Cool I guess?
It would be pretty funny if they dont fix the naval bomber spam, and on DLC release ships are still worthless.
I am keen to do a UK game so waiting for this to release. If they havnt given a date yet is it any chance to be this year?
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Hearts of Iron IV - The Ultimate WWII Strategy Game
- Thread starter GarfunkeL
- Start date
Cool I guess?
It would be pretty funny if they dont fix the naval bomber spam, and on DLC release ships are still worthless.
I am keen to do a UK game so waiting for this to release. If they havnt given a date yet is it any chance to be this year?
IHaveHugeNick
Arcane
- Joined
- Apr 5, 2015
- Messages
- 1,870,164
The problem with naval bombers is early in the war few people realized their potential. But we as players are well aware of it. So I'm not sure how you could "fix" them without making things completely ahistorical at the same time. It ain't players fault that naval strategists of the era were dumb and invested enormous fortune into fleets that ended up being obsolete within couple of years.
True but there is always concessions that must be made between gameplay and realism (that awful B word). And my goodness they sure cut a lot of realism out of this game, at least on release, we can now see them slowly adding it back in, fuel, more complex command structure etc. Not sure if I can complain its for $$$ as this stuff seems to be free.
But I think they underestimated how braindead their audience is, some people enjoy complexity and realism. There was no need to make Hearts of Iron into babys first WW2 game, there are plenty of games on the market that have simplistic mechanics. (And there is nothing wrong with that. I just enjoy Paradox games because they usually go deeper.)
But I think they underestimated how braindead their audience is, some people enjoy complexity and realism. There was no need to make Hearts of Iron into babys first WW2 game, there are plenty of games on the market that have simplistic mechanics. (And there is nothing wrong with that. I just enjoy Paradox games because they usually go deeper.)
Space Satan
Arcane
Vaarna_Aarne
Notorious Internet Vandal
It would just be easier to not allow land-based aircraft on sea. Then at least you wouldn't have to worry about naval bombers being either too strong or too weak (since there is no middle ground in the matter, only two extremes).
Average Manatee
Arcane
- Joined
- Jan 7, 2012
- Messages
- 14,223
So, we're looking at 7-8 months to fix the bug that ruined carriers by making all of their aircraft die instantly as soon as a single land-based biplane wandered into their side of the ocean? Yeah that's normal.
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Space Satan
Arcane
DD Ship designer
New
Hello, and welcome back for another look at what is probably my favourite feature of Man the Guns: the Ship Designer. It has cost us a lot to make - sweat, tears, sanity (several members of the team now understand the “Poi” meme).
The stated goal of Man the Guns is to make the naval gameplay more involved and adding more depth to it by adding more roles that need to be covered and giving the player new tools to fill these roles. We also wanted to make sure that we had a system that could represent a wide variety of ship types with a minimum of clutter. Finally, we wanted the system to be as moddable as possible.
As many of you have concluded from Daniel’s little accident on stream last week, we have overhauled ship types to be ship hulls instead. The ship hulls themselves are basically empty containers with no combat stats. For simplicity’s sake they do contain stats like cruising range and HP (although they don’t have to!), but the rest of the stats come from modules.
(It should be noted that a lot of the numbers and the GUI you are about to see are not completely final so please keep your pitchforks pointing downwards and your torches unlit)
Every hull type has a limited number of slots in which you can fit these modules, and also restricts what type of module you can fit. So a Destroyer - now called a Light Ship Hull - can’t mount heavy guns or airplane launchers but can mount depth charges, whereas a Battleship - now called a Heavy Ship Hull - can mount airplane launchers and heavy guns but not depth charges. These slots come in two flavors - fixed and custom slots. Fixed slots are things that are either mandatory - like the engines - or shouldn’t compete with other things. All ships except submarines have a fixed AA slot, for example. You don’t have to fill that slot if you want your ship to be completely helpless against air attacks, but you can also only ever mount AA guns in that slot. Custom slots are much more flexible and allow you to tailor a ship to a specific role. Higher levels of ship hulls generally have more custom slots available.
Say you play Britain and have somehow ended up in a war against Germany. Submarines are raiding your convoys and you are desperate for new escorts. Under the old system, you built a bunch of destroyers at a fixed cost, maybe spent some naval XP to upgrade their ASW capabilities and that was that. Under the new system, you take an early (read: cheap) light hull and strip out everything you don’t need. That ship is going to operate in the middle of the Atlantic, far away from enemy air, and the opponent has no carriers, so it needs little, if any, AA. The enemy surface fleet hasn’t shown itself in years, so you can skimp on the gun battery and the torpedo armament to cut down cost. You also go with the most basic set of engines to keep the ship as cheap as possible - it doesn’t have to be fast to catch a submarine. Instead, you load the ship down with depth charges and sonar modules to track down enemy submarines. The goal is to make a cheap convoy escort that can be mass-produced.
