New video! Boy, do I feel dumb for blowing off the Anti-Comintern Pact a few episodes ago. Well, now we need to deal with the consequences of our actions, and that means the Soviets are coming for us.
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Jan 1, 2021 14:33
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How much of Africa is considered impassible?
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Jan 2, 2021 02:20
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I'm surprised you're putting maintenance companies in your infantry divisions, there's not that much IC worth of equipment to lose in them even with full support. Armored divisions definitely need them, though. Speaking of, it might be time for some spearhead orders. You should be able to encircle that entire eastern front if you use two armies.
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Jan 2, 2021 04:47
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Scalding Coffee posted:How much of Africa is considered impassible? As far as I can tell, only the Sahara gets impassable terrain in vanilla, and it looks about like this:  wiegieman posted:I'm surprised you're putting maintenance companies in your infantry divisions, there's not that much IC worth of equipment to lose in them even with full support. For what it's worth, I won't actually ever switch any infantry divisions over to the full support template. (Spoilers: The entire vanilla campaign and basically the entire Kaiserreich campaign that will come afterwards is already recorded) It was only ever supposed to be a luxury thing I made because we had a ton of army experience. wiegieman posted:Speaking of, it might be time for some spearhead orders. You should be able to encircle that entire eastern front if you use two armies. I'm not exactly confident in my ability to pull that off. In my experience, that leads to my units running out of organization halfway through and being basically stuck because the supply is completely shot.
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Jan 3, 2021 13:58
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New video! This time, we're going to try and figure out how we're going to crack this Soviet nut. And meanwhile, the Brits just can't get enough of us and keep wanting to go on vacation on our rightfully stolen land.
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Jan 8, 2021 17:14
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Having fast tanks don't seem that helpful against that wall. Your ships are going into combat with someone.
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Jan 8, 2021 20:50
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Scalding Coffee posted:Having fast tanks don't seem that helpful against that wall. Well, the advantage is going to be largely when we actually do manage a breakthrough, in keeping enemy units from filling in the empty provinces behind the line. Moving to medium tanks would surely help with getting breakthroughs, but I wasn't convinced it was necessary at the time. Scalding Coffee posted:Your ships are going into combat with someone. I presume that's just convoys under attack, which I at this point had filed under "that'll just happen and we'll live with it". My attention span for the navy is very slim.
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Jan 10, 2021 02:24
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Honestly even after MTG was released I find that I never actually pay attention to the navy, even when I play nations like Japan or the UK, it's just not a very engaging system in my opinion. The fact that I barely know how naval combat works despite having over 2000 hours in this game speaks to just how bland I think it is. Though it's a lot more relevant in multiplayer than singleplayer as far as I understand it, which probably makes my experience with it incomplete since I very rarely play multiplayer.
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Jan 10, 2021 02:58
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As one of the localizers for EaW going on three years now I'm pretty excited for when you eventually reach our corner of guns war circlegame mods.  I can't believe I'm just now finding this thread though shame on me. Think I'll end up binge-watching all the episodes you have so far after my weekly Only War game tonight! As for Naval Combat: as someone who understands it fairly well nowadays even I think it's not a very engaging system outside of vanilla play- and vanilla is very bland to me nowadays. Paradox's work on the Espionage system though? Fantastic, 10/10, favorite thing to play with in Hoi4 nowadays. If you want, I can sperg out over boat things such as the most efficient way to navally invade anyone (hint, it involves ignoring the naval invasion assistance command) and other such things such as the still completely viable destroyer doomstack.
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Jan 10, 2021 14:14
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Das Panzer posted:As one of the localizers for EaW going on three years now I'm pretty excited for when you eventually reach our corner of guns war circlegame mods. Sperging is what we're here for, mate. Go do it. Also, Zebrica when?
