I would love to see you speculate about how to make naval combat better in games like Hoi. One thing that could also really help Hoi is to make managing Navies easier, cause even after Rule the Waves it's still not great. A system like in Stellaris where you can basically order ships to be build from the navy management screen would significantly help make it less tedious
you overlooked Shogun 2 Fall of the Samurai (and also base game) Real time battles, kinda fun, important for the land war (unless you wanna constantly recapture your backline provinces and have all your costal cities bombed to shit), also naval artillery support in land battles is awesome
Hoi4 naval-wafare logic is lowkey funny: UK: Why are you spreading see-mines in international waters (British channel), Italy? Italy: *E T H I O P I A*
Well the naval production in game is much less than real life, to prevent a certain nation from spamming 20 carriers in a month, also lag. But paradox seems to be on a big reworking path, maybe we’ll get some major naval update in the next Japan or us/uk dlc. Also ai dumb as hell
I actually really like naval combat in hoi4. The main problem is that most nations cant access it due to it taking years to build one capital ship. And those that do usually do one or two engagements and the side that loses has no navy forever.
That's my favorite part about rule the waves. In a lot of games you can avoid ending up in a really horrible crisis once you're good enough, but that's also the most exciting part of the game.
and then on the opposite side, you have 30,000 ton battlecruisers tanking enough damage to make Yamato blush for no reason other than their godly damage control crews
In return in Victoria 3 it is impossible to protect your convoys, because you'd need to deploy fleets to all 100 sea zones your convoys go through, requiring you to micro 100 fleets.
Not really, in Vicky 2, you can ignore blockades because war exhaustion doesn't really do that much. Vicky 2 MP groups have to impose a rule that if you hit 100% war exhaustion you have to surrender which makes blockades incredibly useful. In Vicky 3? Blockades and convoy raiding will actually kill your economy. It used to kill oversea armies too but then they made it so armies don't get maluses if there isn't any convoy to supply them.
@@blank2.0 RGO output can be ignored because the magical world market will mostly save you. Militancy is desired so you can pass reforms. Even if it gets to the point that you get constant rebel stacks, you won't be threatened because the stacks have shit tech and numbers unless you're a big unciv nation like Sokoto or China and still haven't gotten civ status yet. It's not as game ending as in Vicky 3 where a death spiral from being convoy raided to death actually exists.
Hoi4 naval combat players can be separated into 2 types: 1: I have built a giant fleet of warships to fight my enemies! 2: My navy? It's all subs and torpeto bombers.
9:16 yeah, exactly the problem of the most strategy games - you either don’t need the navy, or you win/loose a single big engagement and you don’t need a navy anymore
I mean I am an Eu4 channel, so I have to do it in a way that is understandable to someone who hasn't played Hoi4; and if you are a Hoi4 enjoyer, you don't need an explanation :)
@@albaniaalban in the modern day, yes. But Scania and Norway are the like biggest reasons for why Sweden and Denmark have fought more wars than France and England. Denmark lobbied outrageous tolls on anything crossing into the Baltic for a very long time since they controlled the entire entrance. Also Denmark frequently launched raids of southern Sweden from "eastern Denmark", which includes Scania. But hey, newsflash Denmark, if you bathe Stockholm in (just suppressed rebellion) noble blood, when you promised not to in the peace treaty someone who survived might actually win their turn on the rebellion machine. Not that Gustav Vasa was a so much better king or anything but still.
- Adding a good naval system usually equates to coding a second game, at which point the obvious question is "does this double the playerbase?" You'd also probably be better off releasing a standalone game as there will be a lot of overlap between "I like grand strategy games set in " and "I like naval wargames set in ". - Simulating naval warfare is more suited to the RPG-adjacent genre. Look at the battle of the Nile. Nelson searches the Mediterranean fog of war for most of the campaign time, then has a battle where half the fight is getting shot at while navigating the shallows to close, and the other half is at anchour pounding each other with artillery. So you basically want something to compress that fog of war exploration, while still being interesting. You're basically looking at something resembling FTL. - The "I want navy" crowd is split between true to life simulation of the strategic impact of naval warfare, and those who imagine naval warfare to be the 'Fast and Furious, but with boats' swashbuckling they saw in Pirates of the Caribbean etc. You'll never simultaneously please both, which possibly alienates more players than you gained by putting extensive navy content into your existing game.
I mean, that’s not exactly true, is it? The real life battles which EU4’s combat system are based on would last for a few days at most, with some of that being maneuver into one or a couple engagements and someone orders the retreat or breaks. But we have battles that if properly reinforced can last for months, because that meshes more properly with the rest of the game and gives the player something to do. It’s entirely possible to fudge these things for the purposes of gameplay.
Which means statistics are important part of the entire thing, I can't stress this enough but analysts are a very important part of game development (assuming demographics are included of course) That "swash buckling fast and furious 4 fanbase" can be, after all, consist of nothing but children who can't buy the game, which an analyst can find.
My favourite by far naval combat from both a tactical and a strategic perspective has to be Shogun 2 Fall of the Samurai. There is a big incentive to actually use your navy because you can use powerful and really cool naval barrages in land battles or to just damage enemy buildings or armies on the campaign map and the battles themselves are really fun and a big improvement over the honestly just frustrating and quite buggy ships in Empire or Napoleon. Also nothing beats getting a single western ironclad and then just demolishing all the simple wooden ships your enemies throw at you. The visual spectacle of the naval battles is exactly what it’s supposed to be.
I think the biggest issue is that a navy either completely obliterates the enemy or is completely obliterated by the enemy. Land battles wouldn't be very fun if a unit got deleted the second it lost the battle
@@LemonCake101and it shouldn't be, in hoi4 its only a stackwipe if you fuck it up, same with ck3. While victoria 3 never has stackwipes as its combat system doesnt work that way. So while there should be an element of decisiveness, it shouldnt be "oh one battle and everything is dead".
That's how naval combat works, either there's a massive battle but neither side commits to it and thus there are limited losses. Or both sides commit or are forced to commit and one or both sides take heavy losses. The battle of the Falkland Islands saw British Battlecruisers wipe the floor with the German East Asia Squadron suffering only dozens of dead in return for sinking two armored cruisers and two light cruisers; meanwhile the battle of Jutland failed to inflict serious losses on either side despite three British battlecruisers exploding. Conversely Midway saw the destruction of 4 Japanese fleet carriers in a pitched battle and essentially stopped Japanese advances across the Pacific.
My main issue with the Vic3 Naval system is that devastating defeats... aren't devastating. Rebuilding a destroyed fleet only means hiring back the servicemen and officers, which becomes pretty trivial with the Enlistment Effort decree, and actually gets faster, not slower, with late-game training PMs when you start getting past wooden ships and into ironclads, battleships and dreadnoughts. There's also no economic simulation of actually needing time to build ships. The most you're ever paying is the ongoing maintenance cost of your peak fleet size, which erases the defining aspect of "capital" ships: requiring a huge up-front investment of capital to build in the first place. And since they did the thing where navies get forced back into home port once all their admirals are defeated, navy is borderline meaningless outside of multiplayer. Because the AI is terrible at Navy organisation and defeating them becomes trivial once you figure out how to use a navy doomstack or two to defeat enemy fleets in detail. And even then there's barely any long-term impact to a nation's military capabilities from suffering crushing naval defeats, because any GP or even MP is easily able to afford rebuilding their navy during the truce.
@@artemisfowl7191 yeah its the unfortunate reality of naval combat. Its like taking a land battle between two teams of 40 people each, where each person takes 2 years to replace
My ideal naval system would be more about logistics than anything. Planning supply lines, capturing specific ports, cutting deals with local tribes, trying to negotiate naval treaties with other nations, planning raids on eachother. Most combat is designed around a permanent presence and front lines or stack warfare, but naval battles are a lot more vague and need to be a lot more abstracted. Id much prefer if they were redesigned to essentially be supply lines than stack warfare or whatever hoi was trying to do
I like concept of HoI with hidden fleets, scouting, trade warfare. It might not be balanced or work well but core ideas are much better then other strategy games. Even RTW sucks in this regard with dropping ships into theater and rolling dice if your fleet will spawn on one of another side of English Channel.
Space strategy games are all about naval combat, since all of space is essentially an endless ocean with small planet islands. And in these games it's fun because it's important. In land-based strategy games, the fleet will always play a secondary role in relation to the army, transporting it from one piece of land to another or helping in sieges.
One Total War game that I liked the Naval Warfare game was Fall of the Samurai. You've got that transition period of going from Wooden frigates to armored steam ships, and you could control your ships in formation to try and blow up your enemies. The Explosive shot there made it really fun to see wood ships explode. Also, if we dip into a different genre of games, Assassin's Creed Black Flag had great naval warfare where you'd shoot at enemy ships and then board them to try and take it.
Opinion before watching the video: Naval combat is lame for many people because it operates funamentally differently to most other forms of combat, so to make a game that makes naval combat fun will either drive away a broad playerbase who will likely be bored or overwhelmed by it, or drive away the core base of naval war history fans who would be dissapointed with the lack of accuracy or depth
My favourite part of eu4 naval combat is GB. I fought a series of 6 battles agains the GB navy and finally caught them with a low maneuver admiral and broke their navy while losing 30 heavy ships. Only to realize their actual navy was busy beating up Denmark and hadn’t even noticed me.
@@BigMatthew_ The French left, after losing, so the Italians surrendered. Granted, this was after, 21 years of siege, and the Venetian Naval dominance FINALLY being broken after those 21 years of Naval re-supply.
@@Zivilin the military camps cost a lot of high level resources, they barely do anything and their near impossible to heal despite there being dedicated military healing resource. to make camps fight you just put them in range of each other and it takes half an hour for a battle to actually conclude
while combat in general isnt the focus in victoria 3 and it shows in the way naval combat works, they actually do blockades right. Getting blockaded in vic 3 when u have a bunch of colonies will destroy ur economy and make your people mad, could lead to a revolution, it will make your subjects mad and probably make them revolt or their people revolt against them if not. To the point that its often worth it to white peace or even surrender on wars u could eventually win to avoid the economic damage, sadly the ai doesnt take this into account at all, and will let their economy be destroyed to not white peace cuz they could theoretically still win.
Also, another thing Vicky 3 fixes is the fact that getting your fleet sunk isn't the end of the world. In hoi4 if you get your fleet sunk, it is over, things will start snowballing and you'll never recover the navy. But in Vicky 3 you'll recover it and it isn't the end of the world.
The problem with naval combat in Paradox games it's not about the mechanics themselves, it's about the abysmal interfaces for it. Users have zero control, zero flavor and it's overall very poorly designed for how I see it. Let's take HoI4 as an example: admirals and generals have a similar interface that works way differently, hence offputting the beginners, which then tend to never learn. The fleet control it's way overcomplicated for what it brings to the table, no point and clicking like one can do to micromanage the armies but they have to select the task. The tasks are fairly complicated to get especially to beginners to identify the one they need in every specific situationm meaning it's harder for them to assess the naval situation they're in and the one they want to reach via what task. For how oversimplified and boring in EU4 it is, at least you can deathstack heavy ships and galleys to reach your objective if you don't know any better. In HoI4 one wrong move against the UK or US and your game is toast.
Blockading in EU4 does also increase war exhaustion, and devastation while tiny does kill prosperity which can really hurt the economy of the target. I agree it's not game ruining but I think a true navy that is game ruining might be super unfun to be a little guy.
In civ, you can’t “ignore navy in peace” unless you keep all your troops and cities very far inland. Ships can bombard tiles 2 tiles inland, and even further with promotions and battleships. Ships are generally tougher and faster than ranged land units that can oppose them. This also means invading someone by land when they have an uncontested navy is very difficult.
