Armor on ships in real life: A total saving grace for some ships. Armor in HOI4: Total waste time and effort. I kinda wish having armor had the same process as tanks with piercing etc for the ships
The meta is having more dockyard than your enemy, this was made assuming that each side have same amount of production and both side wanted to achieve naval supremacy via ship alone without planes and other strategy, both industrial capacity also need to be balance with same number of dockyard and tech which in game is virtually inexistent.
Armor is the king it just saying who gonna cares about production cost if you have more resources and more dockyard than your enemy? The problem I see with naval combat is the sinking rate is too high, it should be aimed that most ship in the battle should survive even for losing side, it's utterly ridiculous that you losing hundreds of ship in single engagement, this way so opposing side can repair and still be in the fight in a theatre, it's not fun to just build up your Navy entire game just for couple battle and then achieving naval supremacy and your Navy is useless for the rest of the game. The reason land combat is exciting is because you have a chance of counter attack one defeat doesn't mean the end but Navy is not like that at most you only need 3 good battle and your enemy is done.
@@gkagara Not exactly. The way it is set up, there is usually no recovery if you lose say 10 tank divisions in Russia. Thats a huge loss for a German player. Same thing if the US navy had gotten blown up by a Japanese player. The Japanese player then gets to raid the Med or if Italy built up their fleet, they break out into the Atlantic and raid the coast of Britain. The game is setup fine except armor just isnt good. If you have 2 ships of the exact same design except 1 has armor and 1 doesnt. You produce enough of the no armor version over a period of time that the armored version cannot physically survive against
On carrier combat, c0rax said in the beta-thread that atm the game takes any aircraft that can do air superiority and sets it to "cap" mission(fleet defence) and whatever aircraft are left that can do naval strikes is then used for offensive ops - so atm multirole fighters/nav will only do cap. Pdx are working on migrating it to main armament(role) so we can use fighter weapons on nav/cas and still have them go on the offensive.
SHBB have one advantage, they do not need much tech, Guns and Armor is for free on SHBB. so i dont think they are useless. the problem is the resource cost that early. which hurts your "civ snowball"
Im my eyes their big disadvantage is the repair that takes ages on SHBBs. They receive some light damage and they are out for months, god forbid they lose half their HP and you are looking at a year long repair.
11:57 About That... That was because of missiles out ranging battleship guns as if you notice modern cruisers and battlecrusser are close to if not the size and speed of fast WW2 battleships with out the armour and very few guns mostly missile silos. So Your right at face value it makes sense but being a balance of speed, guns and Armour s not what made destroyer and cusers good... Missles did.
Armor and size are 100% the obsoleting factor. Modern missile cruisers are sub 200 meters and displace less than the 10k tons. That's smaller than WW2 era heavy cruisers like the Baltimore class. Most battleships during WW2 would have been about 80-100 meters larger than your typical missile cruiser and would have displaced 40-60k tons. The Russians have the largest (and I believe only) missile armed battlecruiser in the world and it still doesn't even have half the displacement the Iowa had. They are nowhere near the same size. Keep in mind, the Iowa class was still in service during the gulf war (and later) and was armed with Tomahawk missiles. Missiles did not make them obsolete, because you can put missiles on them. Their extreme cost due to size and armor made them obsolete. Cruisers are only around today because they are relatively cheap (though the US navy is currently getting rid of all of its cruisers now and using destroyers instead). It really does just come down to a balance of cost. You can put missiles on anything, so you might as well put in on the cheapest/smallest thing you can, because armor won't save you anymore (and you don't want to put all you eggs is one nukeable basket). Even before the advent of guided missiles, there was a lot of talk about how much of a mistake is was for the US the prioritize battleships over large cruisers. Some people actually argue that battleships as a class have never NOT been "obsolete" and have never truly justified their cost outside of just being scary (thus strategically or "diplomatically" impactful). That was also an issue though because they were often held in reserve to avoid loses, or hunted mercilessly Planes had made large guns obsolete well before missiles did. Planes were already outraging them before WW2 even started. In their heyday, Torpedoes had also obsoleted their fair share of battleships.