However, Japan has been making aggressive noises recently and you expect to fight in the Pacific against enemy carrier battlegroups. So you start with a more more modern destroyer hull and add as much AA as it can carry to send it to help out Australia.
Unfortunately, you miscalculated and the Japanese are running swarms of cheap, disposable destroyers with lots of torpedoes and not much else, using their carriers in a defensive role to provide air cover. So you design a light cruiser with plenty of guns to annihilate the destroyers before they can do too much damage. It won’t be cheap, but it’ll give you the edge - once it is in service. Somewhere along the line you’ll also want to build up a carrier battlegroup or two of your own, and that means you’ll have to also look at cruisers and battleships for escorts as well as the carriers themselves…thankfully you have a number of old battleships and cruisers lying around that could be given a second lease on life by refitting them (details to come in a future dev diary!)
A lot of these considerations come down to cost. We played around a bit with the idea of having ship hulls provide an amount of tonnage and modules cost some tonnage, but in the end we found that it was easier to understand if the number of variables restraining a design was fairly small. While the system will allow you to build super ships with naval attack values that dwarf the values you can reach in 1.5.4, they will not be cheap and they will have some other areas in which they are weak.
The system also allows you to build a number of ship classes that have been requested a lot, without having to add new subtypes. A light carrier is just a carrier with fewer hangar modules (and thus considerably cheaper), an anti-aircraft cruiser is just a regular cruiser that mounts dual-purpose main guns (which perform somewhat poorly against surface targets compared to other armament options). A seaplane carrier is a cruiser that dedicates most of its custom slots to airplane launchers, giving it great surface detection at the cost of being bad at pretty much everything else.
For some ship types we made special hull types that give special capabilities. The Panzerschiff hull is available for Germany and is essentially a cruiser that mounts a single battleship-grade heavy battery module. Sweden and other nordic countries get a special Coastal Defense Ship hull, which is slower than a regular cruiser but can also mount a battleship gun. The German pre-dreadnoughts have also been given their own hull type, but here it is more a case of missing capabilities…Most of these are set at game start, but some are available as special rewards for completing certain focuses.
As you may have guessed, modules are unlocked by researching technologies. Most of these are in the new and revised naval tech tree which isn’t ready to be shown off just yet, but some are spread around other tech trees. Radar research gives you access, unsurprisingly, to radar modules, and researching anti-air in the artillery tree unlocks better AA guns to mount on your ships. Fire control computers are a side branch of regular mechanical computing machines.
Here is brief list of modules for each ship type, note that some of this will not fully make sense until you see the details of the naval combat rework that is coming in a future dev diary (™):
Light Hulls:
Cruisers:
Heavy Hulls:
Carriers:
Submarines:
As you can see, your light hulls will carry a lot of weight to provide defense against submarines, but can also be turned into quite potent AA units or nasty torpedo boats. Cruisers are meant to be very flexible and fulfil a variety of roles, from being essentially super-heavy destroyers with plenty of torpedoes and guns to being the poor-man’s capital ship or being large, fast minelayers. Battleships and Battlecruisers are separated by different armor schemes and not much else, but with heavy armor being both labor and resource intensive, perhaps some corners could be cut…
Carriers are now more flexible in terms of size, ranging from tiny carriers for a handful of planes all the way to 100+ plane supercarriers. That should make the entry into the carrier game somewhat achievable even for smaller nations. Submarines are still largely the same, but with some upgrades they can be very hard to find indeed and special submarines can lay as many mines as a dedicated minelaying cruiser for less cost and lower risk of detection.
While the ship designer window itself is going to be part of the DLC, the old naval tree you already know will simply unlock pre-scripted ship designs, and instead of the ship designer window you get the regular variant upgrade screen you are already familiar with.
Assuming that the Ship designer works out as we hope it does, we might expand the system to cover tanks and airplanes as well. Some of the backend was made with tanks and airplanes in mind, but we are mainly concerned with overloading the player with design choices during potentially hectic situations in the war (you are trying to micro the encirclement of 6th Army but you also need to design a new tank destroyer…). Ships have a long lead time so we expect you to have to design them less often.
That is all for the week. Next week we will talk a bit about what you can do with your old ships...and why you probably won’t be able to build min-max battleships on the first day of the game.
Hello, and welcome back for another look at what is probably my favourite feature of Man the Guns: the Ship Designer. It has cost us a lot to make - sweat, tears, sanity (several members of the team now understand the “Poi” meme).