Even though it might be a lot to implement, I think the way to solve it would be to tie trade to ACTUAL "ships" and "caravans", not just an arrow that indicates the direction. That would solve most of the economic problems. Sea tiles should also be much smaller (because it's not true that in one day a ship docked in St-Petersburg can join a battle on the other side of the Gulf of Finland or that 3 ships from Satander can block all trade in the Bay of Biscay up until La Rochelle) and make battles more determined by luck, so that you can partially break a blockade or a siege of a navally superior nation at times but they will probably win on the long run due to the numbers
What you really want is to be able to assign warships to a trade node, a bit like piracy. And it would reduce trade power in that node significantly, for only people you are at war with, depending on the number of your ships compared to your enemies. So if you and your enemy both have 10 ships at the same tech level, trade isn't impacted a lot. But if it were a 50 to 5 ratio that has a much larger impact. Equally, the ships could still behave like "Hunt enemy ships" so your ship's combat ability does matter since there will be naval warfare. In short, a proper naval wartime raid system, which was one of the key reasons countries invested in a navy: to harrass enemy merchant fleets.
Coming from a mainly HOI4 perspective but this same problem applies in many other games too, Navies are expensive, take a long time to make, are often quite costly to use if they have a fuel requirement as HOI4 has, take a lot of research to start making and take a lot of construction time due to the needed infra they use, docks and naval dockyards. First off, navy fights are over fast, there is no real chance to understand if you did something well or not, it just happens, Paradox tried to make navies not just disappear when they reworked the system last time but navies are still very much focused on 1 to 2 big fights per war at best, so if you spent 4 years building a navy and it sinks in one fight, its quite hard to understand why this happened, what you could do better next time and the biggest problem, if you spent the whole game focusing on your navy and it sunk, you have just wasted all of the game as you can´t really use a shitty navy as you can use a shitty army. next, navies have low amounts of uses in general, for HOI4, navies are mostly there to counter the enemies navy, outside of that they do little, you can just change your trading partners in most cases, as long as your not a colonial empire convoys are not needed for anything, if you really need to do a naval invasion even a moment of naval superiority from a shit starting or stolen navy is enough, naval bombardment is quite weak and affects only the tiles next to sea tiles, there is no effects from having superiority over the waves out right, even if you can use naval bombardment to your advantage not all navies are made to use that mechanic as light attack contributes a lot less to it than heavy attack. The Joke in HOI4 where "I have 1 million hours and don´t know navy" is not really about how navy is the most complicated thing ever, its how learning it is wasted time compared to how useless it is, someone could learn to make the best navy and during that same time another would have spammed submarines and naval invaded UK with them or used naval bombers or any of the many alternatives to a navy.
I think the biggest problem is that the most realistic mechanic is supply lines, which is extremely hard to make work properly and be fun. A UK fleet should, in some way, be weaker the further away from the home islands it is, like you just can't afford to have a doom-stack over a certain distance away, but even getting basic mechanics like fleet basing to work right in EU4 were never successful, let alone how complicated this system would have to be.
Well EUV might be able to clear up some of those issues - having a game where materiel is critical - and plenty of types exist so that you don’t just build a single type of refinery building - could make trade impact from blockades and convoy raiding a lot more powerful at least
Honestly for me in hoi4 more of a problem with navy is that ships don't listen to you and have to by babysit all the time. You loose battle now you have few ships that don't want to leave repair for next 4 years and new ones take also 4 years to build
considering that trade will be fluid in eu5 I have really high hopes that naval force will take a mugh higher role in there since blockades actually will block the trade flow not only to coastal provinces but also to inland provinces. I'm really want it to succeed in making naval warfare enjoyable
The most dangerous navy I've ever encountered in a game of EU4 manifested from me smashing Spain's light ship fleet so thoroughly that they had over 100 naval limit open for them to build their newest heavy ships. Gave me some severe whiplash when I saw them come at me with 60 new heavy ships.
An underrated civ like game in terms of combat systems is Humandkind it actually has a compelling 4x navy game. Trade is a ridiculously important part of the game and blockades not only stop the flow of resources but actually steals them which is like getting sent to the stone age or being blasted to the moon. Land units are ridiculously vulnerable to light ships so they need even a tiny bit of protection to prevent disaster. Having a navy is extremely important to prevent or exploit this so pumping out as many fast long range scout ships for naval control of the big oceans. However there are also capital ships which are eye watteringly expensive (like 12 turns and -7 pops to make) as well as way slower and more with less sight range. The advantage tho is that they kick ass and light ships cant get close without imploding which means they assert a ridiculous amoint of naval domination while lacking control. Becuase retreating is easy and ships trade damage evenly battles arent usually decisive (unless you get corned in a gulf) and theres room for maneuvering. Collosal naval battles are actually exciting rather than being eyeroll wow cool doomstack bigger number win. I guess i find it frustrating that humankind s extremely simple 2 ship types and real consequences system is infinitely more understandable and engaging than any paradox title.
big irony here is that the one paradox game thats main focus is naval combat (technically) is stellaris, and even then its a very shallow system. you take the designing system of hoi4 and put it on a map as restrictive as eu4. the resulting system is satisfactory, but id hardly call it good.
@@Shuraigekisen the deciding factor is still mostly in factors outside of combat. there is little player input in actual battles, you just command your ships to engage enemies and let the battles play out. you have no input on precise ship movements during a battle.
@@cosmosyn2514 So is ground combat in grand strategy games, you tell your troops to move to a place and if there's enemies they fight on their own but you yourself has no say on how that battle plays out outside of before battle preparations
@@Shuraigekisen the maps in stellaris range from as restrictive to even more restrictive as EU. much of the strategy and depth in games like HOI4 and EU4 comes from maneuvering your troops in rather open maps. that is not present nearly to the same degree in stellaris.
@@cosmosyn2514 Just because you can't maneuver one fleet in battle doesn't mean you have no input on the battle, the restriction from hyperlanes mean you can plan around that and have a close quarter fleet in position to beat a fleet that should have a range advantage, environmental hazards can completely turn the table against a superior fleet that isn't built for it, hyper relays mean you can bank on an elastic defense if you're careful with them, once jump drives and gateways are thrown in the mix it gets even more complex as you can literally have raid fleets to take over an enemy gateway and then have fleets go in through the gate you just seized to cause chaos in their lines, and I'm not gonna open the can of worms that is cloaking as that alone enables guerilla strategies HoI4 could only dream of
I want to like naval combat in PDX games. I have standalone naval games in my Steam library and Rule the Waves is enticing me. But the fundamental shortfall is that all of these games at the end of the day are map painters and you need someone to actually go on the ground and plant the flag. No matter how good you make the naval mechanic, when armies are the only way to achieve the final goal, that's all that ends up mattering.
It is not about naval combat itself, it is about navy being integrated with other gameplay aspects. Normally it would be far easier to ship 10 tons of rice from lets say India to Basra port than moving that rice on land from Basra to Baghdad. Game doesn't model transportation differences.
it might not be that bad but as you stated in the video naval combat is overshadowed anyways, i just make naval bombers instead. ever since they introduced the ship designer it just became a lot more clutter to try to figure out and finding the component researches that are relevant is just terrible
In all seriousness, land combat is probably actually harder than naval combat in hoi4, because you have things like defense and breakthrough. The problem with hoi4 navy is that ships take for ever to build
@@hanneswiggenhorn2023 yea exactly, if your a japan player and you lose navy to usa in MP, you will never be able to get contest navy again bc of how long it takes to build ships lose your carriers? have fun waiting till 1946 to get 1 more out
I think a decent small little change to indirectly buff blockades would be to make the Reduce button for War Exhaustion unclickable while at war, thus enabling a naval power to economically cripple an opponent over time. Still, it's slow going though. On top of that, I suppose there could be a harsher ramp-up of the devastation and WE based on the percentage of land blockaded. That's all just tweaking numbers that already exist. A REALLY crazy idea could be devastation overflow, where 100% devastated provinces spread any additional devastation they would accrue evenly among neighboring provinces. This would be vaguely realistic while still simple enough to be feasible in EU4. After all, Institutions work similarly. This would mean that if you blockade France long enough, eventually Paris WOULD begin to accrue devastation. My ideal system would be one where devastation from blockades would scale up with target's WE, enabling blockades to do serious damage in a span of a few years vs doing almost nothing, while also not being entirely trivial for the naval player. This has been a tired ramble.
Naval battles do work well in Supreme Commander. They're a distinct and important aspect of the game (if the map you're on has significant bodies of water), a little slow on large maps but devastatingly powerful. There are specialist anti-naval and anti-air ships but these primarily exist to protect the artillery ships, which can obliterate bases or armies on land from relative safety. Land forces can't really counter ships in any way unless they get too close to the coast by accident, and air forces need overwhelming power to be effective - so the best way to counter a navy is with a navy of your own. You can theoretically get by just with air power to cross water but it's terribly inefficient and more vulnerable to both static and mobile defences - massed air attacks that just consist of air very frequently end up being mostly or entirely suicidal, meaning if you don't achieve your objective then you've not only wasted all those resources but also given the enemy the opportunity to reclaim the wrecks of your aircraft. Navies, on the other hand, are often able to retreat from engagements as long as they are not severely out-powered by the enemy. There are some amphibious units, but it's also pretty easy to counter them when they do arrive on land because they lack versatility, and they are extremely vulnerable to navies. Navies also of course have longer range - planes will run out of fuel and slow to a crawl in SupCom if they don't have an air staging facility nearby, but ships have no fuel mechanic so you can safely send them on long-term operations far from home.
At 9:05: there already is a rule that naval bombers arent good unless theyre on a carrier. They literally get 10x the stats when on a CV in a naval battle
0:39 bruh the other day I was doing a vic2 France run and had a navy full of cruiser and battleships, I dont remember the numbers but my 1000 naval supply limit was on edge, and lost to Britain who had a navy made of man'owars and commerce raiders, utterly nonsense
Hoi4 naval combat can be pretty fun in MP, and the dopamine hits... oh man, if only i didn't win 90% of the time due to the small problem of being one of the few people who see this video and know exactly what the hit chance graph means.
This is a very creative visualization method which despite not requiring too much effort (not to say its easy, you just dont have to draw your own visuals) still captures the attention. Nice work!