I just wish they'd bring Naval production down to a realistic cost. It shouldn't take until Hearts of Iron 5 to build ships for nations with the industry
@@ruukinen it's impossible to even scratch the surface of what was built by nations like UK/USA unless you spend a year or two building nothing but dockyards. No one is gonna bother doing that, so costs should be reduced
@@silverhost9782 Absolutely not. If you want to match historical production you have to also match historical investment. And if you do match historical investment you actually produce way more ships than was produced.
@@ruukinen The entire industrial balance of vanilla HOI4 is inherently ahistorical. That's what the problem here is. You can't simulate real shipbuilding capabilities in a game that starts you off with so few dockyards. Thankfully mods exist
@@silverhost9782 Are you saying you can't launch 5 battleships and 80 or so light ships between 1936 and end of 1940 in Hoi4 as UK? I used wikipedias list of ships launched as source so it might not be 100% accurate but I don't need to build a single dockyard to match that in game.
Have you ever tested cruiser subs? I find them to be a nice sweetspot between subs 2 and 3. but without wasting a research slot for a long time. With a plane they even have a nice spotting chance and shredd the convoys in the Atlantic.
I think you disrespect armor a bit too much, it's efficiency depends on delta between piercing and armor which scales with admiral skills, ship xp and various bonuses like doctrine and such. You should have tested armor with a good defence admiral and probably higher ship xp.
BftB update was really annoying but this BBA meta and the bugs that came alongside it have been extremely tiring. We need the dev team to slow down and start promoting mods while they fix their game.
@@71Cloak ,but the game is majority using the US system,so using CC would being better then the game. And we all know that the game isn't the most reliable thing. It's even caused people in this comment section to refer to heavy cruisers as "HC" instead of CA.
I don't know why paradox just doesn't buff armour more. Makes historical sense as HC can't really pen any battleships or even battlecruisers and it stops the HC spam. Such a change could also buff Torpedos as they then really are the only options for cruisers and light ships to fight battleships.
Would potentially make pocket battleships a thing. BB calibre guns on a cruiser frame to penetrate BB/BC armour, and BC armour to withstand CA medium batteries, while being cheaper and faster. Much more vulnerable to torpedoes and naval bombers due to having lower HP and air attack for their construction cost, and having less space for secondary batteries.
Guys the meta is having more steel, chromium and dockyard than your enemy because in game finding same amount of dockyard with same amount of production cost to engage in battle without intervention of naval bomber from airbase is virtually impossible. One also said that one side usually have more ship than the other.
I FUCKING KNEW IT As soon as I saw you can still use secondary batteries on CAs I instantly thought "I bet these guys still wreck shit up" I made them but playing singleplayer without actual testing I couldn't really see how well they perform, since the AI gets destroyed by everything basically I was waiting for the update to come out to try them out
I genuinely think the issue is either heavy ship hull is too expensive to counter heavy cruisers, or heavy cruisers are too cheap and maybe need to be their own hull like the German panzerschiffe with increased production (for condensing research just have you unlock it with cruisers hull), maybe only 2 heavy guns allowed like on the front and back?
Mostly the armour calculation is dumb. It used to be binary, either you pierced and did full damage or failed to pierce and suffered a -90% penalty. Now that is a bit broken so they introduced a sort of partial piecing. The current formula is -90% x [1 - ( your piercing / enemy's armour)]. So with 25 piercing against 35 armour you get -28.2% which is your damage reduction. That number should probably get doubled if they want armour and by extension BC/BBs to have any use in naval combat.
Also another issue with naval battles is that they "black hole" or "singularity" all the fleets in the world, a naval engagement can take so long to resolve that a fleet across the litteral world can get over to it to reinforce. as a result you are going to be fighting the entire navy at some point because youll be stuck retreating for weeks from submarines when the time to actually disengage would have happened within afew hours.
after multiple multiplayer games, I will spill the beans here. its actually decked out light cruisers. With the refit bonuses, produce a bunch of light cruisers and you will destroy the screens and the main fleet with torpedo's Lemme also add, I did try the build 71cload mentioned, heavy attack cruisers with light guns. I was able to kill the heavy ships, but then those light cruisers fucked me over
Could you maybe take a look at panzerschiffs with 3 AA 2s, 1 Heavy gun lvl1, 3 2ndary batteries and lvl 2 engine for 36? they would be used with roach screens for raiding in the atlantic.
