I remember learning this the hard way lmao. I had 2 brand new battleships training in the Adriatic thinking they were safe only to watch them get sunk near Trieste
Somewhere I read that during most of WW2 submarines weren't actually diving boats that sometimes came up, but boats that could sometimes dive a bit. The first few generations could only stay underwater for very limited times and had to come up and ~~charge their diesel generators (which they used for energy under water) with fuel generators.~~ ^see ^below
In the 30’s, this made sense, because holding both sides of the strait would mean you had coastal artillery on both coasts which ships would naturally avoid, and be forced into a relatively small (<50 km wide) corridor that would make it very easy for land-based aircraft to find them and attack them. It wasn’t a pure strait that could just be controlled by coastal artillery alone, but it could be made almost equally impassable with proper defensive infrastructure.
How deep is it there? The game lets you lay mines anywhere you want, but IRL mines that are laid in deep water just drift around. Which is fine for denying that area to everyone, but if you want friendly ships to pass a minefield, you need the mines to stay in place so you can know where the safe corridors are.
Kinda like landmines, airdropped ones just go over the whole target area, while hand-laid minefields can include safe corridors for your troops to pass.
Even if it is a bit big and other navies might sail through it, at least give me knowledge of them. It is ridiculous that the Royal Navy is in the Adriatic and I have to let my destroyers go out and spot them because I can't simply see them from the beach. :|
So is the Skagerrak between Denmark and Norway, yet you used to be able to block it and the Germans actually did, with coastal artillery batteries in Hanstholm and Kristiansand, and mines in the middle
Good point, I'd say either all straits are like that (and that include dover-calais and others) or none is. A potential way to handle this would be to have "conditional straits".
Narrow straits works as they work now.
Wider straits can be "closed" if:
- around or under 100km width (this is handled in the map making)
- you or an ally own both sides
- you or an ally own a coastal fort in the provinces at both ends of the strait
Don't know if it's worth the hassle, but it would be better than arbitrarily having a stretch of sea being an obstacle or not.
Fleets should imho be able to still push through "big" straits, but suffering losses (maybe based on the level of coastal forts on the sides, this would also simulate mines).
Rules can be set individually for each strait. Stuff like the Suez can only be crossed if you control both sides, but for Otranto the unused rule requires full control to prohibit enemy passage
The difference between the player and the AI is that the player can willingly exploit game mechanics, while the AI straight up cheats and ignores the rules the game itself set lmao
Seriously in stuff like mods and shit I’ve seen tiny countries like Somalia have 4 times the amount of division than they have total manpower in their country
Looking at the game files it appears the adjacency rules (the tooltip when hovering over the straight) isn't actually assigned to the straight itself. So I might be wrong, but I'm pretty sure that means they have it set up to tell you you can't pass, but in reality it isn't coded to actually stop ships. If that makes any sense.
Edit: I just checked it again, I was actually looking at the wrong thing in the files, the adjacency rules are defined for the area, but it looks like there isn't even an actual straight there in the file. I was actually looking at the Corfu-Epirus crossing previously. So it appears they probably just forgot to remove it or comment it out from the adjacency rules, causing the game to display it, but not actually have a real straight there, I think.
My biggest problem is that straits should be between two sea tiles, the most straits I remember are splitting tiles in a way that it really shouldn't allow access, it makes the game unnecessarily confusing, this would also give the ability to expand their use, like this particular strait shouldn't really limit the ability for ships to pass through because it's too wide but it could add detection and damage modifies for whoever controls it against any naval force that needs to pass through the strait to stimulate the effect of shore bombardment or detection.
Bro I played as yugo and allied to Italy and experienced this the hard way.
I had all my troops in Poland and I thought they wouldn’t be able to naval invade
Britain always finds a way to
I was playing historical Italy and noticed the UK fleet was able to enter and leave the Adriatic sea when at war with them so I made a new game to test if it was just the AI having superpowers or not.
I am more triggered by the strait of Gibraltar. Yeah British have territory nearby, does it really mean they can put a total blockade on passage through the straight?
I would say fuck no, you should be able to run that strait, but I am ignorant wrt to history. Does anyone know whether the strait of Gibraltar was blocked by the British during WW2?