I've really enjoyed the naval battles in the total war games 'rome total war 2' and 'fall of the shogun' The first one focussing on early to mid-time classical naval battles and the latter just in that sweetspot of pre-ironclad transistioning into ironclad naval warfare. The problem with those is that they are packed inside a game that might not be completely what people like about naval warfare. Making a full game with those golden age total war game mechanics but focussed on naval warfare might actually be a perfect naval game
Rule the waves is such a time sink for me, I'll start playing at dinnertime and stop at breakfast. It's so obscenely nice to get good fire control on a new super dreadnought, and I'll just play until I get to test it out, what's the harm? Oh, carriers? Well, they'd be fun to use in this war, so I'll just play until I do a strike on a ship. Oh, it's 1930 and I can actually build good planes and I go further and further for eight hours at a time staring at spreadsheets
Not someone who has played HOI4 or EU4, but as someone who *has* played WoWS, WT Naval, and likes WWII naval history, I think the essence boils down to: Navy is nothing like land combat, but we have to make it for land players. Deathballing? That was a real thing. That was why the Dreadnought arms race in WWI happened, as at that time there was realistically no way to stop a fleet of Dreadnought Battleship and Battlecruisers from destroying everything you loved except making your own. A lot of Torpedoes could theoretically sink a Battleship, but not enough to prevent them from continuing on and destroying the ports of call and decapitating the enemy. And because of how the seas work against smaller ships, a Battlecruiser was faster than a destroyer was. Come Jutland, the fleets were miles long lines of capital ships and the sub-capitals which did show up were utterly obliterated by the massive number of guns presented. Frontlines? They do not exist for 20th century navies. Not in the typical sense of armies meeting along long stretches of land. Warship presence is vastly outsized by the ocean, and even when aircraft become prominent a frontline is really more of where the CAP radii overlap. A land army can make a frontline from one end of the continent to the other, but warships have never been able to stretch so far across while staying operationally capable. So along with what you said in your video, this creates a problem for wargamers. Naval combat asks for things that "land lubbers" absolutely loathe. In fact, I point to Battleship (yes, the board game with red and white pins) as the game most accurate "feel" to real naval combat. Because the vast majority of your time is spent trying to guess where the opponent is, punctuated by a few moments of everything exploding and the advantage flipping dramatically with a few lucky strikes. Lastly, being good at naval combat, and indeed being good at naval strategy, sometimes needs a thorough understanding of the technology behind a ship and abstract forms of warfare. Something very untraditional for land warfare which has had relatively consistent rules throughout history. An example you didn't have, but I think exemplifies this exactly is a game called Highfleet. In Highfleet, you have to know elementary basics on code breaking, course and heading estimation, ELINT, Radar concepts, IR analysis, and delegation between the fleet and task forces. All of this has been made very basic and easy to learn by the uninitiated, but it throws people off for how much it's nothing like StarCraft or Company of Heroes. You spend the vast majority of your time in the dark and the energy of the game is carried through tension. And I have seen a lot of HOI4, EU4, CK3, and Stellaris players take one look at Highfleet and "feel overwhelmed by the UI". Something that I find just a little funny, as I have no idea how they navigate their games either.
I really love Rule the Waves. I personally am not someone that cares much for graphics and that game delivers a lot on the mechanics front. I recently played as the US and went from 1890 to 1960 (I think a few years beyond that even) before I stopped. I usually don’t go much beyond the 40s because I wasn’t a big fan of missiles. I forced myself to just do it and ended up having a blast learning more of those mechanics. I will say though, submarines are probably the single worst part of that game imaginable. I honestly think not having them would be better than how it currently is. Also, it’s fun when you build coastal defenses that come in super clutch. For example, I was playing as Austria Hungary and built a couple motor torpedo boat squadrons that ended up sinking 4 old Italian predreadnaughts (like 16,000 tons) and 2 extremely fancy battle cruisers (like 27,000 tons).
@@antonisauren8998 I did not screenshot it sadly. This was the third country I played as and I didn’t understand how miraculous that was. It was also kinda funny since I couldn’t even see a single thing that was happening. I just got a slough of “UNSIGHTED struck by torpedo” and was greeted with an amazing post battle screen.
Honestly, the issue with navies in EU4 is that they could be fun because you don't necessarily only need them in war, but also for things like privateering. If you are fighting in multiplayer that can be useful, because you are effectively crippling the economy of another player. But against AI that has all sorts of cheat to compete with you anyway? Is like pissing on a fire to snuff it out. Economic damage against an AI nation is nowhere near as effective as against a human player, which makes navy really only useful to stop Barbary Coast pirates and war, which is way more boring than land warfare.
I really wish someone would take the E:TW concept, now that CA seems to have lost the plot, take everything good, and improve it. I preferred E:TW’s naval battles over N:TW’s, as they were more responsive and didn’t take way more effort than land battle. Make the map global. Allow units to be upgraded as time and tech pass, eg smoothbore muskets, to rifled muskets, to breach loading rifles Improve diplomacy, trade, and just about everything else in the game.
Interestingly enough Churchill was said to have found the Battle of the Atlantic the most scary as it was a "dark battle of statistics", could Britain bring in enough food and war materials to keep from being starved into surrender each week and could Germany sink enough convoys to starve Britain into surrender each week. Granted I didn't find Hearts of Iron IV naval warfare very fun in large part because I didn't find Hearts of Iron IV very fun (I did a video about it in 2022 so I won't bore everyone here). There might be something in the way "fleets" are done in Stellaris that could be of help; larger and more expensive fleets put a greater economic drain to build and maintain and so building smaller fleets has its merits of being able to whittle down larger forces as well as how fleets facilitate invasions and coastal bombardments (perhaps Hearts of Iron IV could attach armies to actual fleets like in previous games where Transport Ships were used to land forces on different shores and EU IV could implement smugglers to run past blockades and have blockades reduce trade income in the country of the blockaded port (not as much as the port itself but the more blockaded ports the more it adds up)). While there is not an easy solution, since naval combat needs to be impactful enough on the main game to be worth bothering with but not to bog the whole game down with "busy work" for a part of the game that will effect players less the less oceanic they are. I also wonder if Hearts of Iron could benefit from having blockades act as a ticking capitulation timer (the more complete the blockade the faster it gets) to simulate a population becoming frustrated with the lack of incoming commodities which would require society modelling as there would need to be social, economic and military solutions to this problem; cultural efforts which entrench the understanding of the cause in the minds of the people (social), replacement of lost imports with domestic production (economic) and breaking the blockade (military) to make the game feel more dynamic than just a matter of a few battles and its all over or waiting for a blip of green. But many of these things would need to be balances and trade offs to avoid any one strategy becoming overpowered.
@@LemonCake101 That is a good point and few games have both naval and space combat (Empire Earth's Art of Conquest expansion and the Supreme Commander Series are the only ones which springs to mind). I wonder if there is a good way to make the naval game more interesting, perhaps if marine operations were a thing they'd elevate the meaning.
Civ6 has cool but rather strange naval combat with weird meta. For example scouts are useless from mid game, on land. On the seas it's a unit with bigger range that doesn't take a tile of Naval unit, so you bring your scouts from stone age and keep them in the navy to scream at you if there are Spaniards nearby. Also the fact that there a practical no defensive terrain also means if you winning an initial engagement you most likely steam roll the war. Honorable mention, depending on the map the navy might be utterly useless and there a civ's who are unbeatable on the sea, like Indonesia, Spain, Japan has a good defensive bonuses on the sea and Portugal practically tied to the sea. So if you play as Gaul or Aztec you are guaranteed to lose there. and the last meta build is to keep as much grand admirals as you can, even so their basic bonuses won't work on upgraded units you can use them to level up any ship, and there are two particular grand admirals that can win you entire wars, one creates and armada from your ships and the second one gives you free ironclad even if you haven't researched it. SO while everybody fights with caravels you bring a veteran armada of ironclads that crushes everything on it's way. Also Civ6 is more dynamic on land than civ5, because there a lot more attacking options and because on later stages of the game it's better to unite your units into the Corpses and Armies that have one tile instead of three separate units.
9:00 it's in the game, naval bomber from carrier does 4 times the damage than land based ones 7:3015:18 this reminds me of the naval idea of "all or nothing", you put max armor on vital parts of the ships and none on non vital parts, much like you either win very hard or lose very hard
I genuinely want a mod where Genoa is actually able to doomstack their navy off the coast of the fort in Genova and have that massively slow the siege progress to a crawl even the whole diplo mana to reduce siege progress could be fun potentially, as long as it costs enough mana to not be frustrating for the player (like >100 per 20% progress reducting potentially, plus scaling) would make naval actually mildly relevant for once
I only am really familiar with hoi4 single player so I will say that navy in hoi4 isn't complicated. Quite the opposite actually it follows the Tf2 engineer principle, use a gun, and if that don't work use more gun. I think the main problem is it's just irrelevant, for good ships with a lot of attack say a battleship it takes at least a year and given the size of the British and American navies you can't hope to match the allies in the axis and if you're fighting the axis there's no point. Navies take a long time to build especially good ones which is the problem with hoi4 because it has such a short timeframe only 10 years most of the time, after that the game usually becomes a slog with too many units and variables to keep track of that starts to chog the game. Regardless of what happens navy just won't be useful because Britains is too large to counter
I was playing Hoi4 mp once and saw that my destroyers weren't doing anything about the convoy raiding in a certain region, I look over and see that one battle just wasn't ending, I click it and I see my destroyers fighting a group of submarines, but because they couldn't detect the submarines and since neither ship could attack the other (torpedos can't hit screening ships Ig?) they were just hanging out in a random spot in the ocean for an entire year.
Empire: Total War does a pretty great job of adding a fairly simple yet important naval game onto its army conquest and region management game. Also, if you want Rule The Waves but you’re not a fan of Windows XP, your next option is Ultimate Admiral: Dreadnoughts; it ain’t perfect but it’s good enough for what it does. Just don’t pay for the multiplayer.
For me the in hoi 4 navy is ”not important, very expensive but fun to obliterate navy” it’s simply some thing for majors that would fights someone with a giant navy so you could have a small fun screenshot where you have 3 cruisers sunk and enemy… EVERYTHING, it’s faster then navbombers so if I have time I would do it( oh and mp of course and flex that I understood how navy works)
The pacific theater dynamic your described is basically historically accurate though "I'm gonna build up a crazy huge fleet and oh no the Americans sunk it"
1:19 I really don’t know why TW don’t make naval combat any more. They did it really well in Napoleon and the only problem was that they never managed to make it important enough and make the AI to actually build a navy to challenge the player
They tried for Shogun 2... it was very frustrating. Engagements were slow and tedious and autoresolves completely out of whack. Also, you can capture enemies ships. Meaning, if you lost a battle or autoresolve, your enemy now owns up to half your fleet. That was definitely one of the worst aspects of the game.
Because without extreme care, naval combat outcomes are decided as soon as combat is joined. An exception I don't see mentioned in Empire At War, which has space combat that is effectively naval. There's also the problem that true naval warfare always happens on flat, open terrain, much less interesting that terrain analysis that drives tactical or strategic decisions on land combat.
> The issue with boats is that they're expensive and battles are decisive, meaning you don't build a navy to rule the seas you build a navy to win like two naval battles. Mahan summarized in one sentence 😂
I think what Hearts of Iron needs, is to show how: -finding ships at sea is difficult -coordinating a large fleet is difficult -supplying a large fleet is difficult -and because of the middle two points, fleets tend to fan out into many smaller task forces, and engage eachother over long distances in many parallel battles. Especially carriers during WW2 Translated in game terms -one should need to employ scout task forces, scout planes and eventually radar, to be able to reliably find and engange the enemy. Also, more naval battles should be inconclusive, or not a lopsided victory. The defeated side being able to slip away if the enemy scouts are engaged or dead. -the positioning malus should be much harsher for less experienced admirals and ships. Battleships also need a similar malus to carriers, as in too many battleships in the same battle causes a decrease in effectiveness. Even if good admirals and experienced ships should increase the limit. -ships should have a larger impact on a port supply -the currect way fleets work, needs to be redone. Right now, a single admiral can cover multiple fleets even in two different oceans, say if you are the US and must fight in the Pacific and Atlantic both. So instead of having one admiral command a fleet composed of multiple carrier groups, battleship task forces, scouting and sub-hunting detachments. One admiral commands all capital ship containing fleets. Another all scouts. Another all escorts. Etcetera. It should be possible for naval AI to spread the same fleet over a couple of nearby sea tiles, then converge on an enemy if found, possibly engaging in parallel naval battles
The only game I’ve played where the naval combat was better than the land combat is Star Wars Empire at War. It doesn’t have a lot of the problems that you listed for games like hoi4 or eu4
@@LemonCake101 I would say space navy is still more like maritime navy than air force (unless you go by really low tech hard sci-fi). But it is true that in an Interstellar sci-fi setting the (space) navy is the main important branch with the army as auxiliary, much in the reverse of EUIV/HOI4/Total War. (40K is a massive exception to that, being ground focused due to the origins of the franchise but I would guess that if you had a large scale integrated grand strategy game in 40K practicality would make navies more important than ground forces (I mean, Star Wars could be argued either way but the original comment already points out how Empire at War is more focused on the navy))(the only paradox game with more important navy than army being Stellaris the space game is perhaps illustrative in this).
