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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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- Add possibility watch what I sunk with convoy - raw materials or men or weapons ...
How can you realistically know what cargo was the sunken convoy carrying? You could only estimate lost manpower based on number survivors but such estimate could hardly be precise, especially in wartime.
 
- Same again ? You sunk 2 cruisers and 2 carriers or lost fleet that has crew for 1-2 divisions and this is not affect on country manpower ?

In which historical battle did the loss of 2 cruisers and 2 carriers represent 1-2 divisions worth of manpower?

In the Battle of Midway for example Japan lost 4 Carriers + 1 Cruiser and lost 3057 men, which is not even close to the manpower in a division, and not even register in Japans millions of men available manpower ( despite it being the single most devastating loss of combat capability their Navy suffered in the entire war ).
 
An argument could definitely me made to have separate crew manpower and service manpower for aircraft and naval vessels, but it's hardly a crucial thing in the grand scheme of things.

Not to mention that such split would mean there's a high need to have some mechanisms representing crew training.
 
May I also recommend At War At Sea, by Ronald Spector. Gives a good feel for what it was like to be inside those ships in a fight.
 
I could see adding the manpower cost of sunk ships and destroyed planes to the game. It's not exactly a high-priority item though, losses in the armies dwarfed those of the losses in the navies and air forces.
 
169 agrees and no disagrees? Apparently nobody felt the naval mechanics we're in a good state. Good work team and I look forward to testing it out on release ;)
 
That adds to the hilariousness of the statement

They still get a Chief of Navy though, for some reason.

Heck, a lot of landlocked countries have a Navy chief, just in case.
 
They still get a Chief of Navy though, for some reason.

Heck, a lot of landlocked countries have a Navy chief, just in case.

Even river flotilla need commanders.
 
What the problem or difficulty to count those 3057 men in game ?
Few strings of code.

I'd always recommend caution before assuming anything code-wise is necessarily easy. It's very, very hard to say without actually knowing how the code works under the hood.
 
The loss in combat ships is not the men but the ship itself. A few thousand men and a hundred officers is a drop in the bucket.

Convoys are usually lightly crewed. Losing a dozen men per a ship will add up eventually but the numbers simply wouldn't be worth the game engine resources. To be honest combat ships and planes barely are.

Transports require naval superiority. Also the loss of transports already destroy divisions they carry.
 
What the problem or difficulty to count those 3057 men in game ?
Few strings of code.

It's probably equally difficult to code as about 300 other improvements which would actually impact the war/game, unlike 3000 men out of the 10 million + Japan has available which has zero impact.

So then the question becomes, what should they prioritize? Changes that impact the war, or changes that doesn't?
 
The loss in combat ships is not the men but the ship itself. A few thousand men and a hundred officers is a drop in the bucket.

Convoys are usually lightly crewed. Losing a dozen men per a ship will add up eventually but the numbers simply wouldn't be worth the game engine resources. To be honest combat ships and planes barely are.

Transports require naval superiority. Also the loss of transports already destroy divisions they carry.

I'm not disagreeing that it's not worth prioritising naval/merchant marine personnel losses, but it sounds a bit from what you're saying that it's not even worth tracking losses of ships and planes, which (if I haven't misunderstood you) I'd think would be a fairly radical suggestion to make in terms of modelling the strategic dynamics of the Second World War.

On naval/merchant marine personnel, one of the key issues was having enough personnel - in the age of oil burning ships, many naval jobs were relatively high skilled, and took a fair bit of training and experience. In the context of the pool of total available labour, losing pilots or sailors definitely didn't matter. However, if there was some kind of modelling of a smaller 'skilled labour' pool (or something) then it might be possible to model the impact on Japan of having a small but slowly-replenishing group of highly skilled pilots which, after a significant proportion had been lost in combat, meant strategically important differences in Japan's capability to project airpower.
 
Hi, @podcat, great diary, as always. As a map lover, would love to get a response on one of my older questions, as I fear this issue may never be adressed in future patches, if not done in this one. Thanks in advance!

Xikang included that part of what's now the tibettautonomous region. Liu Wen Hui defeated the Tibetans in the early 30s and retained control.

The map on the wiki page is accurate and shows Xikang including what's now the eastern end of the Tibet autonomous region