• 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 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
 
Last edited:
@podcat - Very excited to see this surprise, thank you.

You mentioned positing, would it be difficult for your exceptional team to allow divisions to be sorted by skill instead of just type? When you are training a large army and there are 30 divisions that are level 3 trained and say 5 that are level 2 trained, it wold be great to be able to sort so they are all grouped together instead of scattered throughout.

Thank you
 

Wow. I guess we will have to be very careful moving divisions now. And I guess it will be even more annoying when the AI uses convoy transport unnecessarily...

Will be really annoying when your Heavy Tank division gets stuck and killed moving from Italy to North Africa. Naval control will be more important than ever, which is probably a good thing.
 
Wow. I guess we will have to be very careful moving divisions now. And I guess it will be even more annoying when the AI uses convoy transport unnecessarily...
why? the ai didnt use the exploit?
 
Oh Thank god! Thank you so much! I really want a good naval game! Both HOI 3's, and HOI 4's naval game was kind of lacking, and not all that very fun. I'm really hoping for continued improvements to the Naval game! More free shipping!

Also thank you so much for finally fixing Subs!
 
Update is looking good, I like it.
Will you be addressing the issue of naval battle icon spam? When an area sees heavy convoy and/or naval air activity, zones like the English Channel can get absolutely swamped in battle results where a plane did 1% damage to a convoy. These icons will obviously go away if you right click the icon at the top, but after a while this stops working too. I find it so annoying I avoid playing nations that rely on convoys for resources now.
 
Damn...now I have to completely rework my mod concerning submarine and convoy war :D:p
Really really good news. Especially the stats.

For the future I wish that there is a separation how air to sea / sub / convoy war works.
So your planes f.e. go on subhunting, but avoid naval fleet engagement, also planes attack only convoys but no surface fleets
 
So... not adding Pre-Dreadnought as a Battleship class? So Schleswig-Holstein is still evenly matched to Fuso?
 
While I appreciate the convoy raiding/submarine tweak, are troops also going to be able to live off local supply/alternate supply caches? Because otherwise a blockade on either the British or the Japanese is going to completely screw a war effort halfway across the world, that should rightfully be supplied from closer bases, .e.g India.
Yeah, Podcat can you confirm about this?
 
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:

**picture**

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

I don't understand this at all. I don't understand what is wrong in the original picture, or what I am supposed to notice. Does anyone know what this was about?