The stated goal of Man the Guns is to make the naval gameplay more involved and adding more depth to it by adding more roles that need to be covered and giving the player new tools to fill these roles. We also wanted to make sure that we had a system that could represent a wide variety of ship types with a minimum of clutter. Finally, we wanted the system to be as moddable as possible.
As many of you have concluded from Daniel’s little accident on stream last week, we have overhauled ship types to be ship hulls instead. The ship hulls themselves are basically empty containers with no combat stats. For simplicity’s sake they do contain stats like cruising range and HP (although they don’t have to!), but the rest of the stats come from modules.
(It should be noted that a lot of the numbers and the GUI you are about to see are not completely final so please keep your pitchforks pointing downwards and your torches unlit)
Every hull type has a limited number of slots in which you can fit these modules, and also restricts what type of module you can fit. So a Destroyer - now called a Light Ship Hull - can’t mount heavy guns or airplane launchers but can mount depth charges, whereas a Battleship - now called a Heavy Ship Hull - can mount airplane launchers and heavy guns but not depth charges. These slots come in two flavors - fixed and custom slots. Fixed slots are things that are either mandatory - like the engines - or shouldn’t compete with other things. All ships except submarines have a fixed AA slot, for example. You don’t have to fill that slot if you want your ship to be completely helpless against air attacks, but you can also only ever mount AA guns in that slot. Custom slots are much more flexible and allow you to tailor a ship to a specific role. Higher levels of ship hulls generally have more custom slots available.
Say you play Britain and have somehow ended up in a war against Germany. Submarines are raiding your convoys and you are desperate for new escorts. Under the old system, you built a bunch of destroyers at a fixed cost, maybe spent some naval XP to upgrade their ASW capabilities and that was that. Under the new system, you take an early (read: cheap) light hull and strip out everything you don’t need. That ship is going to operate in the middle of the Atlantic, far away from enemy air, and the opponent has no carriers, so it needs little, if any, AA. The enemy surface fleet hasn’t shown itself in years, so you can skimp on the gun battery and the torpedo armament to cut down cost. You also go with the most basic set of engines to keep the ship as cheap as possible - it doesn’t have to be fast to catch a submarine. Instead, you load the ship down with depth charges and sonar modules to track down enemy submarines. The goal is to make a cheap convoy escort that can be mass-produced.
However, Japan has been making aggressive noises recently and you expect to fight in the Pacific against enemy carrier battlegroups. So you start with a more more modern destroyer hull and add as much AA as it can carry to send it to help out Australia.
Unfortunately, you miscalculated and the Japanese are running swarms of cheap, disposable destroyers with lots of torpedoes and not much else, using their carriers in a defensive role to provide air cover. So you design a light cruiser with plenty of guns to annihilate the destroyers before they can do too much damage. It won’t be cheap, but it’ll give you the edge - once it is in service. Somewhere along the line you’ll also want to build up a carrier battlegroup or two of your own, and that means you’ll have to also look at cruisers and battleships for escorts as well as the carriers themselves…thankfully you have a number of old battleships and cruisers lying around that could be given a second lease on life by refitting them (details to come in a future dev diary!)
A lot of these considerations come down to cost. We played around a bit with the idea of having ship hulls provide an amount of tonnage and modules cost some tonnage, but in the end we found that it was easier to understand if the number of variables restraining a design was fairly small. While the system will allow you to build super ships with naval attack values that dwarf the values you can reach in 1.5.4, they will not be cheap and they will have some other areas in which they are weak.
The system also allows you to build a number of ship classes that have been requested a lot, without having to add new subtypes. A light carrier is just a carrier with fewer hangar modules (and thus considerably cheaper), an anti-aircraft cruiser is just a regular cruiser that mounts dual-purpose main guns (which perform somewhat poorly against surface targets compared to other armament options). A seaplane carrier is a cruiser that dedicates most of its custom slots to airplane launchers, giving it great surface detection at the cost of being bad at pretty much everything else.
For some ship types we made special hull types that give special capabilities. The Panzerschiff hull is available for Germany and is essentially a cruiser that mounts a single battleship-grade heavy battery module. Sweden and other nordic countries get a special Coastal Defense Ship hull, which is slower than a regular cruiser but can also mount a battleship gun. The German pre-dreadnoughts have also been given their own hull type, but here it is more a case of missing capabilities…Most of these are set at game start, but some are available as special rewards for completing certain focuses.
As you may have guessed, modules are unlocked by researching technologies. Most of these are in the new and revised naval tech tree which isn’t ready to be shown off just yet, but some are spread around other tech trees. Radar research gives you access, unsurprisingly, to radar modules, and researching anti-air in the artillery tree unlocks better AA guns to mount on your ships. Fire control computers are a side branch of regular mechanical computing machines.