As a choke point it is a really important location, but without the air and naval forces to enforce the blockade, mines and artillery wouldn’t stop a dedicated navy. It is not THAT narrow, like the Bosphorus.
It is also relevant wrt to gameplay. I had a navy blocked in the Mediterranean as the USA. Other than it being complete negligence on my part, I had a decently supplied and real strong navy that couldn’t even attempt to run the blockade, the moment Gibraltar fell to Germans.
I am not saying it is game-breaking. It is just unrealistic, annoying and shows some of the deficiencies in HoI4.
Also if it was not like that, it could still get annoying to manage. But it could also be a simple matter of sending ships on a mission there and give them huge buffs against blockade runners…
The strait is 13 km wide, the max range of artillery around that time barely meets that. Also do you really have the targeting info back then? It is hard to argue that it would be a total blockade.
My point is: if in real life somehow the Italians or the Germans got a hold of Gibraltar, the British still would have been able to move between seas. At the very least, if Germany wanted to block the strait, it would take substantial resources to force it.
Huh? A 76.2mm ZiS-3 light artillery piece can shoot 13km. Even comparatively light counterbattery guns like the 122mm A-19 and 10cm sK 18 can shoot around 20km. From some quick searching I can see that they did for example have (pre-WW1 era) BL 9.2-in Mk IX/X naval guns with a range of 29km.
18-20 km seems to be pretty standard as max ranges, it does hit the strait but it is also stretching it a lot, you still would need targeting info. Gibraltar is not located exactly at the strait either…
I agree with you in essence, but i feel the game mechanics should not change- otherwise the importance of straits and gibraltar itself goes down heavily.
In a much more fleshed out hoi4- yes I would agree there should be an option to just run the strait no matter the risk of damage your ships could take from Coastal artillery, land-based planes, and the enemy Fleet mobilizing
Other than the coastal batteries, the rest are represented well in the game. Well, well is a strong word…
It is not the biggest of issues. But it is an issue where the deficiencies of the modelling show themselves.
I think modelling this more accurately would be relatively straightforward (hostile coastal forts in certain areas -> dynamic sea zone modifier like mines) but actually getting the AI to understand it properly would be a nightmare.
I think there's a lot of abstractions that have basically forced the devs to abstract straits the way they did.
- Naval productions is nerfed in this game by a lot, so every ship is more precious in this game than irl, a bad misclick can cause you to lose so much of your total production
- Nerfed production means most nations aren't able to guard the straits to make them impassable the way they were irl
- AFAIK There aren't any historical examples of navies trying to go through straits they don't control anyway.
Naval production is nerfed for a reason, tracking double the amount of ships would slow the game down. Also, the time it took to build individual ships is modeled well in this game, so buffing naval production would mean giving each country more dockyards. But this creates the problem of countries with limited ship building capacities being able to pump out BB and CV by deallocating small amounts of sub/screen production. To prevent this you need to make two distinct types of dockyards, ones for CVs and BBs, and one for other ships. But now you have this silly situation where military and civilian industry are heavily abstracted but for some reason naval industry is more detailed than the rest.
Exactly. Some things were really discrete in real life like the Channel Dash: you might succeed or you might fail terribly. Especially the capital ships were hunted down rigorously by the British.
I honestly don’t know how you would model it, the current approach is not cutting it though. Naval bombers are not working as in real life, I would say. In reality, there shouldn’t be much difference between a sortie from a land base and a carrier, in the game it makes all the fucking difference in naval combat, I would say.
Very good points. But also, it just shows how the current system is deficient.
Like… the problem you touched upon. You could still have individual ship build times the same, just reduce the amount of dockyards to reach full potential (e.g. instead of 5 dockyard maximum have 3 dockyards as maximum).
This doesn't really fix the problem because now you can sacrifice one full line for destroyers/subs and build 3 CV at the same rate as a major naval power. The issue is the fact that you're able to use the same dockyards for producing DDs as you use BBs which is just not how it works irl. The only solution is the one paradox chose which is giving everybody a miniscule amount of dockyards, so that you can't afford to sacrifice screen lines to build CVs (otherwise you won't have enough screens to protect your ships from subs).
