fake strait block

[TheMeInTeam]

i had to activate last stand because i could not order retreat across the bosphorus. there aren't even naval ships with active orders in nearby sea zones, i presume the ai is just sitting ships somewhere? why can't i see them, if they're blocking my divisions from crossing? makes no sense that stuff we don't know would block the attempt.

the most charitable interpretation of this is that it's bugged. blocking the bosphorus with a navy would be impractical in eu 4 times (its mechanics were changed to reflect that, although unfortunately it extended it to much wider straits). in hoi 4 times, it would not be easier. very much the opposite.

this is not a one off issue:





"enemy fleet"? what enemy fleet? it's literally the opposite, only friendlies displayed, still blocked derp.

 

[TheHostName]

maybe iam wrong, but the straights are blocked by ships sitting in the sea tile not being on a mission, therefore not showing up in the info screen.

I have never seen or heard that task forces on missions also block straights. It was always taskforces operating as if you would give shore bombardment.

 

[Dimmie_Dumm]

maybe iam wrong, but the straights are blocked by ships sitting in the sea tile not being on a mission, therefore not showing up in the info screen.

I have never seen or heard that task forces on missions also block straights. It was always taskforces operating as if you would give shore bombardment.

Don't quote me on that, but I believe a fleet on Invasion Support can potentially block it, too.

The idea that ships should be blocking straits only when physically sitting on them is really just another HoI4 invention having no basis in reality: by the time a land division could realistically embark on and then disembark from w/e ferries it's allegedly using to "walk on water", a fleet could have covered dozens of tiles to render the division into fish food. So allowing to "walk on water" on one's whim is too generous of a gift in a game which both gates naval invasion by "supremacy" and - more importantly - prevents ships from passing between enemy-occupied land tiles wherever straits are modelled. This is somewhat alleviated by any tiny ship blocking anything, but then again this senseless micro of detaching and re-attaching ships coupled with a manually moved ship losing 30% of its org because reasons are among the things why players dislike naval interactions so much and I myself bluntly accuse the game of its anti-naval bias.

 

[TheMeInTeam]

maybe iam wrong, but the straights are blocked by ships sitting in the sea tile not being on a mission, therefore not showing up in the info screen.

I have never seen or heard that task forces on missions also block straights. It was always taskforces operating as if you would give shore bombardment.

it's the only explanation i can think of, and it should be considered a bug. especially in the second case, where there is thousands of supremacy of friendly ships...some of which are at sea...yet somehow a ship which can't be detected still prevents troops crossing while everyone in question believes the seas are completely friendly. until they try to cross, then somehow "they just know" lol.

Don't quote me on that, but I believe a fleet on Invasion Support can potentially block it, too.

my best guess is that it requires the physical presence of ships in the sea tile, and that some missions make this happen on occasion, but w/o any reliability. manually parking it there does it reliably.

So allowing to "walk on water" on one's whim is too generous of a gift in a game which both gates naval invasion by "supremacy"

gating invasion by supremacy is bad too. it's a 100% contrived scenario where the nation in question is blocked from doing something extremely dangerous.

we are allowed to attack while outnumbered 10:1 locally, if we want. we can contest impossible skies with outdated planes. however, if we want to launch a naval invasion because we believe our fleet will defeat their fleet, we can't. even when that belief is correct. i am not 100% the upcoming rework will address this, but maybe it will help at least? either way, fleet in being needs said fleet to actually fight if challenged. won't fight hostile ships active in the sea zone? no supremacy.

however, this strait interaction is worse. it's a bug. there's no coherent justification for it. like you point out, ships are somehow blocking a strait which itself blocks the ships. that doesn't square.

but then again this senseless micro of detaching and re-attaching ships coupled with a manually moved ship losing 30% of its org because reasons are among the things why players dislike naval interactions so much and I myself bluntly accuse the game of its anti-naval bias.

i'm not as convinced, since they did multiple things to degrade land combat controls. maybe the goal was to make them as bad as naval ! perhaps this is why we get punished for right clicking on land as well, or the act of *selecting* divisions can cause them to change orders...neither of which existed on release. despite all the problems with navy, and the are many, i can reliably get fleets to do what i want with missions more consistently than i can with the battle planner.

battle planner lies to you about what it will do, has units move away from assigned orders sometimes, fabricates and assigns divisions onto front lines with neutral countries, and attacks without being ordered to attack. bad as naval interactions are, when i set ships to "do not engage", they actually try to avoid combat. when i put a mission in a sea zone, the ships reliably try to go there. bad as it is, the # of rote, mundane inputs is a tiny fraction of land divisions.

and despite that naval isn't in a good state, it's seen more attempts to remake/improve it than the battle planner too. one of the biggest changes the battle planner got was to just punish players for not using it, despite that the use case in question with battle planner required more clicks. they're at least *trying* to make naval better, instead of intentionally worse. the only positive attempt i can easily recall for land combat controls was the failed attempt at cohesion settings.

 

[vermicious knid]

I have a low-level fear that someday they will close the Field Marshall frontline workaround and truly force players to use the battleplanner or suffer.

 

[Vengirni]

we are allowed to attack while outnumbered 10:1 locally, if we want. we can contest impossible skies with outdated planes. however, if we want to launch a naval invasion because we believe our fleet will defeat their fleet, we can't. even when that belief is correct. i am not 100% the upcoming rework will address this, but maybe it will help at least? either way, fleet in being needs said fleet to actually fight if challenged. won't fight hostile ships active in the sea zone? no supremacy.

IIRC, they are going to change change the way supremacy is calculated, however, you will actually need some more of it to launch an invasion. So if it hovers around 50%, neither side will be able to launch their invasion.

