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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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So... not adding Pre-Dreadnought as a Battleship class? So Schleswig-Holstein is still evenly matched to Fuso?

Yeah because THAT is obviously the biggest problem in the naval game right now. :confused:
 
why? the ai didnt use the exploit?
I believe he's referring to the battleplan AI going ape shit with pathing, i.e. transporting divisions via sea when there's a land route and/or when more garrison divisions aren't needed overseas but it moves them anyway. Happens all the time, especially in the Mediterranean.
 
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?

Ships had a tendency to sail through land. They would often clip islands, peninsulas, coast lines. I guess Paradox has fixed that

It was just an aesthetic thing, now its an aesthetically pleasing thing
 
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?

It doesn't show whats wrong, it shows whats right. This is how the same place looks in current 1.4 :D

Brokin.jpg
 
So, any chance we'll get a DLC focused on naval features/content? The changes mentioned here make sense with this DLC, but I'm sensing that some folks want improvements to more areas of naval combat and management.
 
So, any chance we'll get a DLC focused on naval features/content? The changes mentioned here make sense with this DLC, but I'm sensing that some folks want improvements to more areas of naval combat and management.
He did mention it in the DD. More to come in the future.
 
Looking good gentlemen. This DLC looks like a likely day 1 purchase for me. A feature I'd like to see is more of a permanent ledger. Once a war ends, all the casualty and equipment loss data is gone, how about adding a new tab next to the 'current wars' for completed wars so we could peruse the data. Granted this would be more of a feature for mods that feature multiple wars going on in addition to the main event but vanilla has a measure of those as well.
 
@podcat Sometimes in mods that add alot of material, like black ice, the game crashes because of lack of memory after 1942-1945, even on really good, really new computers. Are there any new engine/memory optimizations being worked into the next dlc?
 
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

Anyone help me to recognize these memes? I can only understand the Titanic one.
 
Anyone help me to recognize these memes? I can only understand the Titanic one.

1) the first is a reference to a joke were-in a brit in a boat yells to a german that he's sinking and the german replies what are you thinking about (the english S sounds like the german TH)

3) depth charges were used to sink subs

4) shipping as in ships but also the act of sending something to someone (free shipping is when there's no subcharge for sending it)

6) finding nimitz sounds a bit like finding nemo
 
Anyone help me to recognize these memes? I can only understand the Titanic one.
It's all water-related jokes.

"Sinking" sounds almost the same as "thinking". "What were we thinking?" means "why did we do that?"

I don't know about Loveboats, but the Scharnhost was a German WW2 warship, named after a Prussian officer who fought Napoleon.

"Depth" in a litteral sense is (among other things) the distance between the surface and the bottom of a river or sea or ocean. "Depth" in a figurative sense means complexity, with very positive connotations.

"Free shipping" normally means the product will be delivered to your address for no extra cost. Here, the updated "ship" behavior will come for free.

Nimitz was the supreme commander of the US Pacific Fleet in WW2. Finding Nemo is a very successful Disney movie about a fish (y'know, Disney) trying to find his son, called Nemo.
 
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