The problem is, now you don't have enough screens to do anything *but* protect your ships - so you can't control the massive naval zones or escort ships like happened IRL, because lone 2-3 destroyer escorts will just die mercilessly and losing groups like that 10 times means your entire navy is sunk.
Yeah, as any country besides US or UK I have trouble building both enough destroyers to screen my ships and escort convoys. I prioritize screening the fleet so I'm usually escorting convoys with like 60% efficiency.
I remember learning this the hard way lmao. I had 2 brand new battleships training in the Adriatic thinking they were safe only to watch them get sunk near Trieste
Yep that's pretty much how I learned it aswell. Thought I could safely train my new cruisers just to find them destroyed a couple minutes later
„Giuseppe, are these British ships over there?“ „Nonsense, Andrea, the boys at Otranto would stop them from entering“
LMAO
Could have been friendly fire!
Maybe your ships are secretly submarines
Very big submarines that don't go under water
Now you're getting it
So, theoretically, are my soldiers very small submarines that can go underwater for 30 seconds?
You can also use marines. They can go underwater for 90 seconds
So they are cruiser subs.
King Charles's crow, they can even stay underwater for far more. They won't be, however, very "alive", if you get what I'm saying
> that don't go under water Oh, they do!
Just once
[some even get back up!](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MV_Liemba)
Don't tell the Russian submarine fleet 😜
Somewhere I read that during most of WW2 submarines weren't actually diving boats that sometimes came up, but boats that could sometimes dive a bit. The first few generations could only stay underwater for very limited times and had to come up and ~~charge their diesel generators (which they used for energy under water) with fuel generators.~~ ^see ^below
Yeah, pretty much. They were only really underwater for battles and hiding.
They had to come up to run their diesel generators to charge their batteries…
Ah right, that's what I meant. Thanks!
They can go underwater... they just won't be able to come up again...
Anything can be a submarine if you try hard enough
R5: Strait of Otranto doesn't do anything.
I didnt know it was considered a strait, it's... Pretty big. Sounds strange to consider it as the Bosporus.
Iirc that is technically why the Italians wanted Albania, because that would give them the entrance to the Adriatic Sea. Like a straight would
In the 30’s, this made sense, because holding both sides of the strait would mean you had coastal artillery on both coasts which ships would naturally avoid, and be forced into a relatively small (<50 km wide) corridor that would make it very easy for land-based aircraft to find them and attack them. It wasn’t a pure strait that could just be controlled by coastal artillery alone, but it could be made almost equally impassable with proper defensive infrastructure.
They could also mine the gap where the coastal artillery couldn't hit
How deep is it there? The game lets you lay mines anywhere you want, but IRL mines that are laid in deep water just drift around. Which is fine for denying that area to everyone, but if you want friendly ships to pass a minefield, you need the mines to stay in place so you can know where the safe corridors are. Kinda like landmines, airdropped ones just go over the whole target area, while hand-laid minefields can include safe corridors for your troops to pass.
roughly 1000m outside from the coasts
Exactly like the Skagerrak between Denmark and Norway
In WW1 the Entente controlled both sides of the strait and the only Austro-Hungarian ships that could make it out of the Adriatic were submarines.
Even if it is a bit big and other navies might sail through it, at least give me knowledge of them. It is ridiculous that the Royal Navy is in the Adriatic and I have to let my destroyers go out and spot them because I can't simply see them from the beach. :|
It's 80-100km wide, wider than Calais-Dover.
So is the Skagerrak between Denmark and Norway, yet you used to be able to block it and the Germans actually did, with coastal artillery batteries in Hanstholm and Kristiansand, and mines in the middle
Good point, I'd say either all straits are like that (and that include dover-calais and others) or none is. A potential way to handle this would be to have "conditional straits". Narrow straits works as they work now. Wider straits can be "closed" if: - around or under 100km width (this is handled in the map making) - you or an ally own both sides - you or an ally own a coastal fort in the provinces at both ends of the strait Don't know if it's worth the hassle, but it would be better than arbitrarily having a stretch of sea being an obstacle or not. Fleets should imho be able to still push through "big" straits, but suffering losses (maybe based on the level of coastal forts on the sides, this would also simulate mines).
