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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.
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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:
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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.

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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:
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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.
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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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Very good improvements but it seems as though the ability to accurately preform Operation Weserubung is almost nonexistent now.
 
@podcat
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.
 
Please also consider to give bonus to fleet with multiple type of ship!
I agree say have a small bonus for having 1 DD or CL for every capital or carrier and a larger bonus or several small bonuses for having 2 DD or CL per capital or carrier. right now DD and Cl's arent much needed (perhaps the return of the submarine will encourage screens once again)
 
Awesome another great dev diary, I like it. It will be good to have effective submarines.

I see that convoy routes that are loosing a lot to submarines will be highlighted red so we know to target the area for our antisubmarine warfare. The question I have is will the AI do likewise?
 
Do 1.5 have any new battle animation of convoys and submarine? and may I ask, do you have any plan to set a new TAG for the Superheavy battleship? they only can use battleship model now.
by the way, when I bind the mesh on the skeleton(submarine), I find that you have created a great animation of the submarine of torpedo launching, why not put it in the game?
 
Do 1.5 have any new battle animation of convoys and submarine? and may I ask, do you have any plan to set a new TAG for the Superheavy battleship? they only can use battleship model now.
by the way, when I bind the mesh on the skeleton(submarine), I find that you have created a great animation of the submarine of torpedo launching, why not put it in the game?

Agreed, it would be nice to see what kind of battle was happening based on the 3D models on the map. A huge clash of main navies with carriers and battleships vs. some crappy destroyer combat produces the same 2D icon... not good UI. Contrast that with tank battles on land, which are much easier to track.

The sea zones are huge and empty visually right now, so I think there's room for it.

This is probably stuff for the next DLC though.
 
The next patch will be great, so many good fixes/features. Good work devs!
 
My main issue with the naval side is how tedious to keep track of things is. The map icons look almost like the icons for the normal land divisions. If I decide to transit a fleet to another base, I have trouble finding out how that fleet fares if I want to check on it along the way. When you're in Navy Mode, I think the warships should be highlighted somehow.

I'd love an Unassigned Ships button, like the Unassigned Divisions, to just shift-click and select every ship across the globe that's doing nothing, which would be nice for certain countries that start with ships scattered all over the place!
 
Yes me too. There are often ships unassigned for a while as flotillas split. And I'm the guy who would like to drop and drag ships betrween fleet windows or even use check to select rather then uwrestle with scroll windows.
 
If convoys are easier to intercept then the Allied AI needs to be smarter about not sailing everything through the med (and the Axis through the English channel) on an endless booze cruise.

A very important point.

I think we absolutely have to have control over our convoy routes. A suggestion would be to add a function where we could select some sea zones to exclude them for convoy traffic. E.g. As Britain, I should be able to "turn off" med convoy traffic and use the longer Africa route at the cost of using more ships.

We even had a similar option in Arsenal, where we could simply "turn off" some convoys at the risk of losing trade&supply when convoys were scarce and badly needed somewhere else. I even remember that Arsenal AI was automatically changing convoy routes whenever they were raided.
 
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I'm just another punter, albeit one who may have an unhealthy obsession with warships, but my thoughts for what they're worth are above :). I would, however, never recommend anyone whole sale taking my thoughts and using them without critical examination, or all sorts of strange things might happen (you might suddenly find yourself tracking down earlier editions of Warship, for example :D).

That was funny. Let's hear it for more humor on the forum.

:D

P.S. Does this help...enable?

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Can we PLEASE blacklist certain sea tiles from having both supply lines and troops moving through? I'm tired of having my divisions running the gauntlet through the British Channel for no reason and having them all be destroyed.