Hearts of Iron IV - The Ultimate WWII Strategy Game

[Vaarna_Aarne]

Sheeit, now that's a meatgrinder.

UK having zero ships would imply they just aren't building any? I mean, even if all their canoes got sunk they'd still have enough to just switch to the fast solution of just making a fuckton of subs. Or is this because the Axis are bombing them so hard all their factories are damaged and they're out of convoys so they can't get chromium and shit?

 

[Raghar]

And Japan conquered India, and Finland become commie and joined Russia willingly. Then when Russia was nearly defeated, UK invaded and screamed where is US which pursued isolationist policy (and which was moving theirs transports to Iwo Jima).

Well, UK lost majority of fleet when it was blowing up Japan fleet. Then Germany caught the remnants either in mediterranean, or in channel. Then UK was forced to work hard to make new transports. While Holland holdings were conquered.

 

[The Wall]

Just seen a MP game where US conquered Iwo Jima, Russia had 0 manpower, and UK had 0 ships.

And Germany still lost the war?

 

[Space Satan]

HoIIV have a tendency to have comebacks. You forget some front and then lose huge chunk of your troops to encirclement and all your advance collapses. Ger could lose even in almost ideal conditions. You forget to protect your shoreline, here, enjoy your naval invasion and enemy troops spreading like a plague across the rhine. Moscow could be lost to some fast units. Kyoto to paratroopers etc.

 

[Vaarna_Aarne]

And when you aren't watching, divisions in that garrison group will commit ritual suicide by enemy navy.

 

[GarfunkeL]

All Paradox games (and most other strategy game at that) fail when circumstances require the AI to do naval things and project an amphibious invasion.

Paradox has never managed to make a good naval warfare model and their AI coder(s) have also always been sub-par. It is quite telling when a HoI2 and 3 modder made better AI scripts than what Pdox could ever produce. Regardless, as long as the naval combat model is garbage, no AI script will fix them so instead they have to rely on crutches like unlimited range and zero attrition for AI fleets.

It still cracks me up that after 3 expansions and numerous patches, nobody in Stockholm bothered to ever check whether the ground defence value on airplanes actually did anything. Players found it out after TFH had come out and people did some serious testing thanks to introduction of piercing/armour values and one guy decided to include airplanes. He found out that ground defence stat of the planes is actually not properly called when determining the defence value of a air unit against ground fire.

 

[Average Manatee]

It still cracks me up that after 3 expansions and numerous patches, nobody in Stockholm bothered to ever check whether the ground defence value on airplanes actually did anything. Players found it out after TFH had come out and people did some serious testing thanks to introduction of piercing/armour values and one guy decided to include airplanes. He found out that ground defence stat of the planes is actually not properly called when determining the defence value of a air unit against ground fire.

There's also the toughness bug. For some reason all tech that gives toughness is applied twice. e.g. researching +1 toughness gives your units +2.

 

[IHaveHugeNick]

In fairness to Paradox, doesn't naval warfare always suck in 99% of games? Aside from some very specialized titles like submarine games or some of the more hardcore Cold War simulators, navy is almost always half-assed.

 

[fantadomat]

In fairness to Paradox, doesn't naval warfare always suck in 99% of games? Aside from some very specialized titles like submarine games or some of the more hardcore Cold War simulators, navy is almost always half-assed.

In most strategies is ok. Paradox games do have shit naval combat in all of their games,the best one to my knowledge is the one in Crusader Kings 2.

 

[IHaveHugeNick]

I honestly can't remember when was last good naval combat in a non-naval focused strategy game. It usually is barebones and amounts to nothing but flavor.

 

[Raghar]

I honestly can't remember when was last good naval combat in a non-naval focused strategy game. It usually is barebones and amounts to nothing but flavor.

This one?

Imperialism? (it was automated however)

Empire Total war?

Emperor of Fading Suns had some naval combat as well as space combat.

 

[GarfunkeL]

People say Empire Total War had good naval combat but since the people who are fans of ETW are generally retards, I wouldn't put too much stock on such claims.

 

[Space Satan]

ETW naval wars was a battle of attrition. It was shunned by multiplayer community like faire. Boring, tedious, unbalanced. Even more than land battles, with endless atrillery duels.
I can't remember a good naval warfare in global strategy games because THERE ARE NO OTHER GLOBAL STRATEGY GAMES. Fucking Paradox is the only developer that actually makes them. Global political simulator or other are a weak games, lacking polish and depth. Total War is a moneygrab with greedy retards at the head of the studio. They tried go for naval warfare numerous times and it was awful every time. Shogun, ETW, Rome. Bullshit.

 

[Average Manatee]

ETW reminded me of Pirates!, except slower (distances are much longer and take forever) and the AI always outnumbered you forcing you into shitty drawn out attrition tactics. It was OK for a few battles but fuck is it annoying spending 10 mins every turn fighting off endless waves of trash from half the nations in the game.