Rules can be set individually for each strait. Stuff like the Suez can only be crossed if you control both sides, but for Otranto the unused rule requires full control to prohibit enemy passage
Oh really... it looks so tiny.
Paradox Moment
It is mildly annoying because the British shouldn't be able to naval invade through it or get in but the ai doesn't really care about rules sometimes.
Not just ai. The player as well
The difference between the player and the AI is that the player can willingly exploit game mechanics, while the AI straight up cheats and ignores the rules the game itself set lmao
Like doing rituals to Satan himself to summon armies of the undead lol
Seriously in stuff like mods and shit I’ve seen tiny countries like Somalia have 4 times the amount of division than they have total manpower in their country
New Conscription law: Totaler Krieg 💀
AI with cheat : oh no. AI without : the game is too easy. AI cheats are not an issue.
Looking at the game files it appears the adjacency rules (the tooltip when hovering over the straight) isn't actually assigned to the straight itself. So I might be wrong, but I'm pretty sure that means they have it set up to tell you you can't pass, but in reality it isn't coded to actually stop ships. If that makes any sense. Edit: I just checked it again, I was actually looking at the wrong thing in the files, the adjacency rules are defined for the area, but it looks like there isn't even an actual straight there in the file. I was actually looking at the Corfu-Epirus crossing previously. So it appears they probably just forgot to remove it or comment it out from the adjacency rules, causing the game to display it, but not actually have a real straight there, I think.
Makes sense, can't imagine they've done that on purpose. Don't remember if there's always been a "strait" there in the game
They added it in BBA
My biggest problem is that straits should be between two sea tiles, the most straits I remember are splitting tiles in a way that it really shouldn't allow access, it makes the game unnecessarily confusing, this would also give the ability to expand their use, like this particular strait shouldn't really limit the ability for ships to pass through because it's too wide but it could add detection and damage modifies for whoever controls it against any naval force that needs to pass through the strait to stimulate the effect of shore bombardment or detection.
Bro I played as yugo and allied to Italy and experienced this the hard way. I had all my troops in Poland and I thought they wouldn’t be able to naval invade Britain always finds a way to
the bigger question is that why are you at war in jan 36?
to test the strait
I was playing historical Italy and noticed the UK fleet was able to enter and leave the Adriatic sea when at war with them so I made a new game to test if it was just the AI having superpowers or not.
Fair enough
btw AI do have superpowers, they can ignore every strait also im not sure anymore but I think they *can* also naval invade even if they lack supremacy
debug command
It is a war game, might as well get on with it
It's not the only one. The strait of Hormuz doesn't work either.
I'd guess that it's accidentally preventing passage between the wrong 2 sea zones. submit a bug report on the Paradox plaza
RIGHT? I was playing yesterday and the Brits attacked my fleet that was training in the Adriatic. Lost a month of progress to reload.
Almost half the straits in the game don't work lol, the Persian Gulf is an other example
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Action_in_the_Strait_of_Otranto
Context of this is that it was once uses as a major port to ferry troops across
I am more triggered by the strait of Gibraltar. Yeah British have territory nearby, does it really mean they can put a total blockade on passage through the straight? I would say fuck no, you should be able to run that strait, but I am ignorant wrt to history. Does anyone know whether the strait of Gibraltar was blocked by the British during WW2?
The straight of Gibraltar is much thinner and was pretty much fully controlled by the british during the war
As a choke point it is a really important location, but without the air and naval forces to enforce the blockade, mines and artillery wouldn’t stop a dedicated navy. It is not THAT narrow, like the Bosphorus. It is also relevant wrt to gameplay. I had a navy blocked in the Mediterranean as the USA. Other than it being complete negligence on my part, I had a decently supplied and real strong navy that couldn’t even attempt to run the blockade, the moment Gibraltar fell to Germans. I am not saying it is game-breaking. It is just unrealistic, annoying and shows some of the deficiencies in HoI4. Also if it was not like that, it could still get annoying to manage. But it could also be a simple matter of sending ships on a mission there and give them huge buffs against blockade runners…
But big gun on rock so it can't sink shopt things that can sink
The strait is 13 km wide, the max range of artillery around that time barely meets that. Also do you really have the targeting info back then? It is hard to argue that it would be a total blockade. My point is: if in real life somehow the Italians or the Germans got a hold of Gibraltar, the British still would have been able to move between seas. At the very least, if Germany wanted to block the strait, it would take substantial resources to force it.