EaW was so surprisingly good for a space navy game - the naval game placed warships into multiple tiers of heaviness with different incentives and disadvantages to pursuing either small craft-focused, medium or capital warship strategy (and unlike literally every other Star Wars property it placed small fighter craft properly in a hierarchy and provided destroyer-grade light warships to effectively counter them). Some of the mods for Forces of Corruption really refined the concepts too, and made it more viable to play inside the normal weaknesses of each faction (allowing Empire to go big on torpedo boat-grade fighters and bombers, allowing Rebellion to do better big gun cruisers, etc.) while also helping deal with the (at this point fairly noticeable) older design aspects of the game.
Even though it’s actually about flying bricks, I’ve always felt that Highfleet is the best naval game (for a modern navy). It does a really good job showcasing the intelligence and electronic warfare aspects of naval combat.
There is a conspiracy in game development to make naval combat suck to focus on land battles upon a planet that is overwhelmingly water with historical consequences for success or failure upon the waves. Total War: Empire is one example.
@@gokbay3057most mods make trade essential, you can go from making 20k an end turn to bankrupt if you get blockaded, of course the ai rarely does this and the ai is hardly effected by bankruptcy...
Ironically one of the better non-total spreadsheet games for strategic naval use was Civilization 4 with the Beyond the Sword expansion... Every city had a discrete number of trade routes it could support, which the game would automatically create between domestic and international cities that the city could successfully reach, and because of harbors and especially customs houses, the sea trade was worth significantly more than land trade. Also, resources weren't automatically hooked into your cities but had to path to and from each city successfully - so if you landed on a new continent and settled a colony anywhere but on the coast, you literally would have access to none of the resources of the rest of your empire until you hooked it up to another city on the coast (not necessarily yours - you could receive goods through friendly open ports as well). The important thing was that ships could blockade ports, which kept the tiles under blockade from working but just as importantly could stop all trade through any sea tiles. Blockading all of a rival nation's cities could therefore be extremely financially damaging if they had a lot of sea cities or did a lot of overseas trade, and blockaded islands could lose access to literally the rest of the world's resources, causing their cities to become unhappy, unhealthy, starved, and unable to build any contemporary units. Unfortunately that complexity mostly seems to have been removed in Civ 5, and navies went back to being tools of fighting cities directly or protecting transports rather than economic warfare, and the same was true in Civ 6.
@@LemonCake101 UA:Dreadnoughts and UA:Age of Sail are of the kind where you only control the navy. In Age of Sail you fight in a set campaign via the selected story from the menu in which you earn, buy and steal ships throughout. You can hire Captains for each ship as best intended for its role within your fleet, upgrade your ships specifically for said various roles, choose the cannons (type and number), the number of crew members, with which you can also make landings, and designate the guns the crew each use in land battles and boarding actions. There are also terrain factors like height, wind speed and wind direction which massively spice up each battle. In UA:D, you choose a date and nation for the campaign, you design and build the ships yourself throughout while riding both your nations politics and economics (which, while you can't control, you can make suggestions on to your nation's government) to fight in naval battles and conquer the world. You can also gain the ships, territories and money of other nations as war reparations if you defeat them in war. not that you'd really want to take their ships cause the ai can't design decent ships to save its life. UA:D, rather unfortunately, is quite buggy with plentiful frame drops and the ship designer screen (arguably the main focus of the game) turns even a decent pc into an actual oven. The devs also seem obsessed with attempting to fix the same set of bugs that keep cropping up every 4 or so "updates". Not even kidding, they actually repeat in the devblog time and time again. Most others are mostly just "minor balancing tweaks" so getting actual new content is somewhat rare. Other than the glaring issues though, it is genuinely extremely replayable, or at least more so than UA:AoS, with its long 70 year span of tech development and the randomness of the ai. UA:AoS. However as a "naval warfare" game and a solid gaming experience UA:AoS is much, much better than UA:D
Simply put, on a strategic level, naval combat is not interesting for the reason you described; historically, ships only saw a few engagements, and those engagements were decisive. Moreover, those fights did not happen very often because there was almost always a clear predicted winner, and the loser could just refuse battle. Tactical naval combat is fun, between manuever, weaponry, and firing arcs, but is outside of the scope of a strategy game. On the other end, logistical naval coordination is fun. Its enjoyable to design ships in HoI4 or Stellaris if you know what you're doing. But getting too into the weeds here would also be out of scope for a strategy game, which is why games like Rule the Waves exists. Thats why strategic games, at least historical ones, will probably never have interesting naval combat. The games that come closest tend to be ahistorical space games like Stellaris and GalCiv because they can make the battles more frequent and less decisive. You could probably do something in other ahistorical genres as well.
To find out why navy sucks in games, one needs to ask why countries have navies in the first place. If your game doesn't model transportation, logistics and trade well enough, navies gonna be useless. We use ships to carry bulk cargo around. Thousands time more than a land vehicle can move. If there's no difference between moving goods with ships or with land, why bother navy?
I really love HOI4 naval gameplay honestly but I also agree with all your criticisms on it. It struggles with balancing and simplicity. I hope in a future HOI5 they overhaul naval gameplay. I'd really love to have fleets be smaller in scale so decisive battles hit the same with carrier battles like Midway, but you don't lose entire fleets in one battle. Also adding better supply systems to make blockades more impactful.
Creative Assembly nearly perfected naval combat over the course of Empire through Fall of the Samurai, then somehow blew it so hard in Rome 2, they axed the feature entirely.
For a more impactful and fun naval gameplay every mentioned game should have fully reworked economy and trade model. Because, historically, navy was a toy for superpowers or insanely wealth countries only, so, in eu4, for example, it would be simple: either you go colonial and make profit or die.
Bro, Hoi4 navy shit is just "Build superheavy. Ship go boom boom. Unga bunga.". Like, if u have maybe 2 or 3 decent superheavies, the british navy is just gone. Like, ceases to exist. But of course easiest strategy is laying 6000 mines in the bloody english channel or chesapeake bay.
I feel the main reason for most games is that naval combat is an afterthought. Compare that to Sid Meier's Pirates, where the exact opposite happens. An rpg, not a strategy game. You control a single ship, and the naval combat is quite fun because it is the main focus But it also has land battles, which are significantly less developed
Personally I think total war Napoleon has good navy features, but that could just be because I love the slight chance for a ship to be completely obliterated in one volley
Naval combat sucks bc it is bad. Simple. Tbh large scale naval engagements always sucked IRL too. Most of them was decided by weather or positioning before they started, or were multiple day long chaotic messes like during the Punic wars.
Want to discuss the video? Do so here: discord.gg/pb5b33YTpB
I would love to see you speculate about how to make naval combat better in games like Hoi.
One thing that could also really help Hoi is to make managing Navies easier, cause even after Rule the Waves it's still not great.
A system like in Stellaris where you can basically order ships to be build from the navy management screen would significantly help make it less tedious
you overlooked Shogun 2 Fall of the Samurai (and also base game)
Real time battles, kinda fun, important for the land war (unless you wanna constantly recapture your backline provinces and have all your costal cities bombed to shit), also naval artillery support in land battles is awesome
Hoi4 naval-wafare logic is lowkey funny:
UK: Why are you spreading see-mines in international waters (British channel), Italy?
Italy: *E T H I O P I A*
this is actually a part of a strategy for the world record roman empire forming run in hoi4 btw. (or at least it was at one point)
@@nathaniel1207not to mention that if ever the capital is encircled the rest of the nation loses supply instead of the other way around.
@@jamescawl6904i don't think it does anymore, tho capitals have nearly unlimited supply
@@jamescawl6904 No that was removed 2-3 years ago.
In fairness what makes naval suck for some nations HOI IV sucked for them IRL. The US and UK were destined to rule the waves by 1943
3 hours watching hoi4 navy guides, 2 hours designing perfect ships for everything, 1 minute of naval combat.
When you build the perfect naval composition only to be bombed into oblivion by Naval Bombers 😔
Why make big ship when you make big plane to kill big ship.
Well the naval production in game is much less than real life, to prevent a certain nation from spamming 20 carriers in a month, also lag. But paradox seems to be on a big reworking path, maybe we’ll get some major naval update in the next Japan or us/uk dlc. Also ai dumb as hell
I find the fuel consumption of ships in Hoi 4 problematic. It's easy to make a wrong click that can drain your fuel reserve in a few months.
I actually really like naval combat in hoi4. The main problem is that most nations cant access it due to it taking years to build one capital ship.
And those that do usually do one or two engagements and the side that loses has no navy forever.
Rule the Waves 3 makes me want to tear my hair out, when you see your, nearly, perfect ship die, because your sailors forgot how to fight a fire.
Maybe if they spent less time drilling sailor drills and more time volunteering at the local fire brigades, you would have done better.
That's my favorite part about rule the waves. In a lot of games you can avoid ending up in a really horrible crisis once you're good enough, but that's also the most exciting part of the game.
Battle of Tsushima moment
and then on the opposite side, you have 30,000 ton battlecruisers tanking enough damage to make Yamato blush for no reason other than their godly damage control crews
Moskva moment
Victoria 2 and 3 are the only paradox games where blockades can actually kill your nation
Ironic, arguably one of the worst naval combat systems in paradox games produces the most realistic grand strategic results.
In return in Victoria 3 it is impossible to protect your convoys, because you'd need to deploy fleets to all 100 sea zones your convoys go through, requiring you to micro 100 fleets.
Not really, in Vicky 2, you can ignore blockades because war exhaustion doesn't really do that much. Vicky 2 MP groups have to impose a rule that if you hit 100% war exhaustion you have to surrender which makes blockades incredibly useful.
In Vicky 3? Blockades and convoy raiding will actually kill your economy. It used to kill oversea armies too but then they made it so armies don't get maluses if there isn't any convoy to supply them.
@@shellshockedgerman3947yes because the total collapse of your RGO output and insane ticking militancy is ‘nothing’
@@blank2.0 RGO output can be ignored because the magical world market will mostly save you. Militancy is desired so you can pass reforms. Even if it gets to the point that you get constant rebel stacks, you won't be threatened because the stacks have shit tech and numbers unless you're a big unciv nation like Sokoto or China and still haven't gotten civ status yet.
It's not as game ending as in Vicky 3 where a death spiral from being convoy raided to death actually exists.
Hoi4 naval combat players can be separated into 2 types:
1: I have built a giant fleet of warships to fight my enemies!
2: My navy? It's all subs and torpeto bombers.
3: What navy? You mean supply ships?
@@alexturnbackthearmy1907 Fair.
I love building the biggest navy in the world as czechoslovakia and still beeing unable to get supremacy in the north sea lol
9:16 yeah, exactly the problem of the most strategy games - you either don’t need the navy, or you win/loose a single big engagement and you don’t need a navy anymore
It’s scary how accurate that describes napoleons navy being destroyed.
This is caused by navies having no other use than destroying other navies. Naval gameplay is not integrated well into other systems.
@@kagtkalem7115 its also used to transport the army. Playing sweden or poland or the such and invading france from the coast can save a lot of time.
@@robertharris6092 ai don't need it, they can march from france to vietnam using military access.
@@kagtkalem7115 i never said anything about the AI. Being able to attack from 2 different directions at once is useful.
