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HOI4 Dev Diary - Naval Terrain

Today we are going to talk about Naval Terrain and start talking about some of the core changes to the naval game.

We felt that we wanted to make where you fight more important, and where possible give advantages to people fighting in home waters. The sea in HOI4 has previously generally been either “ocean” or “ocean in range of enemy land based aircraft”, and otherwise mattered little. That’s about to change!

To do this we are introducing several terrain types for seas. These impact what ships work best there, how mines function as well as some other stuff. In total seas are divided into 4 types:
ocean.jpg

Regular Ocean has no special effects, so its similar to plains on land.

Screenshot_4.jpg

Fjords & Archipelagos come with some hefty penalties to big ships, but make it easier to hide (all numbers still quite work in progress btw!)

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Deep Oceans on the other hand are not good for light ships. They are also not good place to mine due to their depth and vastness. Subs like this area (mid atlantic gap = bae) because it is also easier to hide here.

Screenshot_5.jpg

Shallow seas are a bit harder to maneuver well in, and not a great place for submarines.

There is also some possible modifiers on them:

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Arctic Water is a general bad area to operate in, wearing your ships down and causing potential accidents. It also increases casualties if ships sink for any reason. This modifier works much like Extreme Cold on land so it depends on the time of year and temperature.

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Some places in the world have quite a lot of sharks and there are a lot of stories of heavy casualties after the sinking of ships due to sharks. The USS Indianapolis is a famous example where due to several reasons, sharks among those, something like 75% of the crew were lost. It is honestly mostly a cool flavor thing though we wanted to have in ;)

Your performance in these are also affected by Admiral Traits. As we have shown a bit before your Admirals can now gain traits for different terrain types.

Screenshot_2.jpg

  • Cold Water Expert reduces the impact of arctic waters
  • Inshore Fighter gives combat bonuses and speed when operating in Fjords and Archipelagos
  • Blue Water Expert gives combat bonuses and speed when operating in deep oceans
  • Green Water Expert gives combat bonuses and speed when operating in shallow seas
You might have noticed some strange colors in the screenshots above. We are adding some more mapmodes, but it’s mostly all pink and full of coder art at the moment, so you are going to have to wait a bit more to see all those. I am pointing it out because I need to show the terrain mapmode a bit to more easily show off the naval terrain across the world
Screenshot_8.jpg


Around the Dutch East Indies several of the terrain types are visible (the colors on land in this mapmode are still in need of some tweaking btw). The brightest there is archipelagos with the other shades of blue being shallow seas and regular ocean and the darker areas is deep oceans.

This is what the Atlantic and Europe looks like:
Screenshot_9.jpg


Notice the deep ocean in the Atlantic and the fjords around scandinavia.


That’s it for this today, next week we are going to start going over some of the more core naval changes. Seeya then!

Rejected Titles:
  • Naval “terrain” is an oxymoron, like “Military Intelligence”
  • SHARKS
  • Fjords, or how to make Scandinavia relevant this DLC
  • Not from the creators of Sharknado, comes SharkBlizzard
  • Podcat read a book about how horrible it was being on a destroyer in the arctic
 
Just a note on the Stream. Most of the big cities like chicago and Detroit would support Roosevelt and some of down state Illinois would have supported Alf. That is also historical. So, large cities would be with Roosevelt, some smaller cities would be with Landon. But what flipped the election in favor of the Democrats was electrification of the rural areas. Much of what is considered conservative rural areas today voted Democratic because they got electricity. With that in mind, try to get a revolution going in the time frame.
 
I do not think that "shark infested water" is a "cool flavor". Instead statements like this cause unwillingness in people to help protect sharks.
No, sharks did not cause USS Indianapolis to have a lot of casualties. The total fatal shark attacks from 1958–2018 is 439.
 
Im not sure if im pining for the fjords or not. I mean for example the Baltic Sea shouldn't be completely archipelago/fjords. I dont think it makes sense that the Norwegian one stretches so far to the sea also. I guess it's gameplay > realism. What could be done is to make quite narrow sea provonces near coast and have those be fjords for example, but I dont know would that make sense for the gameplay. On the other hand, it could allow something like "defend coastline" naval mission. That way a country with light ships only could try to hold up against countries with bigger ships and prevent them from making invasions and bomb coastline. Don't know if that is realistic tactic though.

Especially if we can now fit Destroyers out with torpedoes. . .
 
So now that we have different naval terrains we will have to build different types of ships to handle the changes. I can't wait to see if we have a ship buildings diary or why Daniel can't click the ships buttons?
 
Hope you can make a more detailed naval tech tree and introduce more ship types.

Coastal submarine for coastal and shallow waters, ocean-going submarine for deep oceans.
Add torpedo boats for green-water navy, and archipelago regions like the Solomon islands.