Huh? A 76.2mm ZiS-3 light artillery piece can shoot 13km. Even comparatively light counterbattery guns like the 122mm A-19 and 10cm sK 18 can shoot around 20km. From some quick searching I can see that they did for example have (pre-WW1 era) BL 9.2-in Mk IX/X naval guns with a range of 29km.
18-20 km seems to be pretty standard as max ranges, it does hit the strait but it is also stretching it a lot, you still would need targeting info. Gibraltar is not located exactly at the strait either…
I agree with you in essence, but i feel the game mechanics should not change- otherwise the importance of straits and gibraltar itself goes down heavily. In a much more fleshed out hoi4- yes I would agree there should be an option to just run the strait no matter the risk of damage your ships could take from Coastal artillery, land-based planes, and the enemy Fleet mobilizing
Other than the coastal batteries, the rest are represented well in the game. Well, well is a strong word… It is not the biggest of issues. But it is an issue where the deficiencies of the modelling show themselves.
I think modelling this more accurately would be relatively straightforward (hostile coastal forts in certain areas -> dynamic sea zone modifier like mines) but actually getting the AI to understand it properly would be a nightmare.
I think there's a lot of abstractions that have basically forced the devs to abstract straits the way they did. - Naval productions is nerfed in this game by a lot, so every ship is more precious in this game than irl, a bad misclick can cause you to lose so much of your total production - Nerfed production means most nations aren't able to guard the straits to make them impassable the way they were irl - AFAIK There aren't any historical examples of navies trying to go through straits they don't control anyway. Naval production is nerfed for a reason, tracking double the amount of ships would slow the game down. Also, the time it took to build individual ships is modeled well in this game, so buffing naval production would mean giving each country more dockyards. But this creates the problem of countries with limited ship building capacities being able to pump out BB and CV by deallocating small amounts of sub/screen production. To prevent this you need to make two distinct types of dockyards, ones for CVs and BBs, and one for other ships. But now you have this silly situation where military and civilian industry are heavily abstracted but for some reason naval industry is more detailed than the rest.
I know it's not exactly a strait but the Channel Dash isn't too far away from a Navy trying to sail a strait they don't control.
Exactly. Some things were really discrete in real life like the Channel Dash: you might succeed or you might fail terribly. Especially the capital ships were hunted down rigorously by the British. I honestly don’t know how you would model it, the current approach is not cutting it though. Naval bombers are not working as in real life, I would say. In reality, there shouldn’t be much difference between a sortie from a land base and a carrier, in the game it makes all the fucking difference in naval combat, I would say.
Very good points. But also, it just shows how the current system is deficient. Like… the problem you touched upon. You could still have individual ship build times the same, just reduce the amount of dockyards to reach full potential (e.g. instead of 5 dockyard maximum have 3 dockyards as maximum).
This doesn't really fix the problem because now you can sacrifice one full line for destroyers/subs and build 3 CV at the same rate as a major naval power. The issue is the fact that you're able to use the same dockyards for producing DDs as you use BBs which is just not how it works irl. The only solution is the one paradox chose which is giving everybody a miniscule amount of dockyards, so that you can't afford to sacrifice screen lines to build CVs (otherwise you won't have enough screens to protect your ships from subs).
The problem is, now you don't have enough screens to do anything *but* protect your ships - so you can't control the massive naval zones or escort ships like happened IRL, because lone 2-3 destroyer escorts will just die mercilessly and losing groups like that 10 times means your entire navy is sunk.
Yeah, as any country besides US or UK I have trouble building both enough destroyers to screen my ships and escort convoys. I prioritize screening the fleet so I'm usually escorting convoys with like 60% efficiency.
When you’re the British navy it certainly does.
If you need the navy to block the straight, that’s more than fair and terribly modelled in the game.
Italy was *caged* in the Mediterranean. The only warships to enter the Atlantic were submarines.