Since Carriers got fixed recently, I did a few tests with these designs and fleet comps, except I replaced some of the HC with an equivalent IC value of Carriers. From my initial testing, it would seem that if carriers are involved at *all*, even if both sides have the same number and quality, Base Strike seems to completely destroy Fleet in Being. Do you think you could look into this? Carriers seem to do an absolutely absurd amount of damage now, so much so that personally don't think it's possible to conclude a meta without taking them into account.
Same thing here, i may have overlooked something but my carriers absolutely destroyed. Actually now that i think about it i did not really use carrier fighters on both sides, so maybe that had something to do with it?
The DP secondaries are working properly. That is what dual purpose means that the gun can engage both surface and air targets so it should give anti-air. The change is just enabling the gun to elevate to 80-90 degrees and giving it a proximity fused shell. It is the same as throwing some aa on to a division to give it some piercing against armour.
I get that it just doesn't make sense that they have the exact same stats for the exact same cost. Introducing a new mounting system and targeting system isn't free.
Well given that you have a mounting for the gun and a high angle fire director for the other AA guns anyway it sort of is free. What I don’t understand is why you can now research a 1940 and 44 secondary that isn’t dual purpose. Before BBA DP secondaries we’re just the end of the secondary tree. Now you get them earlier, which makes sense a lot of 1940 designed ships had DP mounts, but you can still choose the less capable weapon for the same cost. Why would anyone do that?
You don't get better secondaries then the secondary 2s. You can get better main batteries for DDs but the only way to get better secondaries is through the dual purpose tree.
So the balanced battelfleet still just looks cool and tidy and is still totally pointless. What a disappointment. Maybe the suggested armor buffs I've seen mentioned might help? Thanks to Cloak, the god of HOI4 number crunching, he does it so we don't have to.
Paradox just needs to suck it up and apply an effective naval combat width. I think a tonnage limit (basically make IC a tonnage equivalent) could work if it's set right. The only reason heavy cruisers work is that you can mass so many of them and can generate so much light attack from secondaries in small increments. It wouldn't even be particularly ahistorical - a navy of 300 ships fighting in the English Channel would be WAY too large to maneuver with any efficacy. As long as death stacking is possible heavy cruisers will reign supreme.
@@71Cloak If it worked like land combat where if you go over the limit you can't bring more ships in it would make better ships slightly better since they could fight them "1on1" instead of all at the same time.
@@71Cloak I feel like the answer is tied to reworking fleet commanders. Admirals should control the larger groupings as now, but the smaller task forces should also have commanders with some form of command limit. Then have a limit to the number of commanders you can have in each engagement, with anything above 3 leading to massive debuffs and a higher chance that units will randomly disengage due to confusion within the command structures. Though honestly at this stage I feel like the entire base system needs a rethink as it's always felt overly simplified and has always turned one of the biggest theatres of the conflict into an afterthought.
Didn't the original naval combat system work kinda like that, only with weapon ranges. So bigger ships with bigger guns had longer ranges and could engage everything, meanwhile smaller ships could only engage 1 or 2 ships "up the line"
@@71Cloak the problem with the positioning penalty is that it's capped at -75% and it is based on the ratio between your ships and the enemy's This makes it so that you essentially always get some kind of penalty (for no reason) but stacking more ships does the job very well
btw does anyone know if the soviet air debuff national spirit been patched or does the debuffs still not work properly? Knowing paradox the air debuffs are still not applied to air even after months of the bug being known.
Two questions: 1. Would having carriers let you get away with less heavy attack on your cruisers? 2. What do you think about the buff on the coastal defense designer?
Something that i dont see people talk about is Coastal defence ship. They can put Light Medium gun in one of the slots. That is what i have been doing since patch, Costal Def with 1 Light and rest duals + cheap DDs. Might be worth testing vs yours Heavy Cruisers. Dont bother with Torpedo, it doesnt ignore armor like before and it is doing reduced damage based on armor since last patch.
You lost 27 CAs and 10 BBs, almost your entire fleet, in that first engagement. The enemy lost 3 BBs and 2 BCs. Your opponent can just repair and get back to action while you rebuild your CA fleet for the rest of the game. What am I not getting here?