 

[Findell_HOI]

If you put out naval bombers to strike the sea zone you would fine a stack of ships on the position to block the straight.

You could also set a group of ships to patrol and they would eventually find them.

 

[TheMeInTeam]

IIRC, they are going to change change the way supremacy is calculated, however, you will actually need some more of it to launch an invasion. So if it hovers around 50%, neither side will be able to launch their invasion.

i saw that part. what isn't clear is exactly what goes into accrual when contested. it said that convoy raiding decreases enemy, while escort increases yours etc.

what i don't want is the junk we have right now, where a fleet on "strike force" can hold up "supremacy" for weeks or even months no matter what a smaller fleet does in the water. always engage patrol, convoy raiding to sink hundreds of convoys, naval bombing the zone like crazy...none of that matters, their fleet just hides and retains "supremacy" against a fleet actively looking to fight it. if you can reach and it doesn't give the enemy a ridiculous # of fighters against your nav, you can port strike the enemy fleet, assuming you can find it. this is not always practical, nor should it be required.

players who try to tell me that's "historical" are objectively incorrect. there is 0 instance of this fact pattern in history. the germans did not, in fact, actively seek a fight against the royal navy in a massive fleet combat. if they did that, and uk didn't meet them, what would they think of the "fleet in being"?

the worst of both worlds is if we can no longer launch naval invasions because the ai drops superiority for a split second, but it is *also* still possible to hold up superiority without fighting, not fighting oneself.

If you put out naval bombers to strike the sea zone you would fine a stack of ships on the position to block the straight.

i did. with 400 torpedo bombers (i'm iraq, only started making them recently). they eventually took out the enemy fleet. that took a long time. i was able to push from crimea to istanbul before this got rid of them, but it did eventually get rid of them.

at best, that's a workaround for a bug. if ships are blocking straits, they should a) be *very* visible both on map and to nav and b) struggle to do it for straits they can't pass. being blocked by hidden ships in ostensibly friendly waters is wild. how do my troops even know those ships are there?

another reason this is per se' inconsistent/bugged: in the second pair of pictures, the game would allow me to naval invade, despite that i can't cross the strait lol.

I have a low-level fear that someday they will close the Field Marshall frontline workaround and truly force players to use the battleplanner or suffer.

on the one hand, players could just put the units they want to use orders on general plan and control h right before attacking, still doing micro while accruing planning. that would allow right click micro with some planning bonus, or if you just remake spearheads a lot, micro w/o even suffering faster decay.

on the other hand, the original penalty for right click micro could be (and still can be) circumvented similarly, yet the devs didn't care that the de facto consequence of their change was to just make the ui worse. hence your fear is warranted, unfortunately.

 

[TheHostName]

it's the only explanation i can think of, and it should be considered a bug. especially in the second case, where there is thousands of supremacy of friendly ships...some of which are at sea...yet somehow a ship which can't be detected still prevents troops crossing while everyone in question believes the seas are completely friendly. until they try to cross, then somehow "they just know" lol.

I dont know. I think it is WAD. The system is pretty straight forward. Ships parked in the sea tile (not zone) block straights. It is mechanically dumb that you need to park even 1 ship there. Thats true. Its also mechacanically stupid that your army knows there is atleast 1 ship blocking the crossing but that they cant guide/spot that fleet for you to bomb or engage. Same goes for shore bombardment btw.

Don't quote me on that, but I believe a fleet on Invasion Support can potentially block it, too.

Yes. because they arent actually operating in the zone, but more like moving along a certain order of seatiles to their destination. Where they then park and give shorebombardment/block a straight.

i am not 100% the upcoming rework will address this, but maybe it will help at least?

It will 100% create its own problems for sure. But its better then what we have right now.

We literally had a big problem in a tournement we did where we could not agree on a rule on the matter of supremacy fleets. Literelly sitting in Mindanao on strike force with low engagement risk and only carriers being build (best supremacy per IC/resource cost per dockyard) and 2k planes and 5lvl of radar and state aa meant nothing could force those ships out, nothing could beat that supreamcy and nothing could be done by japan. So iam really glad this is getting removed.

however, this strait interaction is worse. it's a bug. there's no coherent justification for it. like you point out, ships are somehow blocking a strait which itself blocks the ships. that doesn't square.

Ohhhhhh you are saying that since its a not only a crossing but also a straight, you cant engage the other fleet since its blocked?

Like as if you want to slap the british fleet on one side of gibralta but cant because entering that tile can only be done by the holder of the straight?

I have a low-level fear that someday they will close the Field Marshall frontline workaround and truly force players to use the battleplanner or suffer.

Meanwhile there is me, who hates it very much and wishes for it to get patched. Just so that i can finally have my way with certain players in the group iam playing with.

Iam allready happy that PDX fixed 9 out of 10 licence exploits for MIO. But the new result is that i have to argue with every new player on whether he is allowed to exploit that 1 method....

what i don't want is the junk we have right now, where a fleet on "strike force" can hold up "supremacy" for weeks or even months no matter what a smaller fleet does in the water. always engage patrol, convoy raiding to sink hundreds of convoys, naval bombing the zone like crazy...none of that matters, their fleet just hides and retains "supremacy" against a fleet actively looking to fight it. if you can reach and it doesn't give the enemy a ridiculous # of fighters against your nav, you can port strike the enemy fleet, assuming you can find it. this is not always practical, nor should it be required.

Exactly. The whole thing with this is that it massivefly effects meta and playstyle. The vanilla meta ive learned for USA is to ignore navy and just do this. Block japan from relevancy and therefore go only for mils. In a mod where you have a nerfed USA that is supposed to invest into a fight with japan.... Just blows balance out of the water. So really. Iam soooooo looking forward to that mechanical change.