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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.

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

Screenshot_3.jpg

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.

Screenshot_7.jpg

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
 
There are 14 living survivors of the USS Indianapolis sinking; I have personally met four of them as well as a number of people involved with the survivors' organization. I can assure you, from their firsthand accounts, that sharks definitely caused casualties amongst the men who spent nearly five days in the water before being rescued.

Funny, my understanding it was a lack of communication between the command levels and a lack of procedures regarding secret missions and arrival times of ships that was the root cause of the tragedy. The sharks were a by-product, not the cause of the massive loss of life.

That's like saying ants ruined the picnic, not the fact that the picnic was beside an anthill.
 
Funny, my understanding it was a lack of communication between the command levels and a lack of procedures regarding secret missions and arrival times of ships that was the root cause of the tragedy. The sharks were a by-product, not the cause of the massive loss of life.

That's like saying ants ruined the picnic, not the fact that the picnic was beside an anthill.
Sort of, that was the reason for the delay in the rescue being made - one command handed off the ship on departure, the new command would not take responsibility until the ships arrival - Indianapolis fell through that gap and nobody noticed she was missing (the USN changed this policy because of the Indianapolis).
Round numbers crew 1200, abandoned ship, 900, survived 300. Suspected shark victims up to 150 (live survivors, not including the bodies they ate).
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/the-worst-shark-attack-in-history-25715092/
 
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Funny, my understanding it was a lack of communication between the command levels and a lack of procedures regarding secret missions and arrival times of ships that was the root cause of the tragedy. The sharks were a by-product, not the cause of the massive loss of life.

That's like saying ants ruined the picnic, not the fact that the picnic was beside an anthill.

Certainly the sharks would not have been an issue had the men been promptly rescued, but had there been NO sharks it's obvious that more men would have survived until rescued so while the sharks are not of themselves a root cause of the disaster they certainly contributed to the casualty numbers and the poster I was originally taking issue with was claiming they did not cause many casualties where, if you take the 150 estimate out of the almost 900 casualties, that's not an insignificant portion of the casualties, even if it is less than those dying from injury, exposure, or dehydration.
 
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 ;)

Yeah but a cold ocean is even more deadly than sharks. Arctic should have the bigger crew loss modifier.

I mean if you are stranded for days without a lifeboat in shark infested waters you might die, if that happens in arctic with sub-zero air temperature (with your clothes wet from the dip even if you manage to crawl onto floatsam) you will die.
 
Did Paradox and the Discovery Channel team up for my Twitter feed? Took me a bit to realize the second tweet (from the Discovery Channel) wasn't a close up of what they were working with at Paradox... HOI Disc.png

That said, like the idea of this - Gives the potential for making some of the notoriously bad areas of the world's oceans to be bad for ships and shipping, rather than generic areas.
 
Water from the toilets is black water, water from the kitchen, showers, and bilge is grey water. Lord knows I had to pump forward to aft enough times...

Those are beyond maritime naming conventions (cant speak to if they started there). Same terminology is used in reference to water damage to property(clean, grey, black)--like floods and insurance.
 
Why did you guys announce this over half a year in advance?

They'll have had their reasons, but there's not a lot of downside to something being announced (and we've had weekly DDs for a long time now as well, so it's not just "announced and we have to wait and see what they're up to"). If you're curious as to the marketing strategy, that's probably a question for another thread.
 
I looks like you forgot the Great Barrier Reef off the coast of Australia! It's called a "Great Barrier" reef for a reason! It is very dangerous, even for a steel ship, to sail through a reef. Sinking on reefs aren't too common, but that is because reefs are mapped and seamen make efforts to avoid them. This is similar to how icebergs can sink even an armored ship but normally don't because seamen have them mapped and make efforts to avoid them.

Even though reefs arn't very dangerous under normal conditions, they can be very dangerous to ships during war and the existence of the Great Barrier Reef played a role in Japan's decision to not invade mainland Australia. The limited ways to navigate shallow reef water make mines more effective. Reefs are especially dangerous to submarines which might hit reefs that are too low for surface vessels to care about.

Reefs are also almost always shark infested ;)
 
I'm a little disappointed that trenches or undersea mountain ranges aren't included - but I guess those things are too deep for this era / not relevant at all.

I would, however, like to see shoreline terrain in future - perhaps as just a modifier to existing land terrain (much like how 'shark infested' is a permanent modifier for certain ocean tiles). Obviously this would be VERY relevant to the Pacific campaign, where there was a wide diversity of beach terrains that had tactical significance (white sandy beaches are very nice and easy to land on, the hard coral rock of certain atolls was an absolute nightmare because it was virtually impossible for marines landing on the beach to find or create cover, and of course there might be islands with natural caves for defenders to hide in, or the landing sites might be swamp/mangroves which should perhaps increase attrition even more than Jungle terrain normally would, etc); but also in Europe as well. The Allies were VERY particular about their amphibious landing sites during the liberation of Europe, and preferred saddle shaped coastlines with sandy shorelines - both of which had various advantages, not least of which they were easier to land on. Both the 'heel' of Italy fit this desired terrain, as did Normandy (which is partially why that region was selected over the closer but too obvious, non-saddle shaped, and slightly rockier Pas-de-Calais).

I personally am not a fan of 'invade anywhere' amphibious landing mechanics, and while I think there should definitely be more than one way for a player to reenact D-Day, not all beaches are equal. Some are just flat out the best, others have some pros and some cons, while others should just be nightmare slogs - the latter of which being more common in Polar and Tropical areas, of course.
 
Will you be able to send your trade convoys through a certain route, avoiding dangerous seas? I mean, naval invasions and military divisions on sea are sort of easy to maneuver, but trade convoys would be nice to tell them what route to take, according safe seas.

Also, will naval forts be modified some how?