I found how to beat them. CL with 3 Light Attack & 2 Torpedoes with lvl 2 armor. Spam 30-50 of these & they smash the CA. they won’t get pierced & they shred the screens then the torpedos will shred the capitals. Since they are screens they won’t be targeted by the capitals first. Allowing them to shred the navy. So (DD -> CL no armor -> CL armor -> DD)
Death stack will always be better than dispersing your fleet, and it will be like this untill Paradox finally realize that increasing positionning penalty doesn't do shit. The only exception i make if for submarines, i might be wrong but i prefer them as raiders or quick response force to naval invasions.
Death stacking is and always has been meta (don't bring your subs along). They tried increasing the penalty from having a larger fleet but it still doesn't seem to matter.
@@marthvader14 The issue is that during ww2, naval battles never engaged a lot of ships, it was always a bunch of smaller engagements and skirmishes. No one ever death stacked their fleet for many reasons : - Absolute supply headache, and probably impossible (how do you correctly refuel, coordinate a 200 ships fleet?) - Area coverage, if task forces were dispersed it was mainly to cover large areas, and having one big fleet basically gives the ennemy the ability to freely operate where you aren't. - Speed, having such a big fleet is basically impossible if you don't move really slowly, meaning you shall never be able to engage an intelligent ennemy - You can't get every single ship to be actively fighting, in a coherent naval formation many ships will be out of range, in hoi4 every ship fights as long as it is in the battle UI which is completely dumb. - Battle decisiveness, no nation is willing to go on a "all in" battle, and I'm pretty sure your sailors don't really want to be thrown in a meat grinder (maybe the case for the Japanese though). No nation is mad enough to loose all of their ship because it's logic to keep some kind of tactical flexibility (part of the reason why the german tried to keep their surface vessels late-war). There's a lot more reason why deathstack is stupidly innacurate and absolutely not strategically interesting. I just think they should have some kind of naval width just like land combat, this will break this meta and emphasize more on task force compositions.
I'm looking forward to the carrier fix. I used carriers on patrol with missions assigned to the air wings (i.e. the current workaround) and they are immensely powerful. Even carrier CAS, which was formerly worthless, does good damage. Looking forward to any analysis on the designer options. I'm guessing that Raiding Fleet is probably still the best.
Carrier raiding with 6 screen or convoy protection duty is the best it seems they have the highest efficiency and could cover a lot of ground. I find it ridiculous that you need hundreds of destroyer to secure your shipping line.
I just found you out today and damn, all the effort you are giving to get the numbers. I must say, it's quite damn impressive, man. Subbed right away. Keep those videos flowing!
Would you consider doing an update on this video cause it looks like medium guns were hit with a nerf? In my own, admittedly amateurish testing, Secondary build CA's were losing to even mostly AAA specced BB's.
What about subs? I was surprised to see that '40 subs set to always engage, with 1 snorkel and 1 torp can just decimate british/american deathstacks like its nothing. The only time I had losses was when at shallow seas and airforce involved.
The ai has always been horrible at dealing with subs. They don't invest in sonar/radar or depth charges. The meta for subs has always been building towards 1940 hulls with 1944 tech so you don't have to pay the chromium cost.
Basically, this is how I understand it. Light Attack attacks screens then line then reserve Heavy Attack attacks line then reserve Torpedo attacks screen then line then reserve Piercing matters alot and partial piercing is probably a thing. Your no armor CL beat the armor CL because the extra dps from more ships is more important than the damage reduction from armor. Your armor CL beat destroyers because destroyer peircing is so low it's dps is low. Your destroyers beat no armor cruisers because in that case all damage is 100% and destroyers have more guns and hp per production. Bascially no armor CL do 90% damage to armor CL with more ships DD does 10% damage to armor CL DD does 100% damage to no armor CL I don't know what the math is but all armor has an effect. It must be partial peircing for guns. Torpedos and Bombers ignore armor.
--> no armor CA kills heavy armor CA i think; less armor -> more dmg taken from light attack and vise versa heavy battery -> deals hard attack with very little light attack which is very weird since bigger guns shoot hravier HE shells. can't they make heavy guns have high light attack with less tracking? like in Stellatis
Light cruisers beat heavy cruisers light attack with base strike doctrine and carriers, because of the enormous amount of organization provided by base strike
How does a CA fleet fare against a CV with CA fleet? Is it worth getting 4 CVs? Also something I noticed recently, the Converted Battleship Carriers are actually better than regular 1936 carriers, as they have a lot more range and an extremely similar price.
