you can see on the left of the red task force, combat can start. I say can, because it depends on your task force settings for how aggressive you want them to be. In this case because it has a strike force to help out the British ships will wait a bit for their strike force to get there (the Germans could engage if they were aggressive and the patrol force weak enough to be taken out fast). Once it’s there the battle will start.

spot_2.jpg



If the battle would have been a pushover for the patrol group (say a lone destroyer) they would have just dealt with it without calling in the strike force and burned all that fuel.

As for piling in more stuff into a battle to escalate it into the doomstacks of old, the solution is that task forces given the order to join will be slowed based on org level and distance (manual orders also reduce this), meaning there will be a significant delay as they get there and can actually get on with firing. Sort of like a coordination penalty. With battles shorter this means you could clear the field and get away before things escalate.

Combat
When it comes to combat we are aiming for less decisive battles, where composition matters more, and that are easier to understand, and where its easier to disengage when stuff goes badly. A tall order! Currently this is a bit too pink and coder-arty for a sneak peek, so you are going to have to be patient (something I know you guys are amazing at, so this should be no biggie ;))

Terrain (recap)
Different parts of the oceans will favor different kinds of task force compositions, combined with admiral traits etc this will allow for some home advantage and variation in “best fleet”. Check out last weeks diary for more details.
upload_2018-10-17_17-7-56.png


Repair/Production (recap)
The changes outlined in repair and production is an important part of making this all feel ok. If we want less decisive battles where the enemy is pushed back at sea, then repairing needed to cost something other than simply time. Repair now takes up dockyards and production of individual big capital ships is slower (although the speed to produce several in parallel is unchanged). Read more details in the previous diary here if you missed it.
upload_2018-10-17_17-7-14.png


Ship Design
We will also allow you to design and refit ships allowing you more options for adapting to changing circumstances and to get the most out of your navy and technological advancement.

Hopefully all this gave you an overview on what we are trying to achieve in Man the Guns and 1.6 Ironclad when it comes to the naval game. Look forward to more detail in future diaries (although we are likely to sprinkle in some other topics in between as well, like our unannounced final focus tree). See you all next week!

Rejected Titles:
  • Nice boat.
  • Ship Spotting - Choose the navy. Choose a big ass ship. Choose a zone.
  • The wargame version of the DM going "roll a perception check"
  • "These are actually the boats you are looking for"
  • "Remember men, the enemy battlefleet is more afraid of you than you are of them"
  • "I see you have spotted a ship. I am a bit of a ship spotter myself"
 
Last edited:
First up let's talk about how we are changing the management of fleets.

Included in this is going to be "managing fleets is no longer a total pain in the rear", right? Because none of this is going to matter if moving, splitting, merging, and managing fleets is as painful as it is now. A way to tell the game that what I want is X destroyers and Y cruisers in zones A and B without having to go in and manually select each individual ship would be lovely (and so on and so forth for the new task forces, etc - as long as I can say what I want relatively easily, then I'm all ears for what you have to show me). Maybe recycle the "priority" mechanic from land so that on a broad basis if I want newer ships to go in one fleet, I can do that, and the lower priority zones get the older ships, but nothing more specific than that.

If some users here demand that you be able to pick which experienced ship goes where and the minutiae of all that (which I assume they will), leave it in as an option I guess, but not mandatory or even default. I just want to not waste ten minutes each time I feel like I need to put a fleet somewhere, or else give up and doomstack everything once again.
 
Great overview of what's ahead, Podcat. I dearly hope that's a transport icon right next to the minesweeper mission. It would be great to assign fleets to specifically escort your amphibious forces, rather than the current method of needed one group on Escort and the other anchored offshore for bombardment. So many of those critical naval battles were the direct result of amphibious operations.

In terms of naval production, have you guys considered a minimum number of dockyards per state or naval base levels as a prerequisite to building capital ships? It would require the player to commit to a deployment port in the production queue, but could be an alternative or supplement to the 5-crane limit for individual vessels.
 
So nothing fixed then?

Endless naval battles that never end still in? How bout the 'stuck in combat when attempting to disengage' bug? The 'sit there in combat refusing to engage' bug? The 'float around and refuse to fire bug'? How bout a way to manage supply/convoys? Naval aircraft still decimated by land based aircraft? Still no counter to anti-naval aircraft?

No? Nothing?

2 years in we still have day 1 bugs... but hey we get a new icon or two and now fleets will sit in their ports more....!??