Here is brief list of modules for each ship type, note that some of this will not fully make sense until you see the details of the naval combat rework that is coming in a future dev diary (™):
Light Hulls:
Cruisers:
Heavy Hulls:
Carriers:
Submarines:
As you can see, your light hulls will carry a lot of weight to provide defense against submarines, but can also be turned into quite potent AA units or nasty torpedo boats. Cruisers are meant to be very flexible and fulfil a variety of roles, from being essentially super-heavy destroyers with plenty of torpedoes and guns to being the poor-man’s capital ship or being large, fast minelayers. Battleships and Battlecruisers are separated by different armor schemes and not much else, but with heavy armor being both labor and resource intensive, perhaps some corners could be cut…
Carriers are now more flexible in terms of size, ranging from tiny carriers for a handful of planes all the way to 100+ plane supercarriers. That should make the entry into the carrier game somewhat achievable even for smaller nations. Submarines are still largely the same, but with some upgrades they can be very hard to find indeed and special submarines can lay as many mines as a dedicated minelaying cruiser for less cost and lower risk of detection.
While the ship designer window itself is going to be part of the DLC, the old naval tree you already know will simply unlock pre-scripted ship designs, and instead of the ship designer window you get the regular variant upgrade screen you are already familiar with.
Assuming that the Ship designer works out as we hope it does, we might expand the system to cover tanks and airplanes as well. Some of the backend was made with tanks and airplanes in mind, but we are mainly concerned with overloading the player with design choices during potentially hectic situations in the war (you are trying to micro the encirclement of 6th Army but you also need to design a new tank destroyer…). Ships have a long lead time so we expect you to have to design them less often.
That is all for the week. Next week we will talk a bit about what you can do with your old ships...and why you probably won’t be able to build min-max battleships on the first day of the game.
Vaarna_Aarne
Notorious Internet Vandal
That does sound quite interesting, though it does raise some questions in regards to more unorthodox or experimental ships like Yamato and Shimakaze (though I figure given the Focus system, maybe those two should be special hulls and equipment for Japs).
The Brazilian Slaughter
Arcane
I want my Submarine Aircarriers!
Vaarna_Aarne
Notorious Internet Vandal
Well BICE already has the Sentoku class subs, albeit their carrier function is kinda useless (even besides the fact it's only two planes and you can't upgrade the count) since it's extra busywork to deploy the planes. On the other hand, I would argue the Hyuga class (they named the hybrid carrier converted Ise as Hyuga class after one of the battleships converted) was actually pretty boss in that even if I'm not entirely sure how the air wing stacking penalty and the hybrid carriers coincide (but main thing is that they fit nicely between Yamato and B-65 for capital ship lines because of their cost and capability to fight, and they had a decent air wing capacity).
(Of course it goes without saying that BICE ship upgrade system is broken as fuck)
(Of course it goes without saying that BICE ship upgrade system is broken as fuck)
They can probably mod this stuff so you can get all kinds of wacky designs?
This is a good addition to the game, its reminiscent of the old hoi3 research, and a hell of a lot better than the ridiculous system of experience giving you magical upgrade buttons. Can only hope they do expand it to tanks, planes, but of course heaven forbid we add complexity it could scare the casuals and/or slow down FUCKING multiplayer.
I am afraid it adds just one more way to hamstring the AI and make the game even easier, we have all seen how terrible vanilla AI is with production/templates, imagine it trying to build competent ships? But again this is an easy fix for mods by providing templates I guess.
I wish they would hurry up and give a release date, I have been waiting for naval rework since release so I can do proper Japan/Britain game.
This is a good addition to the game, its reminiscent of the old hoi3 research, and a hell of a lot better than the ridiculous system of experience giving you magical upgrade buttons. Can only hope they do expand it to tanks, planes, but of course heaven forbid we add complexity it could scare the casuals and/or slow down FUCKING multiplayer.
I am afraid it adds just one more way to hamstring the AI and make the game even easier, we have all seen how terrible vanilla AI is with production/templates, imagine it trying to build competent ships? But again this is an easy fix for mods by providing templates I guess.
I wish they would hurry up and give a release date, I have been waiting for naval rework since release so I can do proper Japan/Britain game.
Average Manatee
Arcane
- Joined
- Jan 7, 2012
- Messages
- 14,223
Funny, HoI4 gets more extensive ship customization than Stellaris.
Space Satan
Arcane
I hope there will be default designs because designing all ships from scratch will be pain in the ass. I mostly build battleships or carrier+screen stuff. Invading britain is the easiest with paratroopers if you can't spare huge invasion force. But now we may be able to field some supercarriers and superbattleships.