Explaining hoi4 naval combat by using Eu4 Icons and UI is just sooo weird
I mean I am an Eu4 channel, so I have to do it in a way that is understandable to someone who hasn't played Hoi4; and if you are a Hoi4 enjoyer, you don't need an explanation :)
@@LemonCake101many hoi4 enjoyers do not understand the naval mechanics lmao
I have 1200 hours of Hoi4 gameplay and have NO idea how the navy works@@LemonCake101
@@liambeirowski4680 I have 700 hours in hoi4 and i know how navy works, seriously? It isnt that hard dude.
@@liambeirowski4680 sadly 4000 hours now and i still fuck up with navy (exception is naval invasion which is quiet easy)
Swedes couldn't give Danes anything that could make them happy.
Wait true!
Love how Danes and Swedes are united in their disinterest in Skåneland lol
I cant march my troops over the ice to lay siege on Copenhagen, and Sweden is only overpowered, that show that Paradox simp for the evil Danes.
@@albaniaalban
I think it should, naturally, go to the Belgians
@@albaniaalban in the modern day, yes. But Scania and Norway are the like biggest reasons for why Sweden and Denmark have fought more wars than France and England. Denmark lobbied outrageous tolls on anything crossing into the Baltic for a very long time since they controlled the entire entrance. Also Denmark frequently launched raids of southern Sweden from "eastern Denmark", which includes Scania. But hey, newsflash Denmark, if you bathe Stockholm in (just suppressed rebellion) noble blood, when you promised not to in the peace treaty someone who survived might actually win their turn on the rebellion machine. Not that Gustav Vasa was a so much better king or anything but still.
- Adding a good naval system usually equates to coding a second game, at which point the obvious question is "does this double the playerbase?" You'd also probably be better off releasing a standalone game as there will be a lot of overlap between "I like grand strategy games set in " and "I like naval wargames set in ".
- Simulating naval warfare is more suited to the RPG-adjacent genre. Look at the battle of the Nile. Nelson searches the Mediterranean fog of war for most of the campaign time, then has a battle where half the fight is getting shot at while navigating the shallows to close, and the other half is at anchour pounding each other with artillery. So you basically want something to compress that fog of war exploration, while still being interesting. You're basically looking at something resembling FTL.
- The "I want navy" crowd is split between true to life simulation of the strategic impact of naval warfare, and those who imagine naval warfare to be the 'Fast and Furious, but with boats' swashbuckling they saw in Pirates of the Caribbean etc. You'll never simultaneously please both, which possibly alienates more players than you gained by putting extensive navy content into your existing game.
And you have to perfectly balance both sides or one will get completely ignored by loudest meta players.
second type of naval fans can go to hell tbh
I mean, that’s not exactly true, is it? The real life battles which EU4’s combat system are based on would last for a few days at most, with some of that being maneuver into one or a couple engagements and someone orders the retreat or breaks. But we have battles that if properly reinforced can last for months, because that meshes more properly with the rest of the game and gives the player something to do. It’s entirely possible to fudge these things for the purposes of gameplay.
I believe the first point is known as The Covert Action Rule
Which means statistics are important part of the entire thing, I can't stress this enough but analysts are a very important part of game development (assuming demographics are included of course)
That "swash buckling fast and furious 4 fanbase" can be, after all, consist of nothing but children who can't buy the game, which an analyst can find.
My favourite by far naval combat from both a tactical and a strategic perspective has to be Shogun 2 Fall of the Samurai. There is a big incentive to actually use your navy because you can use powerful and really cool naval barrages in land battles or to just damage enemy buildings or armies on the campaign map and the battles themselves are really fun and a big improvement over the honestly just frustrating and quite buggy ships in Empire or Napoleon.
Also nothing beats getting a single western ironclad and then just demolishing all the simple wooden ships your enemies throw at you. The visual spectacle of the naval battles is exactly what it’s supposed to be.
Don't forget you can even use 'first-person' controls on them
Yeah fr.Shogun 2 FOTS is probably the only strategy game where your navy actually makes a huge difference during coastal land battles.
@@AdmiralPrestonJColeTheGigaChad don't forget the trade aspect, crucially important for most clans, even if you don't trade yourself
Navy in Fots also provides great mobility for your armies, you can move around several times further than your land armies march
It is fun to watch but sucks as naval wargame. There is no wind, maps are tiny compared to artilery ranges. Napoleon is peak TW naval combat.
I think the biggest issue is that a navy either completely obliterates the enemy or is completely obliterated by the enemy. Land battles wouldn't be very fun if a unit got deleted the second it lost the battle
Every battle a stackwipe
@@LemonCake101and it shouldn't be, in hoi4 its only a stackwipe if you fuck it up, same with ck3. While victoria 3 never has stackwipes as its combat system doesnt work that way. So while there should be an element of decisiveness, it shouldnt be "oh one battle and everything is dead".
That's how naval combat works, either there's a massive battle but neither side commits to it and thus there are limited losses. Or both sides commit or are forced to commit and one or both sides take heavy losses. The battle of the Falkland Islands saw British Battlecruisers wipe the floor with the German East Asia Squadron suffering only dozens of dead in return for sinking two armored cruisers and two light cruisers; meanwhile the battle of Jutland failed to inflict serious losses on either side despite three British battlecruisers exploding. Conversely Midway saw the destruction of 4 Japanese fleet carriers in a pitched battle and essentially stopped Japanese advances across the Pacific.
My main issue with the Vic3 Naval system is that devastating defeats... aren't devastating. Rebuilding a destroyed fleet only means hiring back the servicemen and officers, which becomes pretty trivial with the Enlistment Effort decree, and actually gets faster, not slower, with late-game training PMs when you start getting past wooden ships and into ironclads, battleships and dreadnoughts. There's also no economic simulation of actually needing time to build ships. The most you're ever paying is the ongoing maintenance cost of your peak fleet size, which erases the defining aspect of "capital" ships: requiring a huge up-front investment of capital to build in the first place.
And since they did the thing where navies get forced back into home port once all their admirals are defeated, navy is borderline meaningless outside of multiplayer. Because the AI is terrible at Navy organisation and defeating them becomes trivial once you figure out how to use a navy doomstack or two to defeat enemy fleets in detail. And even then there's barely any long-term impact to a nation's military capabilities from suffering crushing naval defeats, because any GP or even MP is easily able to afford rebuilding their navy during the truce.
@@artemisfowl7191 yeah its the unfortunate reality of naval combat. Its like taking a land battle between two teams of 40 people each, where each person takes 2 years to replace
My ideal naval system would be more about logistics than anything. Planning supply lines, capturing specific ports, cutting deals with local tribes, trying to negotiate naval treaties with other nations, planning raids on eachother. Most combat is designed around a permanent presence and front lines or stack warfare, but naval battles are a lot more vague and need to be a lot more abstracted. Id much prefer if they were redesigned to essentially be supply lines than stack warfare or whatever hoi was trying to do
I like concept of HoI with hidden fleets, scouting, trade warfare. It might not be balanced or work well but core ideas are much better then other strategy games. Even RTW sucks in this regard with dropping ships into theater and rolling dice if your fleet will spawn on one of another side of English Channel.
@@antonisauren8998 yeah many say this is one of the areas RTW can improve the most
Space strategy games are all about naval combat, since all of space is essentially an endless ocean with small planet islands. And in these games it's fun because it's important. In land-based strategy games, the fleet will always play a secondary role in relation to the army, transporting it from one piece of land to another or helping in sieges.
One Total War game that I liked the Naval Warfare game was Fall of the Samurai. You've got that transition period of going from Wooden frigates to armored steam ships, and you could control your ships in formation to try and blow up your enemies. The Explosive shot there made it really fun to see wood ships explode.
Also, if we dip into a different genre of games, Assassin's Creed Black Flag had great naval warfare where you'd shoot at enemy ships and then board them to try and take it.
Me like spam big ship me like big number big ship go boom 💥
Number go up good in fairness
When money: Spam big ship.
When no money: Spam galleys.
Opinion before watching the video: Naval combat is lame for many people because it operates funamentally differently to most other forms of combat, so to make a game that makes naval combat fun will either drive away a broad playerbase who will likely be bored or overwhelmed by it, or drive away the core base of naval war history fans who would be dissapointed with the lack of accuracy or depth
Any change in opinion after watching?
My favourite part of eu4 naval combat is GB.
I fought a series of 6 battles agains the GB navy and finally caught them with a low maneuver admiral and broke their navy while losing 30 heavy ships.
Only to realize their actual navy was busy beating up Denmark and hadn’t even noticed me.
When you said artillery fire pips affects ship cannons I genuinely did a double-take.
They do!
What about Iberian Artillery Fire +1? Is it as broken for naval cannons as a Custom Nation taking Infantry Fire +1?
@@Alorand that does effect it!
@@Alorand no, its just 5% more dmg, Britain does not care and the ai doesnt know what a heavy ship stack is
THE ISLAND BROKE BEFORE THE FRENCH DID!! CANDIA STANDS!!
(The French where the first to leave)
Oh😂 So it broker before the italians did?
@@BigMatthew_ The French left, after losing, so the Italians surrendered.
Granted, this was after, 21 years of siege, and the Venetian Naval dominance FINALLY being broken after those 21 years of Naval re-supply.
The Anno series has the exact opposite problem lol, Navy is fleshed out while theres absolutely abysmal land combat
There’s land combat in anno?
@@nobodyherepal3292 Atleast in Anno 1404, you can make military camps. It is the worst ground combat system ever but I love it
@@nobodyherepal3292you used to in older installments
@@skem9622 Worse than Caesar 3?
@@Zivilin the military camps cost a lot of high level resources, they barely do anything and their near impossible to heal despite there being dedicated military healing resource. to make camps fight you just put them in range of each other and it takes half an hour for a battle to actually conclude
while combat in general isnt the focus in victoria 3 and it shows in the way naval combat works, they actually do blockades right. Getting blockaded in vic 3 when u have a bunch of colonies will destroy ur economy and make your people mad, could lead to a revolution, it will make your subjects mad and probably make them revolt or their people revolt against them if not. To the point that its often worth it to white peace or even surrender on wars u could eventually win to avoid the economic damage, sadly the ai doesnt take this into account at all, and will let their economy be destroyed to not white peace cuz they could theoretically still win.
Also, another thing Vicky 3 fixes is the fact that getting your fleet sunk isn't the end of the world. In hoi4 if you get your fleet sunk, it is over, things will start snowballing and you'll never recover the navy. But in Vicky 3 you'll recover it and it isn't the end of the world.
The problem with naval combat in Paradox games it's not about the mechanics themselves, it's about the abysmal interfaces for it. Users have zero control, zero flavor and it's overall very poorly designed for how I see it.
Let's take HoI4 as an example: admirals and generals have a similar interface that works way differently, hence offputting the beginners, which then tend to never learn. The fleet control it's way overcomplicated for what it brings to the table, no point and clicking like one can do to micromanage the armies but they have to select the task. The tasks are fairly complicated to get especially to beginners to identify the one they need in every specific situationm meaning it's harder for them to assess the naval situation they're in and the one they want to reach via what task.
For how oversimplified and boring in EU4 it is, at least you can deathstack heavy ships and galleys to reach your objective if you don't know any better. In HoI4 one wrong move against the UK or US and your game is toast.
The UI certainly doesn't... help.
Blockading in EU4 does also increase war exhaustion, and devastation while tiny does kill prosperity which can really hurt the economy of the target. I agree it's not game ruining but I think a true navy that is game ruining might be super unfun to be a little guy.