The problem with fleets in HoI is that there's no real interesting strategic gameplay with them without getting into absurd detail that no one playing at the HoI4 level wants to involve themselves with. The land combat works because you have lots of territory with terrain and combat width so maneuvers and shit are possible. WW2 naval combat is basically doomstacks and hope you win. Like, did anyone actually pay attention to weather patterns in HoI3? Because that's about the closest you'll get to strategic planning in HoI.

Of course, an entirely separate problem is that it's the 4th HoI game and not only are navies not very interesting, they still aren't balanced in any fashion resembling historical. This is something Paradox should take flak for.

 

[Space Satan]

Naval warfare during WWII WAS boring and tedious. Some clashes here and there and two big midway and okinawa dogpiles. Midway was 26 US ships vs 21 jap. And that was huge because other battles were usually far smaller in scale. And most battles involved convoys. Noone wanted to commence their navy to decisive battle and european theater were mostly coast guard actions. Paradox promised to rework naval warfare and make it interesting but I can't imagine how could they accomplish that because it never was interesting in the first place.

 

[Vaarna_Aarne]

I am not entirely sure you want to try "historical balancing" for navies. I mean, BICE does that to an extent and its unit trees are a fucking disaster. And as mentioned, historical naval warfare in WW2 would mean you get a single major battle which can decide everything, making it rather pointless too.

There's kind of a mystery to how naval warfare could or should be handled, and it's not an easy mystery at that because you need to juggle production of new ships, ships themselves, and naval battle. And each of these is a big thing to cover, and because they are all interlocked the problem of "how is navvy formed" gets harder for it. For example, you need to find something to counter doomstacks. In the standard scenario you also have the challenge of making navies even worth anything for everyone besides the US (and not have war with US as a guaranteed failure option for Japan).

I can't really imagine a solution either, besides some sortie-based model where you have naval warfare based on more passive and old fashioned convoy escorts with smaller ships, new more detailed decisive battles where you need to decide maneuvers and responses for challenging sea area control (which really would need forced pausing of the game for a mini-battle when the player is involved), and time needed to reposition, rearm, resupply, and rest. And even there, I can't really think of the how for it or how it'd look like at the end, just a vague general idea.

I can't remember a good naval warfare in global strategy games because THERE ARE NO OTHER GLOBAL STRATEGY GAMES. Fucking Paradox is the only developer that actually makes them. Global political simulator or other are a weak games, lacking polish and depth.

Well there are the Supreme Ruler games... But I would say the naval war in them is even worse than in Pdox games. Like way, way worse.

 

[Average Manatee]

Historical lethality rates mighty not be desired but historical composition should be. As it is half the ship classes are entirely useless, even detrimental to produce.

 

[Vaarna_Aarne]

Even there you have kind of a big question mark in regards to how to balance that, since this is a game about numbers first and foremost, so unless you have a way of turning numbers advantage upside down you have to operate around that.

In that sense, it would probably be better to instead of a classed tree of boats (or worse, the monstrosities from BICE) it might be beneficial to have even just a rough ship builder where you cull the number of ship classes and instead present the player with means to make their own around a baseline determined by cost and maybe some "naval tradition" value that explains why the Japanese are building absurdly oversized Yamato class battleships instead of more modest deviations from baseline. Maybe even have it kind of a fleet-wide factor that makes you gravitate towards a certain kind of navy, I dunno.


The issue really shouldn't be "how to make historical composition mandatory" rather than "how to make every ship class useful, and remove superfluous ones." One example of this I feel is the kind of a whipping boy of ship classes, heavy cruiser. And on topic of historical composition, the other problem I feel is that there's only two kinds of naval battle before numbers are pitted against one another: One in open waters, and one where other side has 1000+ ground-based fighter planes et al supporting them. That's generally the thing I feel as mentioned before, because there is no genuine phase of maneuver and preparing for battle with possible outside factors coming in to play, you end up in a situation where there's exactly two kinds of fleet: Submarine Horde and the carriers+battleships task force.

Another problem is naturally balancing how fast a navy can be built against player agency, if you'd want historical naval sizes you'd have to severely restrict player agency, which is a non-starter IMO because it's a game not an educational tool about navies of WW2. So the crux of the solution has to be how to make naval warfare more involved without it adding more busywork, which is why I'd figure some sort of decisive battle system around challenging control for waters around whatever would be ideal for a more indepth system so it happens in focused bursts of activity where the rest of the game is on hold rather than on top of everything else.