Vaarna_Aarne
Notorious Internet Vandal
The old HoI3 tech system was neither complex nor anything like even the basic equipment upgrade system from HoI4. Ultimately all you did was increase the strength of units ad infinitum as date penalties drop, and in anything you devoted yourself to you were always best off going wholehog. At most in desperate cases you might forego engine upgrades (just not with tanks, since tank techs had cancelable-penalties instead of just extra fuel cost like boats) but in every case where you could spare the Leadership, it was get all stuff because it was all desireable (since what "specialized equipment" meant in it was "gimped equipment"). What the HoI3 system was is basically the HoI2 and HoI4 tech tree with added busywork of splitting techs.
This is not to say there aren't problems in the extant upgrade system of HoI4, which too tends to have upgrades that are just plain better and upgrades that are there to act as a tax (generally Reliability), and it doesn't really encourage specialized equipment but improved equipment. Construct-a-boat system might be a good start for replacing TD/SPA/etc subcategories and instead make designing specialized equipment by hand a thing and possibly more desireable (or at least in case of tanks make terrain-specialized tanks). In case of smaller boats it should work since you have benefit from two or three types of destroyers that are specialized (AA, anti-sub, and torpedo), but in most other cases, since most other equipment does one job, it's very likely you will end up in a situation where one build is just plain better at the one job.
Thor Kaufman
Arcane
What do you mean, obsolete? In ship vs ship battle or generally?
First part is kind of irrelevant imo since it takes years to build ships, anyway. Unless you account for submarines which are easier to build maybe. Though tbf build times are ridiculously fast in HoI IV, even though at least in MP you can't really get ship upgrades AND build heavy ships in time for war, really. Not to mention that irl existing ships would be upgraded over the year (That would be a neat mechanic).
Haven't cared to look into the next DLC, seems to add unwanted complexity (for me and many others at least). Never liked naval at all, wonder how the fuel stuff will work out. I am pretty content with the supply map mode. Just adding another ressource like Endsieg mod would be stupid but if one could add fuel/other ressources reserves (like Tungsten for Germany) or stuff like that that would actually be pretty darn cool.
That would be pretty ahistorical (not like it matters). At least the Bismarck wouldn't be able to get sunk I suppose.
Just depends if you want to put the focus on naval battle which A LOT of players hate or keep it obsolete.
General debuff maybe or that Naval bombers can only operate with air superiority? Or power up Light Cruisers or Destroyers Anti-Air capability.
More variety is nice in general, wonder how the balancing will work out.
Also in MP it would make Japan a complete sitting duck (not like PDX cares about MP) if land based aircraft weren't allowed on water. Japan can't survive without Kamikaze.
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Vaarna_Aarne
Notorious Internet Vandal
Well the primary thing is really just that you don't really have a lot you can do to avoid thousands of land-based fighters and bombers effectively sealing an area where the only thing that can contest them is... Even thousandser counter horde of land-based fighters. It's really the only thing that would make sense from a gameplay perspective for airpower at sea if you want any semblence of balance. Otherwise you either have Light Cruisers and Destroyers with the ability to destroy all planes they come across, or you have the aerial horde rule the seas, there's no inbetween really. It's really entirely a gameplay consideration rather than historical (and I'd say gameplay > historical every single time).
(And yea, kamikaze mission is a whole other problem to add to the mess since it's either even worse than NBs or not worth it at all)
PS: Bismarck's critical blow to its rudder was struck by carrier-based Swordfish.
(And yea, kamikaze mission is a whole other problem to add to the mess since it's either even worse than NBs or not worth it at all)
PS: Bismarck's critical blow to its rudder was struck by carrier-based Swordfish.
Thor Kaufman
Arcane
Ah, I thought it was also land-based. Didn't know it was only carrier-based.
Anyway, great plane. Funnily enough it being made out of nothing but wood and cloth basically made it a perfect plane and way better suited than regular metal frame planes.
Anyway, great plane. Funnily enough it being made out of nothing but wood and cloth basically made it a perfect plane and way better suited than regular metal frame planes.
Vaarna_Aarne
Notorious Internet Vandal
IIRC, it's not even just naval AA that had these problems. IIRC only around 2-5% of aircraft lost during WW2 were caused by AA fire.
Also of note is that proximity fuses were not invented until much later in the war.
EDIT: PS: Btw, that channel has a really great video in regards to kamikaze attacks:
Also of note is that proximity fuses were not invented until much later in the war.
EDIT: PS: Btw, that channel has a really great video in regards to kamikaze attacks:
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IHaveHugeNick
Arcane
- Joined
- Apr 5, 2015
- Messages
- 1,870,164
Yeah, pretty much. As players we have benefit of advanced knowledge that big ships with big guns are about to be overtaken by aerial firepower, but naval planners before the war did not. Which means that if AI tries to play historical it is utterly hopeless. It takes a lot time to build capital ships, while the player can have a doomstack of naval bombers ready at the moment the war starts.
