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HOI4 Dev Diary - Naval Updates

While Waking the Tiger and Cornflakes were not supposed to focus on the naval part of the game, we actually ended up doing a few things anyways :D So today’s diary is going to be about that!

First up: We got a new screen in the Navy Overview Screen that gives you a breakdown of losses and kills. These can be filtered by nations and faction.
Screenshot_2.jpg


You can for example see that France has lost 42 destroyers and sunk 67 Italian destroyers during the last year. The interface also lists convoys, so it’s much easier to keep track on how much of the enemies shipping you have taken out and to see how its changed between current and last month. If you click on an entry here it will give you a detailed breakdown of the ships:
upload_2018-2-7_16-25-18.png


Speaking of convoys: we have changed how raiding works and how losses in convoy efficiency is handled. Convoy sinkings is now tracked by strategic area rather than route, meaning that if several routes go through an area that is being raided, they will all be affected rather than single routes randomly being hit. This makes things much more predictable and you can’t get around efficiency hits by suddenly stopping a trade or a change in supply situation. The actual effect of a sunken convoy depends on how many are active (so if there are two convoys shipping stuff and one gets sunk thats a big impact, but if it’s 50 then it is pretty minor). The efficiency itself reacts slowly a bit per day to avoid jumps and weirdness. This solution means that it’s possible to keep convoy efficiency for the enemy low as long as you raid enough.

Screenshot_3.jpg


To help illustrate this to the owner of the convoys, we color routes that end up with lower efficiency due to raiding orange. Any area that is hit badly enough gets a special texture and is colored red. You can then focus your anti-raiding efforts on these areas.

We have also been tweaking the detection logic of submarines and how fleets engage. Fleets usually had a really easy time to find submarines due to some strange code thats now been keelhauled (a destroyer could more easily find a submarine that could find itself very easily...it was very philosophical), so we hope that part of naval warfare is going to feel better. Naval combat is an area that has been a bit neglected since launch, so we will be giving it some higher priority in future development.

Development wise the team is now in full polish and bugfixing mode, which means pet peeves like this one get addressed. I bet everyone who has played China or Japan has noticed this at least once:
Screenshot_5.jpg


Ships no longer go across land in the Yellow sea (and other tricky places) :)


We have also changed how transports interception is handled. Before it was possible to send a sacrificial transport first, and have it get caught by the enemy fleet as the rest of your transport fleet sailed past to invade the enemy. Now ships in combat are still able to detect transports for this case and “suck” them into the same combat. This should fix multiple exploits :) The way it looks on map (as the later transports may get caught in a different location) is that we show a special combat indicator over them and clicking on that sends you to the main combat in the zone.
Untitled-1.jpg


Next week we will be taking a look at achievements and nation forming, and some neat new UI changes.

Don’t forget to tune into World War Wednesday at 16:00 CET. Today we are going to start a new session (because Daniel was losing so badly vs Japan >:-D) as historical Germany, to show how it plays differently now.

Rejected Titles (due to popular demand):
What were we sinking!?
Loveboats II - The sinking of the Scharnhorst
Adding depth to the naval game
This DLC comes with free shipping
So the DLC is the Titanic and this bug is the iceberg...wait
Finding Nimitz: The Game
 
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This is a really good start, but you REALLY need to focus on making all the other ships useful again. Right now the optimal fleet composition is all battleships and aircraft carriers since that nerf to cruisers pretty much made them obsolete.
 
Awesome! I'm glad to see the naval side of things getting some love :)
 
Awesome! Good to see the Naval mechanics getting some love in this update.
 
While Waking the Tiger and Cornflakes were not supposed to focus on the naval part of the game, we actually ended up doing a few things anyways :D So today’s diary is going to be about that!