War exhaustion would matter if you didn't had the option to erase it with mana
In civ, you can’t “ignore navy in peace” unless you keep all your troops and cities very far inland. Ships can bombard tiles 2 tiles inland, and even further with promotions and battleships. Ships are generally tougher and faster than ranged land units that can oppose them. This also means invading someone by land when they have an uncontested navy is very difficult.
Also carriers can very much extend your enemy's aerial range
Also barbarian ships can be very annoying.
Ships can also move and fire. Unlike land units that need to setup to fire.
Yeah I think Civ really nails Naval combat
@@lukatomas9465 -british peasants ca 800
This sums up how I feel about navy in strategy games
Even though it might be a lot to implement, I think the way to solve it would be to tie trade to ACTUAL "ships" and "caravans", not just an arrow that indicates the direction. That would solve most of the economic problems. Sea tiles should also be much smaller (because it's not true that in one day a ship docked in St-Petersburg can join a battle on the other side of the Gulf of Finland or that 3 ships from Satander can block all trade in the Bay of Biscay up until La Rochelle) and make battles more determined by luck, so that you can partially break a blockade or a siege of a navally superior nation at times but they will probably win on the long run due to the numbers
What you really want is to be able to assign warships to a trade node, a bit like piracy. And it would reduce trade power in that node significantly, for only people you are at war with, depending on the number of your ships compared to your enemies. So if you and your enemy both have 10 ships at the same tech level, trade isn't impacted a lot. But if it were a 50 to 5 ratio that has a much larger impact. Equally, the ships could still behave like "Hunt enemy ships" so your ship's combat ability does matter since there will be naval warfare.
In short, a proper naval wartime raid system, which was one of the key reasons countries invested in a navy: to harrass enemy merchant fleets.
Coming from a mainly HOI4 perspective but this same problem applies in many other games too, Navies are expensive, take a long time to make, are often quite costly to use if they have a fuel requirement as HOI4 has, take a lot of research to start making and take a lot of construction time due to the needed infra they use, docks and naval dockyards.
First off, navy fights are over fast, there is no real chance to understand if you did something well or not, it just happens, Paradox tried to make navies not just disappear when they reworked the system last time but navies are still very much focused on 1 to 2 big fights per war at best, so if you spent 4 years building a navy and it sinks in one fight, its quite hard to understand why this happened, what you could do better next time and the biggest problem, if you spent the whole game focusing on your navy and it sunk, you have just wasted all of the game as you can´t really use a shitty navy as you can use a shitty army.
next, navies have low amounts of uses in general, for HOI4, navies are mostly there to counter the enemies navy, outside of that they do little, you can just change your trading partners in most cases, as long as your not a colonial empire convoys are not needed for anything, if you really need to do a naval invasion even a moment of naval superiority from a shit starting or stolen navy is enough, naval bombardment is quite weak and affects only the tiles next to sea tiles, there is no effects from having superiority over the waves out right, even if you can use naval bombardment to your advantage not all navies are made to use that mechanic as light attack contributes a lot less to it than heavy attack.
The Joke in HOI4 where "I have 1 million hours and don´t know navy" is not really about how navy is the most complicated thing ever, its how learning it is wasted time compared to how useless it is, someone could learn to make the best navy and during that same time another would have spammed submarines and naval invaded UK with them or used naval bombers or any of the many alternatives to a navy.
I think the biggest problem is that the most realistic mechanic is supply lines, which is extremely hard to make work properly and be fun. A UK fleet should, in some way, be weaker the further away from the home islands it is, like you just can't afford to have a doom-stack over a certain distance away, but even getting basic mechanics like fleet basing to work right in EU4 were never successful, let alone how complicated this system would have to be.
Well EUV might be able to clear up some of those issues - having a game where materiel is critical - and plenty of types exist so that you don’t just build a single type of refinery building - could make trade impact from blockades and convoy raiding a lot more powerful at least
The control loss from blockades should also be interesting, although it is a bit.. unusual in implimentation.
Honestly for me in hoi4 more of a problem with navy is that ships don't listen to you and have to by babysit all the time. You loose battle now you have few ships that don't want to leave repair for next 4 years and new ones take also 4 years to build
Unfortunate that Airships: Conquer The Skies wasn't mentioned here
OOF, yeah. That game is amazing.
considering that trade will be fluid in eu5 I have really high hopes that naval force will take a mugh higher role in there since blockades actually will block the trade flow not only to coastal provinces but also to inland provinces.
I'm really want it to succeed in making naval warfare enjoyable
The most dangerous navy I've ever encountered in a game of EU4 manifested from me smashing Spain's light ship fleet so thoroughly that they had over 100 naval limit open for them to build their newest heavy ships. Gave me some severe whiplash when I saw them come at me with 60 new heavy ships.
Ah yeah, the classic don’t sink enemy out of date ship strat
An underrated civ like game in terms of combat systems is Humandkind it actually has a compelling 4x navy game.
Trade is a ridiculously important part of the game and blockades not only stop the flow of resources but actually steals them which is like getting sent to the stone age or being blasted to the moon. Land units are ridiculously vulnerable to light ships so they need even a tiny bit of protection to prevent disaster. Having a navy is extremely important to prevent or exploit this so pumping out as many fast long range scout ships for naval control of the big oceans. However there are also capital ships which are eye watteringly expensive (like 12 turns and -7 pops to make) as well as way slower and more with less sight range. The advantage tho is that they kick ass and light ships cant get close without imploding which means they assert a ridiculous amoint of naval domination while lacking control. Becuase retreating is easy and ships trade damage evenly battles arent usually decisive (unless you get corned in a gulf) and theres room for maneuvering. Collosal naval battles are actually exciting rather than being eyeroll wow cool doomstack bigger number win. I guess i find it frustrating that humankind s extremely simple 2 ship types and real consequences system is infinitely more understandable and engaging than any paradox title.
Yeah but the war system makes me want to break my keyboard so ive given up on it :(
All I know is 500 heavy ship deathstack in a 5 years long battle in the carribeaen
big irony here is that the one paradox game thats main focus is naval combat (technically) is stellaris, and even then its a very shallow system. you take the designing system of hoi4 and put it on a map as restrictive as eu4. the resulting system is satisfactory, but id hardly call it good.
Bro did not touch the game after the combat rework
@@Shuraigekisen the deciding factor is still mostly in factors outside of combat. there is little player input in actual battles, you just command your ships to engage enemies and let the battles play out. you have no input on precise ship movements during a battle.
@@cosmosyn2514 So is ground combat in grand strategy games, you tell your troops to move to a place and if there's enemies they fight on their own but you yourself has no say on how that battle plays out outside of before battle preparations
@@Shuraigekisen the maps in stellaris range from as restrictive to even more restrictive as EU. much of the strategy and depth in games like HOI4 and EU4 comes from maneuvering your troops in rather open maps. that is not present nearly to the same degree in stellaris.
@@cosmosyn2514 Just because you can't maneuver one fleet in battle doesn't mean you have no input on the battle, the restriction from hyperlanes mean you can plan around that and have a close quarter fleet in position to beat a fleet that should have a range advantage, environmental hazards can completely turn the table against a superior fleet that isn't built for it, hyper relays mean you can bank on an elastic defense if you're careful with them, once jump drives and gateways are thrown in the mix it gets even more complex as you can literally have raid fleets to take over an enemy gateway and then have fleets go in through the gate you just seized to cause chaos in their lines, and I'm not gonna open the can of worms that is cloaking as that alone enables guerilla strategies HoI4 could only dream of
I want to like naval combat in PDX games. I have standalone naval games in my Steam library and Rule the Waves is enticing me. But the fundamental shortfall is that all of these games at the end of the day are map painters and you need someone to actually go on the ground and plant the flag. No matter how good you make the naval mechanic, when armies are the only way to achieve the final goal, that's all that ends up mattering.
It is not about naval combat itself, it is about navy being integrated with other gameplay aspects. Normally it would be far easier to ship 10 tons of rice from lets say India to Basra port than moving that rice on land from Basra to Baghdad. Game doesn't model transportation differences.
i feel as if eu4 is good enough naval combat for a PDX game because i will never ever ever understand the hoi4 navy system
It not even that bad, I feel like people just say that because its a meme: like claiming Eu4 trade is hard.
it might not be that bad but as you stated in the video naval combat is overshadowed anyways, i just make naval bombers instead. ever since they introduced the ship designer it just became a lot more clutter to try to figure out and finding the component researches that are relevant is just terrible
In all seriousness, land combat is probably actually harder than naval combat in hoi4, because you have things like defense and breakthrough. The problem with hoi4 navy is that ships take for ever to build
They really need to add ships on the market, or the ability to lease Rickard production. That is how most small countries get their babies anyways.
@@hanneswiggenhorn2023 yea exactly, if your a japan player and you lose navy to usa in MP, you will never be able to get contest navy again bc of how long it takes to build ships
lose your carriers? have fun waiting till 1946 to get 1 more out
I think a decent small little change to indirectly buff blockades would be to make the Reduce button for War Exhaustion unclickable while at war, thus enabling a naval power to economically cripple an opponent over time. Still, it's slow going though. On top of that, I suppose there could be a harsher ramp-up of the devastation and WE based on the percentage of land blockaded.
That's all just tweaking numbers that already exist. A REALLY crazy idea could be devastation overflow, where 100% devastated provinces spread any additional devastation they would accrue evenly among neighboring provinces. This would be vaguely realistic while still simple enough to be feasible in EU4. After all, Institutions work similarly. This would mean that if you blockade France long enough, eventually Paris WOULD begin to accrue devastation. My ideal system would be one where devastation from blockades would scale up with target's WE, enabling blockades to do serious damage in a span of a few years vs doing almost nothing, while also not being entirely trivial for the naval player. This has been a tired ramble.
Honestly I really like both of those. The no reduce war exhaustion at war actually is in a couple mods too.
Naval battles do work well in Supreme Commander. They're a distinct and important aspect of the game (if the map you're on has significant bodies of water), a little slow on large maps but devastatingly powerful. There are specialist anti-naval and anti-air ships but these primarily exist to protect the artillery ships, which can obliterate bases or armies on land from relative safety. Land forces can't really counter ships in any way unless they get too close to the coast by accident, and air forces need overwhelming power to be effective - so the best way to counter a navy is with a navy of your own.
You can theoretically get by just with air power to cross water but it's terribly inefficient and more vulnerable to both static and mobile defences - massed air attacks that just consist of air very frequently end up being mostly or entirely suicidal, meaning if you don't achieve your objective then you've not only wasted all those resources but also given the enemy the opportunity to reclaim the wrecks of your aircraft. Navies, on the other hand, are often able to retreat from engagements as long as they are not severely out-powered by the enemy. There are some amphibious units, but it's also pretty easy to counter them when they do arrive on land because they lack versatility, and they are extremely vulnerable to navies.
Navies also of course have longer range - planes will run out of fuel and slow to a crawl in SupCom if they don't have an air staging facility nearby, but ships have no fuel mechanic so you can safely send them on long-term operations far from home.
At 9:05: there already is a rule that naval bombers arent good unless theyre on a carrier. They literally get 10x the stats when on a CV in a naval battle
Total war Warhammer 3 mentioned!!!
Trench craventail world conquest confirmed!!!!
Yup, mentioned for forgetting to show up!
@@LemonCake101 They hate the sea so much they gave ships legs and wheels so that they could have them fight them on land
0:39 bruh the other day I was doing a vic2 France run and had a navy full of cruiser and battleships, I dont remember the numbers but my 1000 naval supply limit was on edge, and lost to Britain who had a navy made of man'owars and commerce raiders, utterly nonsense
Lemon Cake knows his navies. He may even be preserved dessert which was once served on Her Majesty's pre-dreadnought battleships.