The drawback of the BB conversions is IIRC that they're more costly to build from keel up and that they can only use heavy engines instead of the more efficient carrier engines.
I have found that torpedoes just aren't that valuable anymore. Destroyers are so hard to kill in comparison to everything else because of the lack of LA CAs that you aren't going to be able to torpedo anything. The enemy capitals will be dead before they run out of screens in my experience.
Armor sucks without admirals. Admirals give defence bonuses, which stack with both damage reductions and armor. A good admiral makes armor ~50% more effective. Armored light cruisers win almost every time vs unarmored in my testing Cheapest possible superheavy with decent engine plus armored light cruisers beat Heavy Cruisers + roach DDs with admirals. In addition, you throw on AA on all the empty slots in a Superheavy and make it a viable counter to Naval Bombers
The problem with admirals is the way they level will decide any close fight. The side that gets lucky and ends up getting more attack through level ups will win. Also, I ran it again and it was closer but still in CAs favour.
my final question about this is what if you simply don't bring the capital ships to the fight and instead brought only light ships to the battle along with torpedoes to kill to kill enemy capitals when their screening efficiency drops
In an actual game, this tilts even further towards CAs because of admiral +positioning trait more or less nullifies the malus from bigger fleet (and CA fleets will be bigger in an equal IC fight compared to BB/BC). UK, US and Japan have that trait on their best admiral, and Italy and Germany have that on their second best irc
An admiral will also increase defense, which increases armor. This wouldn't boost no armor CAs, but would make BCs and BBs stronger. I'm not sure if it's enough to make a significant difference, but I doubt that adding an admiral would be as clear cut as you are making it out to be.
Hey 71Cloak, two quick questions. What template do you use for the "36 BB" you gave 10 of to the both sides and what is the ideal fleet composition of BB's, HC's and DD's?
The 36 BBs were really just for nations that start with bbs and can refit them to be a bit more effective. Ca can win against BC without BB on their side. Composition depends on enemy. If the enemy has CL with a lot of light attack then you need a high ratio of screens to capitals (4.5 +). If the enemy doesn't have light attack then barely more than 3 will do.
Great tests, thank you. According to my small scale testing, screened fleet vs. unscreened fleet with same IC cost, I would say, forget screens in surface battles and use the IC for more capital ships. Historically screening was introduced to counter the thread of torpedo boats to capital ships. Since BBA the damage torpedoes seems so much nerfed and together with the strong positioning bonus for the unscreened fleet, that it is useless. Exception is probably if the enemy attacks with subs. Then you probably want to have some anti-sub destroyers.
After watching this video I started an USA campaing just to test what was said here, since I never really understood naval game and never cared about it really. And the results were in the very first battle against Japanese : 1 lost destroyer and 8 CV naval bombers on my side VS 1 BC, 4 CA, 7 CL and 41 DD on their side. Wow. Just. Wow!
I have been seeing very good results using a mix of 100% torpedo destroyers and 100% light attack cruisers. Screens melt from the latter and everything else (big) implodes from the former. AA can be put on either if needed and submarines get melted too due to the magical damage destroyers do to subs even without depth charges.
Is there a website or something I can go to for updated meta's? I'm a bit of a pleb at hoi4. Last game I was Australia and did nothing but spam out Cruisers and destroyers. Actually worked very well against all the local hostile navy's and thr japanese subs... that is until the Yamato found me and sunk half my fleet in a single engagement...
How about making realistic tests 1940 cruiser hull is not a thing neither is gun level3 and firecontroll and radar would require refit right before war and no admiral with 25% posissioning hurts the bigger fleets.
Positioning in the tests is the same for both sides (unless he's specifically testing with a bigger fleet on one side). Even then, it doesn't really matter because the side with more ships tends to win. The 1940 hull isn't terribly realistic to make up the whole of your capital ship line but it will make up a significant portion if you dedicate research and docks to getting them out early. For battery 3s, those are even more of a thing because you can refit them onto old ships. Refits are still good and waiting for battery 3s to refit also means you get good radar + fire control.
I wasn't using battery 3s. I was using medium battery 1s. It was only the non-CAs ships that were using 1940 battery tech. The CAs I was designing can be built in 36, they will just be a bit slower.