So I don't see any solution to this problem other than to make ahistorical adjustment and either make all the AI focus on carrier fleets from the start, or to just disable land-based naval bombers completely.
So I don't see any solution to this problem other than to make ahistorical adjustment and either make all the AI focus on carrier fleets from the start, or to just disable land-based naval bombers completely.
Vaarna_Aarne
Notorious Internet Vandal
Land-based fighters too, since even if they don't fight they disable carrier wings through sheer numbers. Not sure if they also spot everything.
The Brazilian Slaughter
Arcane
Why not gate naval bombers behind a fuckload of slow-to-research doctrines? Represents the fact that people didn't figure out how useful they were.
So you can research a proper fleet fast, or take a while and get naval bombers.
So you can research a proper fleet fast, or take a while and get naval bombers.
Vaarna_Aarne
Notorious Internet Vandal
Nah, that wouldn't work either. Either they're too good, or not good enough. Or they take too long to research, or not long enough. Middle ground is impossible.
The only real solution is to not have them at all.
The only real solution is to not have them at all.
Space Satan
Arcane
DD ship refits
Hello, and welcome back to another exciting dev diary about ship design!
As many of you noted last week, ship design in the interwar years was heavily restricted by the Washington Naval Treaty and the First London Naval Treaty. During and after the Great War, naval planners the world over were drawing up plans for new battleships that made use of new technologies, with ever bigger guns requiring ever stronger armor meaning increasingly large ships that were becoming even more expensive. At the same time, Britain and France were at the edge of bankruptcy from the debts they had accumulated during the Great War and could not afford another naval arms race with the fairly untouched nations of Japan and the US.
The result was the Washington Naval Treaty of 1922, which forbade any new battleship construction for a period of 10 years and restricted the maximum size of ships as well as their gun armament. In 1930, the signatories of the Washington Naval Treaty came together and negotiated the London Naval Treaty, which limited the construction of cruisers and stipulated strict restrictions on their size. In early 1936, the London Naval Treaty was up for renegotiation and that, as they say, was when the trouble started.
These restrictions forced the designers of warships in the interwar period to come up with some interesting compromises, and although we can’t possibly model all the interconnected ways in which these restrictions impact design - the Nelson class baffled American designers who were trying to comprehend why the British would build a ship like that - we did want to model some of the impact and also represent the diplomatic effects of the naval treaties.
All the signatories of the 1930 London Naval Treaty will start with a national spirit that restricts the maximum cost of their capital ships. As I said last week, we originally played around a bit with tonnage as a restricting value for ship design, and obviously this would have tied in neatly with the Naval treaties, but the design was changed later to instead focus on slots and construction cost. We also thought about simulating the restrictions in gun caliber etc. through restricting modules, but in the end decided against it because it would disincentivize the player to engage with the ship designer - imagine researching a new heavy battery and then finding out that you can’t install it because it would violate the treaty! It still means that in ship design, you can’t just build the best possible ship on day one as the cost restrictions are quite harsh.
When you start the game in 1936, you will notice a mission ticking down reminding you that the Second London Naval Conference is currently underway. If you don’t decide to bail, you will automatically sign the Second London Naval Treaty. Bailing from the treaty is at first only available during the London Conference, costs some political power, but less for fascist nations. However, fascist nations can stay in the treaty and later decide to cheat use creative accounting to measure the true displacement of their ships, which means they have reduced restrictions while, presumably, lying through their teeth when asked about the curiously large cruisers they are building (the Head of Ship Design for the Royal Navy during the 1930s once remarked that the other side was either building their ships from cardboard or lying when presented with the official numbers for a new cruiser!).
Once world tension hits a certain level, the decisions to leave the treaty are once again available for everyone. Should any country have left the treaty, either during the initial conference or afterwards, a timer starts ticking down for the remaining countries that activates the historical “escalator clause”, which will ease the restrictions slightly, allowing even the signatories of the treaty to build more powerful ships. As a fascist country you therefore have an incentive to stay in the treaty, as it will restrict your opponents more than it restricts you while denying them the escalator clause.
If a country outside the treaty reaches a certain percentage of the British size in capital ships, they can be invited into the treaty. Should the nation decline and continue to expand their navy until near parity, the treaty nations can try to force them to disarm up to 80% of the number of capital ships. A refusal to disarm may lead to war. If a signatory nation exceeds the allocated amount of capital ships, they immediately get a mission to reduce the number of capital ships, at the threat of major stability loss.