Hoi4 naval combat can be pretty fun in MP, and the dopamine hits... oh man, if only i didn't win 90% of the time due to the small problem of being one of the few people who see this video and know exactly what the hit chance graph means.
This is a very creative visualization method which despite not requiring too much effort (not to say its easy, you just dont have to draw your own visuals) still captures the attention. Nice work!
The eu4 game icons etc aren't exactly the easiest to work with, being .dds files but its a lot better then nothing I found
I've really enjoyed the naval battles in the total war games 'rome total war 2' and 'fall of the shogun'
The first one focussing on early to mid-time classical naval battles and the latter just in that sweetspot of pre-ironclad transistioning into ironclad naval warfare.
The problem with those is that they are packed inside a game that might not be completely what people like about naval warfare. Making a full game with those golden age total war game mechanics but focussed on naval warfare might actually be a perfect naval game
12:47 please don't do that again. I almost died
What do you mean I am professional Italian
Rule the waves is such a time sink for me, I'll start playing at dinnertime and stop at breakfast. It's so obscenely nice to get good fire control on a new super dreadnought, and I'll just play until I get to test it out, what's the harm? Oh, carriers? Well, they'd be fun to use in this war, so I'll just play until I do a strike on a ship. Oh, it's 1930 and I can actually build good planes and I go further and further for eight hours at a time staring at spreadsheets
2000 new subs in 2 WEEKS. Bro that is insane man. Keep up the good work and love the content.
Total war games had so cool Naval Gamplay back in the day
Napoleon, Empire and Shogun / Fall of the Samurai!
Not someone who has played HOI4 or EU4, but as someone who *has* played WoWS, WT Naval, and likes WWII naval history, I think the essence boils down to: Navy is nothing like land combat, but we have to make it for land players.
Deathballing? That was a real thing. That was why the Dreadnought arms race in WWI happened, as at that time there was realistically no way to stop a fleet of Dreadnought Battleship and Battlecruisers from destroying everything you loved except making your own. A lot of Torpedoes could theoretically sink a Battleship, but not enough to prevent them from continuing on and destroying the ports of call and decapitating the enemy. And because of how the seas work against smaller ships, a Battlecruiser was faster than a destroyer was. Come Jutland, the fleets were miles long lines of capital ships and the sub-capitals which did show up were utterly obliterated by the massive number of guns presented.
Frontlines? They do not exist for 20th century navies. Not in the typical sense of armies meeting along long stretches of land. Warship presence is vastly outsized by the ocean, and even when aircraft become prominent a frontline is really more of where the CAP radii overlap. A land army can make a frontline from one end of the continent to the other, but warships have never been able to stretch so far across while staying operationally capable.
So along with what you said in your video, this creates a problem for wargamers. Naval combat asks for things that "land lubbers" absolutely loathe. In fact, I point to Battleship (yes, the board game with red and white pins) as the game most accurate "feel" to real naval combat. Because the vast majority of your time is spent trying to guess where the opponent is, punctuated by a few moments of everything exploding and the advantage flipping dramatically with a few lucky strikes.
Lastly, being good at naval combat, and indeed being good at naval strategy, sometimes needs a thorough understanding of the technology behind a ship and abstract forms of warfare. Something very untraditional for land warfare which has had relatively consistent rules throughout history. An example you didn't have, but I think exemplifies this exactly is a game called Highfleet. In Highfleet, you have to know elementary basics on code breaking, course and heading estimation, ELINT, Radar concepts, IR analysis, and delegation between the fleet and task forces. All of this has been made very basic and easy to learn by the uninitiated, but it throws people off for how much it's nothing like StarCraft or Company of Heroes. You spend the vast majority of your time in the dark and the energy of the game is carried through tension. And I have seen a lot of HOI4, EU4, CK3, and Stellaris players take one look at Highfleet and "feel overwhelmed by the UI". Something that I find just a little funny, as I have no idea how they navigate their games either.
I really love Rule the Waves. I personally am not someone that cares much for graphics and that game delivers a lot on the mechanics front. I recently played as the US and went from 1890 to 1960 (I think a few years beyond that even) before I stopped. I usually don’t go much beyond the 40s because I wasn’t a big fan of missiles. I forced myself to just do it and ended up having a blast learning more of those mechanics. I will say though, submarines are probably the single worst part of that game imaginable. I honestly think not having them would be better than how it currently is.
Also, it’s fun when you build coastal defenses that come in super clutch. For example, I was playing as Austria Hungary and built a couple motor torpedo boat squadrons that ended up sinking 4 old Italian predreadnaughts (like 16,000 tons) and 2 extremely fancy battle cruisers (like 27,000 tons).
Hope you got at least screenshots. Usefull torpedo boats are like Yeti in this game. :D
@@antonisauren8998 I did not screenshot it sadly. This was the third country I played as and I didn’t understand how miraculous that was. It was also kinda funny since I couldn’t even see a single thing that was happening. I just got a slough of “UNSIGHTED struck by torpedo” and was greeted with an amazing post battle screen.
Honestly, the issue with navies in EU4 is that they could be fun because you don't necessarily only need them in war, but also for things like privateering.
If you are fighting in multiplayer that can be useful, because you are effectively crippling the economy of another player.
But against AI that has all sorts of cheat to compete with you anyway? Is like pissing on a fire to snuff it out.
Economic damage against an AI nation is nowhere near as effective as against a human player, which makes navy really only useful to stop Barbary Coast pirates and war, which is way more boring than land warfare.
Thing with economic damage against AI, is you don't usually want to damage the AI, but integrate it instead
Empire Total War had pretty good naval combat. At the strategic and tactical level you had to struggle through what was often an outmatched fight.
I have heard good things in fairness!
I really wish someone would take the E:TW concept, now that CA seems to have lost the plot, take everything good, and improve it. I preferred E:TW’s naval battles over N:TW’s, as they were more responsive and didn’t take way more effort than land battle.
Make the map global.
Allow units to be upgraded as time and tech pass, eg smoothbore muskets, to rifled muskets, to breach loading rifles
Improve diplomacy, trade, and just about everything else in the game.
Interestingly enough Churchill was said to have found the Battle of the Atlantic the most scary as it was a "dark battle of statistics", could Britain bring in enough food and war materials to keep from being starved into surrender each week and could Germany sink enough convoys to starve Britain into surrender each week.
Granted I didn't find Hearts of Iron IV naval warfare very fun in large part because I didn't find Hearts of Iron IV very fun (I did a video about it in 2022 so I won't bore everyone here).
There might be something in the way "fleets" are done in Stellaris that could be of help; larger and more expensive fleets put a greater economic drain to build and maintain and so building smaller fleets has its merits of being able to whittle down larger forces as well as how fleets facilitate invasions and coastal bombardments (perhaps Hearts of Iron IV could attach armies to actual fleets like in previous games where Transport Ships were used to land forces on different shores and EU IV could implement smugglers to run past blockades and have blockades reduce trade income in the country of the blockaded port (not as much as the port itself but the more blockaded ports the more it adds up)).
While there is not an easy solution, since naval combat needs to be impactful enough on the main game to be worth bothering with but not to bog the whole game down with "busy work" for a part of the game that will effect players less the less oceanic they are.
I also wonder if Hearts of Iron could benefit from having blockades act as a ticking capitulation timer (the more complete the blockade the faster it gets) to simulate a population becoming frustrated with the lack of incoming commodities which would require society modelling as there would need to be social, economic and military solutions to this problem; cultural efforts which entrench the understanding of the cause in the minds of the people (social), replacement of lost imports with domestic production (economic) and breaking the blockade (military) to make the game feel more dynamic than just a matter of a few battles and its all over or waiting for a blip of green.
But many of these things would need to be balances and trade offs to avoid any one strategy becoming overpowered.
I feel like space combat compared to naval is really in a league of its own, as every nation is an England in that setup
@@LemonCake101 That is a good point and few games have both naval and space combat (Empire Earth's Art of Conquest expansion and the Supreme Commander Series are the only ones which springs to mind).
I wonder if there is a good way to make the naval game more interesting, perhaps if marine operations were a thing they'd elevate the meaning.
Civ6 has cool but rather strange naval combat with weird meta. For example scouts are useless from mid game, on land. On the seas it's a unit with bigger range that doesn't take a tile of Naval unit, so you bring your scouts from stone age and keep them in the navy to scream at you if there are Spaniards nearby. Also the fact that there a practical no defensive terrain also means if you winning an initial engagement you most likely steam roll the war. Honorable mention, depending on the map the navy might be utterly useless and there a civ's who are unbeatable on the sea, like Indonesia, Spain, Japan has a good defensive bonuses on the sea and Portugal practically tied to the sea. So if you play as Gaul or Aztec you are guaranteed to lose there. and the last meta build is to keep as much grand admirals as you can, even so their basic bonuses won't work on upgraded units you can use them to level up any ship, and there are two particular grand admirals that can win you entire wars, one creates and armada from your ships and the second one gives you free ironclad even if you haven't researched it. SO while everybody fights with caravels you bring a veteran armada of ironclads that crushes everything on it's way. Also Civ6 is more dynamic on land than civ5, because there a lot more attacking options and because on later stages of the game it's better to unite your units into the Corpses and Armies that have one tile instead of three separate units.
9:00 it's in the game, naval bomber from carrier does 4 times the damage than land based ones
7:30 15:18 this reminds me of the naval idea of "all or nothing", you put max armor on vital parts of the ships and none on non vital parts, much like you either win very hard or lose very hard
I genuinely want a mod where Genoa is actually able to doomstack their navy off the coast of the fort in Genova and have that massively slow the siege progress to a crawl
even the whole diplo mana to reduce siege progress could be fun potentially, as long as it costs enough mana to not be frustrating for the player (like >100 per 20% progress reducting potentially, plus scaling)
would make naval actually mildly relevant for once
I don’t think that’s mod-able unless you do it through events but fair!
I only am really familiar with hoi4 single player so I will say that navy in hoi4 isn't complicated. Quite the opposite actually it follows the Tf2 engineer principle, use a gun, and if that don't work use more gun. I think the main problem is it's just irrelevant, for good ships with a lot of attack say a battleship it takes at least a year and given the size of the British and American navies you can't hope to match the allies in the axis and if you're fighting the axis there's no point. Navies take a long time to build especially good ones which is the problem with hoi4 because it has such a short timeframe only 10 years most of the time, after that the game usually becomes a slog with too many units and variables to keep track of that starts to chog the game. Regardless of what happens navy just won't be useful because Britains is too large to counter
I was playing Hoi4 mp once and saw that my destroyers weren't doing anything about the convoy raiding in a certain region, I look over and see that one battle just wasn't ending, I click it and I see my destroyers fighting a group of submarines, but because they couldn't detect the submarines and since neither ship could attack the other (torpedos can't hit screening ships Ig?) they were just hanging out in a random spot in the ocean for an entire year.
Empire: Total War does a pretty great job of adding a fairly simple yet important naval game onto its army conquest and region management game. Also, if you want Rule The Waves but you’re not a fan of Windows XP, your next option is Ultimate Admiral: Dreadnoughts; it ain’t perfect but it’s good enough for what it does. Just don’t pay for the multiplayer.
For me the in hoi 4 navy is ”not important, very expensive but fun to obliterate navy” it’s simply some thing for majors that would fights someone with a giant navy so you could have a small fun screenshot where you have 3 cruisers sunk and enemy… EVERYTHING, it’s faster then navbombers so if I have time I would do it( oh and mp of course and flex that I understood how navy works)
sometimes in eu4 even just a single naval battle can determine the person dominating the seas not for a 100 years but even for the entire game
Navy Field enjoyers: RISE UP!!