First up: We got a new screen in the Navy Overview Screen that gives you a breakdown of losses and kills. These can be filtered by nations and faction.
View attachment 333512

You can for example see that France has lost 42 destroyers and sunk 67 Italian destroyers during the last year. The interface also lists convoys, so it’s much easier to keep track on how much of the enemies shipping you have taken out and to see how its changed between current and last month. If you click on an entry here it will give you a detailed breakdown of the ships:
View attachment 333525

Speaking of convoys: we have changed how raiding works and how losses in convoy efficiency is handled. Convoy sinkings is now tracked by strategic area rather than route, meaning that if several routes go through an area that is being raided, they will all be affected rather than single routes randomly being hit. This makes things much more predictable and you can’t get around efficiency hits by suddenly stopping a trade or a change in supply situation. The actual effect of a sunken convoy depends on how many are active (so if there are two convoys shipping stuff and one gets sunk thats a big impact, but if it’s 50 then it is pretty minor). The efficiency itself reacts slowly a bit per day to avoid jumps and weirdness. This solution means that it’s possible to keep convoy efficiency for the enemy low as long as you raid enough.

View attachment 333509

To help illustrate this to the owner of the convoys, we color routes that end up with lower efficiency due to raiding orange. Any area that is hit badly enough gets a special texture and is colored red. You can then focus your anti-raiding efforts on these areas.

We have also been tweaking the detection logic of submarines and how fleets engage. Fleets usually had a really easy time to find submarines due to some strange code thats now been keelhauled (a destroyer could more easily find a submarine that could find itself very easily...it was very philosophical), so we hope that part of naval warfare is going to feel better. Naval combat is an area that has been a bit neglected since launch, so we will be giving it some higher priority in future development.

Development wise the team is now in full polish and bugfixing mode, which means pet peeves like this one get addressed. I bet everyone who has played China or Japan has noticed this at least once:
View attachment 333510

Ships no longer go across land in the Yellow sea (and other tricky places) :)


We have also changed how transports interception is handled. Before it was possible to send a sacrificial transport first, and have it get caught by the enemy fleet as the rest of your transport fleet sailed past to invade the enemy. Now ships in combat are still able to detect transports for this case and “suck” them into the same combat. This should fix multiple exploits :) The way it looks on map (as the later transports may get caught in a different location) is that we show a special combat indicator over them and clicking on that sends you to the main combat in the zone.
View attachment 333511

Next week we will be taking a look at achievements and nation forming, and some neat new UI changes.

Don’t forget to tune into World War Wednesday at 16:00 CET. Today we are going to start a new session (because Daniel was losing so badly vs Japan >:-D) as historical Germany, to show how it plays differently now.

Rejected Titles (due to popular demand):
What were we sinking!?
Loveboats II - The sinking of the Scharnhorst
Adding depth to the naval game
This DLC comes with free shipping
So the DLC is the Titanic and this bug is the iceberg...wait
Finding Nimitz: The Game

Uh all cool but when does the thing where you can evade an enemy fleet indefinitely by hitting the "do not engage" mode get fixed? This is a problem for multiple reasons including when you do naval invasions, you can do escort convoys with this mode and not run the risk of the enemy sinking your ships. Noticeable when Germany invades the UK for example.
 
Very nice. Subs might actually be useful to build now.

This DLC/patch gets better and better, the only thing that could make it better at this point would be if it added more "Austria-Hungary Demands X" events for its claims.
 
Interesting! Very, very interesting and welcome changes.

But as naval warfare is the subject, any chance we can get some way to estimate how many of what ship types another country has? It probably wouldn't be that hard to find out how many battleships or carriers a nation might have, at least in peacetime.
Would be a good thing to implement into an espionage system *hint hint*. That being said the Japanese manged to hide the existence of the Yamato from the west well before the war started so it's not all easy pickings.
 
Take my money. Take all of my money now. Just give me these naval updates.
 
Does anyone know when it will be available for pre-order on Steam?
 
...What were we sinking!?

Outstanding additions!

We love it when youioverdeliver.

Would it be greedy to ask for the naval service records and battle reports be available for the full game for an overview of fleet performance and later analysis? Not much time to compile that while at war. Maybe a special for DLC owners?
 
@podcat

Does this fix the strange edge case of a battleship trying to hunt down a submarine but always immediate back out of the battle and and forward repeatedly? If not no big deal and it can wait for a full naval shakedown cruise. See what I did there?