So you will probably want to make sure you have the most capable ships you can as you are quite limited in numbers as well as size. One of the more annoying parts of the old variant system was that a capital ship might well be obsolete by the time it hit the waves, with no chance of ever being modernized. It made even less sense in the context of the ship designer, where the upgrades between the ship classes were supposed to be more gradual. Enter the refit feature, which will allow you to upgrade your ships and otherwise tailor them better to your needs as the situation changes - from upgrading the AA on your battleships to removing one of the torpedo sets on your destroyers to make room for more depth charges.
All modules have a production cost, of course, but in addition they can (and usually do) have a conversion cost as well as a dismantling cost. The conversion cost determines how much it costs to, well, convert that module from another module. This means that it is usually cheaper to upgrade, say, Anti-Air from Level 1 to Level 2 than it is to rip out the rear turret and put some AA in there. There are some exceptions to this, mostly for historical immersion: upgrading the engines is a major effort that historically required very long yard times (you basically have to cut open the hull to get the old engines out and get the new engines in, then patch it up), so it is almost always not worth it (upgrading the engines on an old battleship gets you about 2 knots of speed at the cost of a modern light cruiser), but we wanted to give you the option. As a general rule, it is never cheaper to build a lower tier and then refit to something more modern.
If there is no specific conversion cost scripted in, you have to pay the dismantling cost for the old module and the construction cost of the new module. Modders will be pleased to hear that you can script in dismantling resource costs so you can actually gain resources back from scrapping certain components.
To refit a ship, you create a variant and then select the ship you want to refit, then order it to refit to that variant. The ship will detach to go to the nearest naval base and become an item in the production queue with a few special mechanics: because it is technically still on the map, it can be bombed and damaged, which reduces build progress. If the province it is in is overrun by the enemy, it will be captured and may end up serving your enemies.
You usually can’t refit between ship hulls (so a 1936 destroyer can only be refit to other 1936 destroyer variants), but otherwise you have a lot of freedom on what you can refit into what and are only really restricted by cost (for historical examples, see the Japanese Mogami class becoming heavy cruisers after being built as light cruisers). A special case are carriers, where cruiser and battleship hulls can be converted into certain carrier hulls. These are generally not as capable as purpose-built carriers, but if you have some old ships lying around…
Lastly, some of you have noticed that one of the German ships we showed last week looked a little different. The Admiral Scheer is at game start the Pride of the Fleet for Germany, giving Germany a small (5%) war support bonus and the ship itself some bonuses to defense against critical hits (ahistoric in case of HMS Hood, certainly) and bonuses to experience gain. It also has some interesting synergy with admirals that have the Media Personality trait: they will gain bonuses when commanding a fleet with a Pride of the Fleet in it.
Assigning a ship as Pride of the Fleet is free if you don’t have one already. Changing your Pride of the Fleet costs some political power (and presumably makes the crew of the old one very sad, you monster). You can only make a capital ship the Pride of the Fleet, and you should choose wisely - losing it gives a painful penalty to war support for a while.
That’s all for today, remember to tune in at 1600 hours for our stream, when we will show off some gameplay for Mexico!
As many of you noted last week, ship design in the interwar years was heavily restricted by the Washington Naval Treaty and the First London Naval Treaty. During and after the Great War, naval planners the world over were drawing up plans for new battleships that made use of new technologies, with ever bigger guns requiring ever stronger armor meaning increasingly large ships that were becoming even more expensive. At the same time, Britain and France were at the edge of bankruptcy from the debts they had accumulated during the Great War and could not afford another naval arms race with the fairly untouched nations of Japan and the US.
The result was the Washington Naval Treaty of 1922, which forbade any new battleship construction for a period of 10 years and restricted the maximum size of ships as well as their gun armament. In 1930, the signatories of the Washington Naval Treaty came together and negotiated the London Naval Treaty, which limited the construction of cruisers and stipulated strict restrictions on their size. In early 1936, the London Naval Treaty was up for renegotiation and that, as they say, was when the trouble started.
These restrictions forced the designers of warships in the interwar period to come up with some interesting compromises, and although we can’t possibly model all the interconnected ways in which these restrictions impact design - the Nelson class baffled American designers who were trying to comprehend why the British would build a ship like that - we did want to model some of the impact and also represent the diplomatic effects of the naval treaties.
All the signatories of the 1930 London Naval Treaty will start with a national spirit that restricts the maximum cost of their capital ships. As I said last week, we originally played around a bit with tonnage as a restricting value for ship design, and obviously this would have tied in neatly with the Naval treaties, but the design was changed later to instead focus on slots and construction cost. We also thought about simulating the restrictions in gun caliber etc. through restricting modules, but in the end decided against it because it would disincentivize the player to engage with the ship designer - imagine researching a new heavy battery and then finding out that you can’t install it because it would violate the treaty! It still means that in ship design, you can’t just build the best possible ship on day one as the cost restrictions are quite harsh.