And please seperate the pre-treaty traditional battlecruisers (Hood, Amagi, Lexington) and the post-treaty "cruiser killers" or "large cruisers" (Dunquerke, Alaska) in the current "battlecruiser" tech tree. The former have same firepower as battleships of the same era, but with increased speed and decreased armor. The latter have same speed as battleships of the same era, but much less firepower and armor, which are essentially enlarged heavy cruisers. Maybe we could have a reworked naval tech tree like this:

upload_2018-10-11_12-22-28.png
 
Are you going to fix Çanakkale strait and Marmara sea tiles? It looks same to me @podcat
This is something I would call weird game design:

I feel like Çanakkale bosphorus should get same treatment with İstanbul bosphorus. (permission mechanic)
Its now completely open for ships passing from Aegean sea tile to Marmara Sea and it just doesn't make sense from strategic defending point.
7io5VQH.png


Meanwhile Marmara's other part is weirdly attached to Black sea:
Vk8hyKR.jpg


This is fine as its but ships coming from this aegean tile shouldn't enter marmara straight away.
7wTbuqO.jpg


This is current state:
L1evvJr.jpg


My proposal is to divide Eastern Mediterrenean Sea to three to make it realistic:
fWe4XBl.png


This will also avoid weird naval invasions (by passing Çanakkale bosphorus to inside sea) that might done around Marmara, And controlling Aegean can be lot harder for big powers like UK to do naval invasions. (Meanwhile cyprus is easier, so naval invasions are even more common there)

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Source for Çanakkale bosphorus:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montreux_Convention_Regarding_the_Regime_of_the_Straits

"The International Straits Commission was abolished, authorising the full resumption of Turkish military control over the Straits and the refortification of the Dardanelles. Turkey was authorised to close the Straits to all foreign warships in wartime or when it was threatened by aggression; additionally, it was authorised to refuse transit from merchant ships belonging to countries at war with Turkey."

Can you guys please fix this as well? @podcat
 
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I do not think that "shark infested water" is a "cool flavor". Instead statements like this cause unwillingness in people to help protect sharks.
No, sharks did not cause USS Indianapolis to have a lot of casualties. The total fatal shark attacks from 1958–2018 is 439.

I haven't read much about the Indianapolis lately (and don't have a very reliable memory, it's not returning anything from the distant, darkest past), but apparently Juneau lost more than a few sailors to sharks while they waited for rescue. Reading Neptune's Inferno, sharks definitely feature as a hazard of the South Pacific, and were an element when it came to fatalities post-sinking (although I'd probably err on the side of the arctic modifier being the shark modifier, and vice versa, as arctic waters were brutal). It's important to note that the figure you provide is over a period when substantially fewer ships were being sunk in positions where sailors were adrift at sea for considerable periods of time after a sinking. We'd almost definitely find that deaths at sea due to exposure in arctic waters aren't that great between 1958-2018 compared with 1941-1945 as well ;).
 
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Hope you can make a more detailed naval tech tree and introduce more ship types.

Coastal submarine for coastal and shallow waters, ocean-going submarine for deep oceans.
Add torpedo boats for green-water navy, and archipelago regions like the Solomon islands.

And please seperate the pre-treaty traditional battlecruisers (Hood, Amagi, Lexington) and the post-treaty "cruiser killers" or "large cruisers" (Dunquerke, Alaska) in the current "battlecruiser" tech tree. The former have same firepower as battleships of the same era, but with increased speed and decreased armor. The latter have same speed as battleships of the same era, but much less firepower and armor, which are essentially enlarged heavy cruisers. Maybe we could have a reworked naval tech tree like this:

View attachment 410100

Super impressive chart. I really hope the devs listen to some of the amazing input from the community
 
The fact you can have more casualties on loss makes me think you guys are going to be implementing some sort of special naval manpower @podcat ?
 
Deep Ocean looks brutal to destroyers, but I thought they were supposed to escort convoys there? Is destroyer vs subs so one-sided that even -lots% is still enough? Or is it simply WIP?

Ah. This looks like Light Cruisers now become more useful. Before they were probably pointless compared to destroyers, now on the other hand they are much more useful as general screens that can go anywhere with fewer penalties to terrain. Destroyers excel everywhere else, but if you are deep ocean then LC's gain in significance. Nice balance tweak here I think.
 
It doesn't sound like much of a rescue effort was made to rescue survivors of the Scharnhorst. (anyone know why that was?)

Maybe having naval superiority should increase the proportion of rescued sailors.
It was December 1943 off Nordkapp, and almost dark the entire time - arctic night. The sea was high and the water was freezing, so most sailors who had survived numerous torpedos and shells froze to death in minutes. The few survivors were picked up by British ships in the immediate aftermath.

Even if the Germans had had naval superiority (which they didn't) they would not have been able to mount a rescue operation in time.
 
Because it was night, and there was a threat to the vessels from enemy submarines which meant that the less risky option was to withdraw to protect the vessels (which are always more important afloat) over recovering enemy sailors and risk being sunk (and therefore not being afloat).
Well, actually Scharnhorst was on her own, and the threat was from the Royal Navy surface combatants mainly. And as mentioned in the previous post - it was freezing cold, and most would die within minutes.
 
I think the best would be to allow coastal forts to attack ships in the immediate vicinity, not only amphibious invasions. Maybe something similar to the effect of mines.

Yes, and "immediate vicinity" could by quote nasty - 12-15km for the German naval guns on Jersey, so not nice for the Royal Navy.