 

[GarfunkeL]

One problem in modelling naval warfare is that doomstacks are historically accurate. That is, until carriers came along. The goal was to concentrate your ships against a lesser number of enemy ships and to pound them into submission. Battle cruisers turned out to be useless because they couldn't withstand the damage of being in the battleline while not being significantly faster or cheaper than battleships. Light cruisers were the scouts of battleships, not actually meant to fight. Heavy cruisers were division leaders, merchant raider hunters, and show of power ships at colonial stations. Finally, destroyers were the screening escorts of battleships. Each main class had a reason for its existence and a role to play. Unless your naval combat model simulates that to a sufficient enough detail, you might as well not bother. HoI just places the ships in two lines and has the ships semi-randomly shoot at each other, with distance between ships decided by admiral skill, weather and ships speeds. Which sounds fine on paper but is not actually what naval combat in late 19th century and early 20th century was.

 

[AwesomeButton]

It still cracks me up that after 3 expansions and numerous patches, nobody in Stockholm bothered to ever check whether the ground defence value on airplanes actually did anything. Players found it out after TFH had come out and people did some serious testing thanks to introduction of piercing/armour values and one guy decided to include airplanes. He found out that ground defence stat of the planes is actually not properly called when determining the defence value of a air unit against ground fire.

Things like this are why I've stopped giving money to this company, except for EUIV expansions when they drop to 50% off.

I think Patrician III had actually nice naval combat gameplay/minigame, can't testify for its historical accuracy.

 

[Turtle-Zone 3000]

Just wondering what HoI4 mods are being worked on, I uh havent got access to that board on the paradox forum.
I definately know Kaiserreich is one of them.

 

[Raghar]

One problem in modelling naval warfare is that doomstacks are historically accurate. That is, until carriers came along. The goal was to concentrate your ships against a lesser number of enemy ships and to pound them into submission. Battle cruisers turned out to be useless because they couldn't withstand the damage of being in the battleline while not being significantly faster or cheaper than battleships. Light cruisers were the scouts of battleships, not actually meant to fight. Heavy cruisers were division leaders, merchant raider hunters, and show of power ships at colonial stations. Finally, destroyers were the screening escorts of battleships. Each main class had a reason for its existence and a role to play. Unless your naval combat model simulates that to a sufficient enough detail, you might as well not bother. HoI just places the ships in two lines and has the ships semi-randomly shoot at each other, with distance between ships decided by admiral skill, weather and ships speeds. Which sounds fine on paper but is not actually what naval combat in late 19th century and early 20th century was.

Last gun naval battle was naval engagement between Chinese and Viet-Namese. When Viet-Namese two Frigates and two Corvettes attacked four Chinese corvettes.
Viet-Namese thought they would have it easy when two theirs ships had basically twice as much tonnage than Chinese corvette, and they bought a Frigate with radar controlled guns from US. But, theirs radar controlled guns had mailfunction, and crew didn't exactly trained manual aiming. Result was one Viet-Namese ship sunk. One Chinese ship moved to shallows until they would douse fires and patch it up to ensure it would stop leaking, and one Chinese ship with engine damage where Chinese said they used smoke screen. Well perhaps smoke from engine was accompanied by smoke screen. The smoke was heavy.

Viet-Names ships ran away with one surviving rear facing canon still shooting to dissuade Chinese ships. Two Chinese ships pursued them heavily. But then they reconsidered because other chinese ships needed support and considering holes in hull, captain didn't want to stress it and unnecessary lose ships for few Viet-Namese who were running away.

Well, the strange part of that was, shortly before the action S. Vietnamese officials had sudden outbreaks of moving from one city to another, moving to airport, or important meeting combined with phone failures. For some reason nobody from officials who were originally supposed to give them permission to engage Chinese was accessible.

 

[Space Satan]

About war weariness rework

Here is what's going to happen: There will be a (opt-in) beta patch containing the change that removes forced status quo. This will give everyone a chance to test it and see whether or not it's actually adequate to ensuring every war isn't to the death. If it turns out to indeed be inadequate to the task, we will look at it again and likely make further changes.

 

[Vaarna_Aarne]

Just wondering what HoI4 mods are being worked on, I uh havent got access to that board on the paradox forum.
I definately know Kaiserreich is one of them.

Well there's quite a few of them, Kaiserreich is just the proverbial 800 pound gorilla in the room. BlackICE is the other big one, but there's also Millenium Dawn (which suffers from the usual problem with modern day scenarios that they aren't willing enough to get into lurid and crazy alt-history instead of following the BORING real history of events after 20XX), The Great War, Road to '56, and a whole bunch of other stuff. Looking at the Workshop, some demented bugger has put in the work to make a Lord of the Rings mod. Plus the expected projects of a new Fallout mod, and the hardly surprising existence of at least one zombie apocalypse mod.

 

[IHaveHugeNick]

The real question here, is whether it is even possible to make engaging and historically accurate WW2 naval combat. Barely any naval action happened in both world wars, if real life was boring and stale, how can the game be different?