When you start the game in 1936, you will notice a mission ticking down reminding you that the Second London Naval Conference is currently underway. If you don’t decide to bail, you will automatically sign the Second London Naval Treaty. Bailing from the treaty is at first only available during the London Conference, costs some political power, but less for fascist nations. However, fascist nations can stay in the treaty and later decide to cheat use creative accounting to measure the true displacement of their ships, which means they have reduced restrictions while, presumably, lying through their teeth when asked about the curiously large cruisers they are building (the Head of Ship Design for the Royal Navy during the 1930s once remarked that the other side was either building their ships from cardboard or lying when presented with the official numbers for a new cruiser!).
Once world tension hits a certain level, the decisions to leave the treaty are once again available for everyone. Should any country have left the treaty, either during the initial conference or afterwards, a timer starts ticking down for the remaining countries that activates the historical “escalator clause”, which will ease the restrictions slightly, allowing even the signatories of the treaty to build more powerful ships. As a fascist country you therefore have an incentive to stay in the treaty, as it will restrict your opponents more than it restricts you while denying them the escalator clause.
If a country outside the treaty reaches a certain percentage of the British size in capital ships, they can be invited into the treaty. Should the nation decline and continue to expand their navy until near parity, the treaty nations can try to force them to disarm up to 80% of the number of capital ships. A refusal to disarm may lead to war. If a signatory nation exceeds the allocated amount of capital ships, they immediately get a mission to reduce the number of capital ships, at the threat of major stability loss.
So you will probably want to make sure you have the most capable ships you can as you are quite limited in numbers as well as size. One of the more annoying parts of the old variant system was that a capital ship might well be obsolete by the time it hit the waves, with no chance of ever being modernized. It made even less sense in the context of the ship designer, where the upgrades between the ship classes were supposed to be more gradual. Enter the refit feature, which will allow you to upgrade your ships and otherwise tailor them better to your needs as the situation changes - from upgrading the AA on your battleships to removing one of the torpedo sets on your destroyers to make room for more depth charges.
All modules have a production cost, of course, but in addition they can (and usually do) have a conversion cost as well as a dismantling cost. The conversion cost determines how much it costs to, well, convert that module from another module. This means that it is usually cheaper to upgrade, say, Anti-Air from Level 1 to Level 2 than it is to rip out the rear turret and put some AA in there. There are some exceptions to this, mostly for historical immersion: upgrading the engines is a major effort that historically required very long yard times (you basically have to cut open the hull to get the old engines out and get the new engines in, then patch it up), so it is almost always not worth it (upgrading the engines on an old battleship gets you about 2 knots of speed at the cost of a modern light cruiser), but we wanted to give you the option. As a general rule, it is never cheaper to build a lower tier and then refit to something more modern.
If there is no specific conversion cost scripted in, you have to pay the dismantling cost for the old module and the construction cost of the new module. Modders will be pleased to hear that you can script in dismantling resource costs so you can actually gain resources back from scrapping certain components.
To refit a ship, you create a variant and then select the ship you want to refit, then order it to refit to that variant. The ship will detach to go to the nearest naval base and become an item in the production queue with a few special mechanics: because it is technically still on the map, it can be bombed and damaged, which reduces build progress. If the province it is in is overrun by the enemy, it will be captured and may end up serving your enemies.
You usually can’t refit between ship hulls (so a 1936 destroyer can only be refit to other 1936 destroyer variants), but otherwise you have a lot of freedom on what you can refit into what and are only really restricted by cost (for historical examples, see the Japanese Mogami class becoming heavy cruisers after being built as light cruisers). A special case are carriers, where cruiser and battleship hulls can be converted into certain carrier hulls. These are generally not as capable as purpose-built carriers, but if you have some old ships lying around…
Lastly, some of you have noticed that one of the German ships we showed last week looked a little different. The Admiral Scheer is at game start the Pride of the Fleet for Germany, giving Germany a small (5%) war support bonus and the ship itself some bonuses to defense against critical hits (ahistoric in case of HMS Hood, certainly) and bonuses to experience gain. It also has some interesting synergy with admirals that have the Media Personality trait: they will gain bonuses when commanding a fleet with a Pride of the Fleet in it.
Assigning a ship as Pride of the Fleet is free if you don’t have one already. Changing your Pride of the Fleet costs some political power (and presumably makes the crew of the old one very sad, you monster). You can only make a capital ship the Pride of the Fleet, and you should choose wisely - losing it gives a painful penalty to war support for a while.
That’s all for today, remember to tune in at 1600 hours for our stream, when we will show off some gameplay for Mexico!
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