Talking about the future doesn't mean nothing is fixed (although the naval aircraft decimated by land-based aircraft was confirmed fixed by Podcat in this thread). Indeed, I'd expect a rework of many systems to fix many bugs (or at least make them obsolete - ie, the system will mean that the bug is no longer a thing, even if the bug isn't 'fixed' specifically. As the devs have said many times, one DD isn't everything they're doing, and in this case it was clearly labelled as a high-level overview (exactly the kind of DD one wouldn't expect specific bugs to be referenced in).

That doesn't mean we shouldn't ask for bugs to be fixed (we should!) but it's probably best not to jump to conclusions, the evidence for which is not yet available.
 
So nothing fixed then?

Endless naval battles that never end still in? How bout the 'stuck in combat when attempting to disengage' bug? The 'sit there in combat refusing to engage' bug? The 'float around and refuse to fire bug'? How bout a way to manage supply/convoys? Naval aircraft still decimated by land based aircraft? Still no counter to anti-naval aircraft?

No? Nothing?

2 years in we still have day 1 bugs... but hey we get a new icon or two and now fleets will sit in their ports more....!??

Most of this has been briefly addressed in the dev diary, for details you have to wait on more dev diaries:
To deal with this we have split up combat into essentially 2 parts. Spotting, and actual combat. For a combat to happen you must first spot the enemy fully. Below is a picture showing a patrol force of destroyers closing in on fully spotting a German cruiser group, with a strike force assigned to support. It goes pretty fast because I have built a decent radar net to support my ships.

When you get a target to 100% spotting, which is the bar you can see on the left of the red task force, combat can start. I say can, because it depends on your task force settings for how aggressive you want them to be. In this case because it has a strike force to help out the British ships will wait a bit for their strike force to get there (the Germans could engage if they were aggressive and the patrol force weak enough to be taken out fast). Once it’s there the battle will start.

If the battle would have been a pushover for the patrol group (say a lone destroyer) they would have just dealt with it without calling in the strike force and burned all that fuel.

As for piling in more stuff into a battle to escalate it into the doomstacks of old, the solution is that task forces given the order to join will be slowed based on org level and distance (manual orders also reduce this), meaning there will be a significant delay as they get there and can actually get on with firing. Sort of like a coordination penalty. With battles shorter this means you could clear the field and get away before things escalate.

When it comes to combat we are aiming for less decisive battles, where composition matters more, and that are easier to understand, and where its easier to disengage when stuff goes badly. A tall order! Currently this is a bit too pink and coder-arty for a sneak peek, so you are going to have to be patient (something I know you guys are amazing at, so this should be no biggie ;))

Do people even read nowadays, or do they have to get everything spelled out for them?
 
I like the way this is shaping up, would there be any plans to have spotting aircraft added as this hugely increase the ability of a cruised patrol to locate the enemy at least with suitable weather. My expectation is that a destroyer force would shadow by day and attack at night when facing a heavier opponent like a capital ship. Will carrier based strike forces stand off and just use their air power while the rest of the task force protect them?
 
Is any change happening to escort mission, I'm not sure how it currently works but I not convinced that it always gives much protection to a convoy. Looking at some of the convoy actions in the Arctic the escort seems to have 3 parts an integrated escort of destroyers and lighter ships that are there to perform AAW and ASW, a covering force which is normal a cruiser based squadron which is looking for threats far enough away from the convoy that it has chance to warn the convoy to change course and delay approach of the enemy while the 3rd force a heavy unit distant cover closes the gap. The heavy force puts itself far enough away to be a less risk of air attack. This seems to be how the Scharnhorst met HMS Duke of York at least. And PQ17 had a similar structure until (wrongly) ordered to scatter
 
Seems like there is a new mission for fleets/taskforces:
Desktop 18-10-2018 12-03-03-248.png

The one on the right next to the repair button might have something to do with naval invasions or troop convoys.
All the others seem self explanatory.

Also some nice tidbits here:
Desktop 18-10-2018 12-03-18-167.png

Seems like we can set taskforces to sortie during day/night as needed as well as the formation perhaps?
 
Seems like there is a new mission for fleets/taskforces:
View attachment 411565
The one on the right next to the repair button might have something to do with naval invasions or troop convoys.
If I were a betting man I'd say it's transporting troops with navy ships, possibly to be able to send troops through sea zones too dangerous for convoys or to avoid lack of convoys perventipr all troop movement. Targeting convoys can really cripple the USA and Japan if they can't move troops to combat zones.
 
many mods adds naval patrol planes as low efectivity naval bomber, long range capacity. I think is a good idea get this into vanilla been diferent fron common naval bomber but working with spotting capacity. Planes spotting capacity is vital for cv planes and also for a plane as i mentioned.
 
I dont have data in front of me, but there weren't THAT many naval engagements in WW2--especially compared to Air Force or Land Engagements. Especially when you discount engagements centering around convoys.