@@28lobster28 Going from fire control 0 (2.5% hit chance) to fire control 3 radar 3 is a 13% increase in hit chance for all weapon types. That should translate into 13% more damage over a given period of time. Not a bad upgrade for refits. Otherwise, refitting all your starting cruisers isn't a horrible idea. Cheap way to create a whole bunch of CAs really fast for most nations.
from what it looks like the british 'spirit of the airforce command' 'CAG night fighting' is fixed. So maybe it's worth it for england to go for the base strike doctrine? because it should be a 25% increase in airplane damage: 3 strikes a day (2 in daylight = 2*100% eff + (1 in nighttime = 50% eff instead of 1 in nighttime = 0% eff)) Also for some reason i was doing gigantic amounts of damage to ships with carrier cas/nav ( i may have overlooked something but idk what that could have been) I just started oneshotting carriers, BB's per aircraft strike
Was no us navy conclusion that heavy cruisers were better in late war?. Here we have the same problem than in aur combat, navy need take care of supplies. Actually the lack of low supply by shaking fleets (should grow exponentially the supply for navy's instead of linearly for army) planes is more complex but linked to land combat, if you need to choose stack land units of planes will be fixed. Still there's no a big deal to prevent the combat like in your covers of hype fleets. The naval clash of ww2 were inconclusive. What happens in your test looks fine to me, the wrong thing in the game is get this number of ships in the channel
Ok but what about realistic fleet composition? 10HC20DD? 20HC10DD? Oops all HC? For say japan who needs to control the entire pacific how would you set up fleets?
I've found that light cruisers still shred, battlecruisers are awesome too. Carriers have always been OP, especially decked out with nothing but naval bombers. The only thing that seems to be a true difference in naval battles are just better fire control and radar, which the AI doesn't seem to really invest in, as far as armor you really only need the base level battlecruiser armor or none to be successful. Oddly enough.
Ok so I don't bother with carrier fighters I just put a shit ton of AA on my battleships 3 batteries and one secondary gun rest is AA and I just get a metric fuck ton of naval bombers fory carriers
If screens fight screens and capitals fight capitals, then maybe there is no need to add secondary batteries to the heavy cruisers? I mean, secondaries are light attack meant to target small ships like DDs and LCs. Fast capital ships with only heavy batteries sounds like the historical concept of the dreadnough, because they had superior range and speed they could fire on the enemy and retreat fast enough to stay just out of enemy range. I would add some AA, otherwise with the fixed carriers they would not stand a chance against them nor be able to operate anywhere near an enemy airfield
I guess it makes sense when you think about what you are actually building, these things arent heavy cruisers really, they are basically pocket battleships, panzerschiffe, original dreadnoughts.
Please can you make Carrier Planes? for Land based aircraft it seems that quality > quantity, but for naval the deck space seems to be too punishing for quality aircraft.
I still dont get what should i do i mean i get heavy cruisers are destroys everything except bb but i dont get anything else maybe bcz i have average english so can u build a example navy for japan and usa
What's the meta naval designer? Before it was coastal fleet designer, but given the stats you're giving, the coastal reduces heavy attack by 25%. Is it still viable for heavy cruisers? Or were better off getting raiding fleet designer or whatever suits best
I would be interrested how this all effects in the Total war mod lol... But would be too much to ask If you could take a Look bc yeah its technically New naval system
Do you know the exact numbers that speed dodging was nerfed to? Is it still viable to make fast CAs with no armor to dodge while carriers do most of the work or is that wrong?
For singleplayer it really doesnt matter as the ai is terrible. The fastest and cheapest way is to delete all heavy ships and build only light cruisers and destroyer. Focus on light attack and speed for cruisers as they will simply decimate enemy screens and your destroyers will nuke the remaining heavys. It’s ridiculous honestly, around 30 properly built light cruiser 2s with about 50-60 dds (make sure they have torps too) is gonna obliterate the whole british navy with very minimal casualties. Or yeah just spam 1940 subs with added snorkel and dont build anything else.
Well, I´m not disappointed :) ...I've always liked cruisers, and I'm happy that they're not dead, and still very much usable. Also glad to know carriers work again as intended, I missed building them in the last few weeks. Thanx for the video & explanation!
@@lordsupersuccnaval bombers, but they will only really work when out of combat not when the subs are already in combat unless you have crazy detection on them