The pacific theater dynamic your described is basically historically accurate though
"I'm gonna build up a crazy huge fleet and oh no the Americans sunk it"
1:19 I really don’t know why TW don’t make naval combat any more. They did it really well in Napoleon and the only problem was that they never managed to make it important enough and make the AI to actually build a navy to challenge the player
In general the given reason was people didn't engage with it, so it was like 80% of work for 20% engagement
They tried for Shogun 2... it was very frustrating. Engagements were slow and tedious and autoresolves completely out of whack. Also, you can capture enemies ships. Meaning, if you lost a battle or autoresolve, your enemy now owns up to half your fleet.
That was definitely one of the worst aspects of the game.
As a History buff especialy of the Spice Trades/Opium trade/Napoleon era
This Hurts :(
Good video
Because without extreme care, naval combat outcomes are decided as soon as combat is joined. An exception I don't see mentioned in Empire At War, which has space combat that is effectively naval. There's also the problem that true naval warfare always happens on flat, open terrain, much less interesting that terrain analysis that drives tactical or strategic decisions on land combat.
> The issue with boats is that they're expensive and battles are decisive, meaning you don't build a navy to rule the seas you build a navy to win like two naval battles.
Mahan summarized in one sentence 😂
as the only naval-maritime taker, i have to gaslight myself to get into the mood sometimes
There are dozens of us. 😃🚢
Sea Power : Naval Combat in the Missile Age looks amazing tho
I think what Hearts of Iron needs, is to show how:
-finding ships at sea is difficult
-coordinating a large fleet is difficult
-supplying a large fleet is difficult
-and because of the middle two points, fleets tend to fan out into many smaller task forces, and engage eachother over long distances in many parallel battles. Especially carriers during WW2
Translated in game terms
-one should need to employ scout task forces, scout planes and eventually radar, to be able to reliably find and engange the enemy. Also, more naval battles should be inconclusive, or not a lopsided victory. The defeated side being able to slip away if the enemy scouts are engaged or dead.
-the positioning malus should be much harsher for less experienced admirals and ships. Battleships also need a similar malus to carriers, as in too many battleships in the same battle causes a decrease in effectiveness. Even if good admirals and experienced ships should increase the limit.
-ships should have a larger impact on a port supply
-the currect way fleets work, needs to be redone. Right now, a single admiral can cover multiple fleets even in two different oceans, say if you are the US and must fight in the Pacific and Atlantic both. So instead of having one admiral command a fleet composed of multiple carrier groups, battleship task forces, scouting and sub-hunting detachments. One admiral commands all capital ship containing fleets. Another all scouts. Another all escorts. Etcetera.
It should be possible for naval AI to spread the same fleet over a couple of nearby sea tiles, then converge on an enemy if found, possibly engaging in parallel naval battles
Hoi4 inspired me so much so now I’m joining the Navy so I know exactly what it’s like.
The only game I’ve played where the naval combat was better than the land combat is Star Wars Empire at War. It doesn’t have a lot of the problems that you listed for games like hoi4 or eu4
Space Navy is quite different to normal navies though, that's more of an airforce+
@@LemonCake101 I would say space navy is still more like maritime navy than air force (unless you go by really low tech hard sci-fi).
But it is true that in an Interstellar sci-fi setting the (space) navy is the main important branch with the army as auxiliary, much in the reverse of EUIV/HOI4/Total War. (40K is a massive exception to that, being ground focused due to the origins of the franchise but I would guess that if you had a large scale integrated grand strategy game in 40K practicality would make navies more important than ground forces (I mean, Star Wars could be argued either way but the original comment already points out how Empire at War is more focused on the navy))(the only paradox game with more important navy than army being Stellaris the space game is perhaps illustrative in this).
EaW was so surprisingly good for a space navy game - the naval game placed warships into multiple tiers of heaviness with different incentives and disadvantages to pursuing either small craft-focused, medium or capital warship strategy (and unlike literally every other Star Wars property it placed small fighter craft properly in a hierarchy and provided destroyer-grade light warships to effectively counter them).
Some of the mods for Forces of Corruption really refined the concepts too, and made it more viable to play inside the normal weaknesses of each faction (allowing Empire to go big on torpedo boat-grade fighters and bombers, allowing Rebellion to do better big gun cruisers, etc.) while also helping deal with the (at this point fairly noticeable) older design aspects of the game.
Even though it’s actually about flying bricks, I’ve always felt that Highfleet is the best naval game (for a modern navy). It does a really good job showcasing the intelligence and electronic warfare aspects of naval combat.
There is a conspiracy in game development to make naval combat suck to focus on land battles upon a planet that is overwhelmingly water with historical consequences for success or failure upon the waves. Total War: Empire is one example.
I did enjoy the naval battles in Empire, though land armies certainly mattered more for the game.
@@gokbay3057most mods make trade essential, you can go from making 20k an end turn to bankrupt if you get blockaded, of course the ai rarely does this and the ai is hardly effected by bankruptcy...
Ironically one of the better non-total spreadsheet games for strategic naval use was Civilization 4 with the Beyond the Sword expansion... Every city had a discrete number of trade routes it could support, which the game would automatically create between domestic and international cities that the city could successfully reach, and because of harbors and especially customs houses, the sea trade was worth significantly more than land trade. Also, resources weren't automatically hooked into your cities but had to path to and from each city successfully - so if you landed on a new continent and settled a colony anywhere but on the coast, you literally would have access to none of the resources of the rest of your empire until you hooked it up to another city on the coast (not necessarily yours - you could receive goods through friendly open ports as well).
The important thing was that ships could blockade ports, which kept the tiles under blockade from working but just as importantly could stop all trade through any sea tiles. Blockading all of a rival nation's cities could therefore be extremely financially damaging if they had a lot of sea cities or did a lot of overseas trade, and blockaded islands could lose access to literally the rest of the world's resources, causing their cities to become unhappy, unhealthy, starved, and unable to build any contemporary units.
Unfortunately that complexity mostly seems to have been removed in Civ 5, and navies went back to being tools of fighting cities directly or protecting transports rather than economic warfare, and the same was true in Civ 6.
Its strange you didnt mention Ultimate admiral dreadnoughts.
Im just waiting for Sea power and Task force admiral.
Never even heard of that game I’ll be honest
@@LemonCake101it’s like rule the waves but everything is worse except the graphics. Yes I’m biased.
@@LemonCake101 UA:Dreadnoughts and UA:Age of Sail are of the kind where you only control the navy. In Age of Sail you fight in a set campaign via the selected story from the menu in which you earn, buy and steal ships throughout. You can hire Captains for each ship as best intended for its role within your fleet, upgrade your ships specifically for said various roles, choose the cannons (type and number), the number of crew members, with which you can also make landings, and designate the guns the crew each use in land battles and boarding actions. There are also terrain factors like height, wind speed and wind direction which massively spice up each battle. In UA:D, you choose a date and nation for the campaign, you design and build the ships yourself throughout while riding both your nations politics and economics (which, while you can't control, you can make suggestions on to your nation's government) to fight in naval battles and conquer the world. You can also gain the ships, territories and money of other nations as war reparations if you defeat them in war. not that you'd really want to take their ships cause the ai can't design decent ships to save its life. UA:D, rather unfortunately, is quite buggy with plentiful frame drops and the ship designer screen (arguably the main focus of the game) turns even a decent pc into an actual oven. The devs also seem obsessed with attempting to fix the same set of bugs that keep cropping up every 4 or so "updates". Not even kidding, they actually repeat in the devblog time and time again. Most others are mostly just "minor balancing tweaks" so getting actual new content is somewhat rare. Other than the glaring issues though, it is genuinely extremely replayable, or at least more so than UA:AoS, with its long 70 year span of tech development and the randomness of the ai. UA:AoS. However as a "naval warfare" game and a solid gaming experience UA:AoS is much, much better than UA:D
Simply put, on a strategic level, naval combat is not interesting for the reason you described; historically, ships only saw a few engagements, and those engagements were decisive. Moreover, those fights did not happen very often because there was almost always a clear predicted winner, and the loser could just refuse battle.
Tactical naval combat is fun, between manuever, weaponry, and firing arcs, but is outside of the scope of a strategy game.
On the other end, logistical naval coordination is fun. Its enjoyable to design ships in HoI4 or Stellaris if you know what you're doing. But getting too into the weeds here would also be out of scope for a strategy game, which is why games like Rule the Waves exists.
Thats why strategic games, at least historical ones, will probably never have interesting naval combat. The games that come closest tend to be ahistorical space games like Stellaris and GalCiv because they can make the battles more frequent and less decisive. You could probably do something in other ahistorical genres as well.
If they reduced naval reserve morale damage or let us reinforce morale with more ships it would be better
the "Ultimate Admiral" series (Both "Age of Sail" and "Dreadnoughts") is my favourite depiction of Naval Warfare.
To find out why navy sucks in games, one needs to ask why countries have navies in the first place. If your game doesn't model transportation, logistics and trade well enough, navies gonna be useless. We use ships to carry bulk cargo around. Thousands time more than a land vehicle can move. If there's no difference between moving goods with ships or with land, why bother navy?
I really love HOI4 naval gameplay honestly but I also agree with all your criticisms on it. It struggles with balancing and simplicity. I hope in a future HOI5 they overhaul naval gameplay. I'd really love to have fleets be smaller in scale so decisive battles hit the same with carrier battles like Midway, but you don't lose entire fleets in one battle. Also adding better supply systems to make blockades more impactful.
Was Napoleon Total War really the last time we had good naval-campaign gameplay???
Again, if you want good navy gameplay, get a navy gameplay only game :)
Try Total War's Fall of the Samurai naval combat!
Creative Assembly nearly perfected naval combat over the course of Empire through Fall of the Samurai, then somehow blew it so hard in Rome 2, they axed the feature entirely.
For a more impactful and fun naval gameplay every mentioned game should have fully reworked economy and trade model. Because, historically, navy was a toy for superpowers or insanely wealth countries only, so, in eu4, for example, it would be simple: either you go colonial and make profit or die.
7:31 This is basically all of Stellaris.
Meanwhile stellaris has the opposite problem, fun fleet combat but the land war is meh
True
“Grand strategy games typically have naval combat being a side thing” stellaris being the major exception
Space combat isn’t navy, if anything it’s air force +
Because i only see number go down of enemy somtimes
Age of empires 3 naval battles are tons of fun
Bro, Hoi4 navy shit is just "Build superheavy. Ship go boom boom. Unga bunga.". Like, if u have maybe 2 or 3 decent superheavies, the british navy is just gone. Like, ceases to exist. But of course easiest strategy is laying 6000 mines in the bloody english channel or chesapeake bay.
I really like the way navies and blockades etc work in the Strategic Command games. Worth looking into.
5:23 Is that Aussie hate I hear?
I hate landing in Australia
I feel the main reason for most games is that naval combat is an afterthought. Compare that to Sid Meier's Pirates, where the exact opposite happens. An rpg, not a strategy game. You control a single ship, and the naval combat is quite fun because it is the main focus
But it also has land battles, which are significantly less developed
best naval combat was experienced in Empire: Total War
o7
What does „o7“ mean?
FOTS is also pretty good
@@fabianeweil192 its a salute
Personally I think total war Napoleon has good navy features, but that could just be because I love the slight chance for a ship to be completely obliterated in one volley
Naval combat sucks bc it is bad. Simple.
Tbh large scale naval engagements always sucked IRL too. Most of them was decided by weather or positioning before they started, or were multiple day long chaotic messes like during the Punic wars.
Jutland discredited the battleship. :V