The volume you see in current HOI is absurd. Further, the delicate balance between building new ships, sailing your current ones, and repairing damaged ones...IS the strategic naval game.

Coastal land useful and readily available for naval ship construction, refitting and repair is quite limited, even in island nations. Managing those docks is crucial--or should be--to success. And yes, when a ship is damaged, it should take months, nearly a year to repair. The dynamic between Germany and UK was just that, Germany knocked a number of British ships out, but suffered losses herself. The UK either had ships in reserve or was able to build new ones. The Germans after exhausting themselves taking out a bunch of Brits had to go repair for months, allowing the Brits to get right back into the sea and keep the German surface fleet generally at harbor for the remainder of the war.
While I largely do agree with the statements above, You got to factor in the ''Fun'' factor of a game. Maybe adding sliders can help adjust difficulty and realism? That way if people don't enjoy parts of how the game currently plays itself, people can adjust it to their own liking, instead of waiting a couple months for an update. Really like the sliders that are going to be added in the new update for how a country is going to play (which route are they going ot take).

F.e.
A totally different game, EA UFC 3, tries to be as realistic as possible, but the ''Fun'' factor has been the one thing that hasn't grown as the realism value has.
 
Last edited:
While I largely do agree with the statements above, You got to factor in the ''Fun'' factor of a game. Maybe adding sliders can help adjust difficulty and realism?

Firstly I have to recognize everyone has a different definition of fun. I enjoy playing Hearts of Spreadsheet 4, most of my friends think this game is for Rainmen.

To me, what makes this game exciting, is the chance to sit in the shoes of Ike/FDR/Lemay/Halsey all at once and make decisions. I want the scenario to parallel history as close as possible (correct geography, resource distribution, relative industrial capacity, recruitable population, etc.) so that when I diverge from what the real guys did, I have realistic responses to my actions. I love alt history, it isn’t about rail reading myself to the latest edition of Huffington Mifflim WW2 textbook.

So yeah, I suppose I want my developers to be as faithful to accuracy as possible, as that brings out the fun for me.

Some people like forming quick empires and romping across the asiatic plains, or jungles of SA, or whatever in a more RTS speed 4 type game. Which is fine, and if the player base generally plays like that—the devs absolutely need to make systems (sliders) that would scratch that itch.

For me though, unyielding realism only brings out more alt history possibilities.
 
Most of this has been briefly addressed in the dev diary, for details you have to wait on more dev diaries:
...
Do people even read nowadays, or do they have to get everything spelled out for them?

Nothing in the OP or your post addresses the bugs/issues I brought up. Splitting combat into two parts doesn't mean we won't have endless naval battles that never happen, entire stacks sitting there listlessly in the battle screen refusing to engage or retreat. Having more complex reinforcement rules doesn't fix ships refusing to fire.

As I read it, they're basically charging for a bug fix. Naval combat was a feature that was promised as part of the base game. The fact that this is 2y after the fact, alone, should have people up in arms. Now they have the audactity to charge for it?
 
Firstly this is so much better than the stream, some exciting looking changes.
How will you guys balance the difference in combat between the pacific and European theaters? Most of the time in port is pretty bang on for UK, France, Germany, Italy etc but in the Pacific it was a different story because of the difference in distance. Carrier and battle groups were actively searching for each other not sitting in port all the time.

Reconnaissance was mostly carried out by long range scout aircraft and flying boats specifically for this task, planes are much more efficient and effective than ships for scouting and much more expendable.

I love the idea of making capital ships more scarce and valuable, as well as being able to deign a ship and most importantly refit old ships as the first thing I do at the beginning of any game is group all SS1s and sometimes DD1s and disband them.

IRL aircraft were OP and that doesn't make for a fun game but it would be nice if that was represented more than it is currently, I don't mean kamikazes of course that needs fixing. Where the enemy has air superiority it is madness to have ships there as the risk to them is too great. Filling the Mediterranean with naval bombers as Italy and sinking the occasional DD and just doing chip damage to enemy shipping doesn't feel good and it's far from accurate.

DETECTION & AIR POWER were the most important elements of naval combat especially in the pacific, I'm happy that one of those is being worked on and it would be great if the other was looked into as well.
 
As I read it, they're basically charging for a bug fix. Naval combat was a feature that was promised as part of the base game. The fact that this is 2y after the fact, alone, should have people up in arms. Now they have the audactity to charge for it?

Paradox stopped charging for bug fixes when they started using their new DLC model. Changes to core game mechanics or bugfixes is going to be free in patch 1.6 even if you don't pay to buy the DLC. The DLC content usually is new stuff added, things like new National Focus trees and Amphibious assault vehicles for example.