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Jan 10, 2021 17:18
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Hopefully this year! We tried to have it out by Christmas, but with how massive it is, it just wasn't feasible. Now that Scroup is back from service in the AFRF tho, Yard and Cyrus have been able to focus more on coding than having to be heads of the devteam. I've actually been working on the loc for Chiropterra recently, and while I can't really say much yet, I will say that Zebrica is gonna be a wild ride- it's larger than both the Equestrian and Griffonian continents combined. Going to add this on here to avoid doubleposting: BOTES, and HOW DO BOTE. Naval Combat in Hoi4 is a little bit obtuse in it's current build, but still (as long as you have more than a couple continents) very viable and oftentimes useful for reaching far away places- not to mention that if you're a European country fighting in, Say, North Africa, you are most likely drawing your supplies via naval shipping unless you happen to own the entirety of Turkey. As a reminder, land Supply only goes to your front so long as there is a direct route from your Capital to the unit via provinces that are specifically your own, or of a country you are specifically allied with. Simply having military access rights does not mean you get to draw supply from them, so if you aren't in a faction with someone on the front, you're going to be shipping naval supplies. And that means convoys! Convoys are good, and if you aren't building warships, you should be building convoys. The more convoys you have, the better your overseas supply lines are going to be, obviously, but they also affect how efficient your overseas resource trading is, the number of available convoys affects troop deployment across water (in much the same way transport planes work for Airborne landings!) as well as naval invasion speed, which is also effected by a couple research techs. TheMcD posted:
There are actually two indicators for naval combat so you can discern them at a glance! One is specifically for convoy raiding, the other is specifically for major fleet actions. (One shows up as a small lil' convoy on the map, the other, predictably, shows up as a warship.) Now then, onto the meat and potatoes of naval warfare! I'll try not to get too stuck into number crunch, for the sake of simplification. Firstly, the MTG update has mostly made meme stacks of like, 1000 submarines, or 40 BBs or like 12 carriers a thing of the past, as nowadays there are stacking penalties for your navies. Off the top of my head, the most effective Vanilla task group follows the old American WW2 model of 1-2 Aircraft Carriers, 3-4 Battleships, 3-4 Battlecruisers, 5 Heavy Cruisers, 10 Light cruisers, and around 15-20 destroyers. Anything past that and your task groups will start having issues entering battle because they're be too bloated and have issues fighting things. You can still have larger over-all numbers in a main Fleet without penalty if they smaller task groups are operating in the same area, but if you don't separate them out INTO different task groups they'll start to flounder, and then you're just hemmoraging very expensive naval vessels. Think of it in terms of Armies and Army Groups. Each Naval Task Group can easily represent a single Army of 24 Divisions or so (as modeled in HOI4) under a single General. Then, you have several different task groups operating under your Admiral, who leads the specific Fleet, the Naval stand-in for Army Groups. At this time, HOI4 does not model Task Group commanders, and PDX hasn't really said anything about adding them yet, so for now, all we have are Fleet Admirals, who give their bonuses to the Fleet as a whole, not just singular Task Groups, in the same way a Field Marshal gives his bonuses to every Army under his Army Group. One notable and silly addendum to all this is that whilst they got major nerfs in the same way Submarines did because of this specific meta, you can still just crap out 1000 Destroyer strong doomstacks in a year or two assuming your naval industry is up to par. (like, 20-30 dockyards or so) As long as they have the three important things- Torpedo Tubes, Sonar for sub detection, and Anti-Submarine Weapons, you can still go around with your massive destroyer fleet making GBS threads on everything from the measly Italian navy up to Britain's main Carrier Fleets. The US usually has strong enough fleets to match you, but hey, destroyers build very quickly and watching a doomstack melt PACCOM is hilarious to me. As for actual combat and damage numbers, the only thing worth noting is thus: The heavier your armor, guns, and other modules, the slower your vessel will be- and thus the better engines you'll have to mount on your boats, which are unlocked by researching later ship models. Past that, just treat them like tanks or infantry; higher numbers tend better. But let's get onto what I'm reasonably sure the biggest issue is for most people: HOW TF DO I MAKE MY FLEETS WORK? Well, friends, let's start by explaining all the deployment options: a note to interrupt myself with: Naval Task Forces (and Fleets, by extension) can either deploy into their own taskings, Task force by Task force, or the entire fleet (If you want specific admirals for specific jobs, for example a surface fleet vs a submarine fleet) can be assigned one singular job. The deployment options are as follows: Naval Exercises Patrol Strike Force Convoy Raiding Convoy Escort Naval Invasion Support Oh, also, Mine Laying and Mine Clearing, but those are pretty self explanatory: Have your botes either lay or clear a naval zone of sea mines. Naval Exercises- Just like Air Training, it deploys your ships to their chosen deployment zones out at sea, and starts accruing their experience, which now works very similarly to Infantry experience levels. Something to note is that training accidents can and will happen, and ships can be damaged and must be repaired in port. (Don't forget to tab over to your production tab and assign some of your dockyards to ship repair!) Patrol- Now we're getting down to the important stuff. Patrolling Task Forces will patrol a Single naval zone they're assigned to (the best sorts of task forces are small groups of 5-7 destroyers or destroyers and one or two light cruisers) and attempt to SPOT enemy fleets in their naval zone. Once spotting reaches 100%, and you fully identify the enemy fleet, it is then able to be engaged by your Patrols and ANY STRIKE FORCES ASSIGNED TO THAT NAVAL ZONE. We'll get to more Strike Force specifics in a minute. Depending on whatever you have your Patrol's engagement orders set to, they can either disengage immediately, attempt to attack whatever fleet is out there, or some mix of the two. Generally I have dozens of small destroyer Patrol Task Forces scouring the naval zones and set to disengage immediately, so that they don't get caught up in fleet actions. It tends to mean less fleet actions on my end, but as well, my navy tends to remain more together and thus safer. Strike Force- VERY IMPORTANT: If a task force or Fleet is on Strike Force, It will sit it's happy rear end in a port somewhere until someone spots an enemy fleet. Thus, without Patrol groups, Strike Force is absolutely, completely useless, because land forces can't spot fleets effectively enough to deploy a Strike Force, and Air Force spotting via naval bombers is only effective near coastlines. A Strike Force is best comprised of your main Task Force(s), as I listed up above (Carriers, Battleships, etc. your heavy hitters effectively) as they're the main Striking Force that you're going to slap the enemy Navy with. Also, again, make sure you're checking your Task Force's engagement rule so that they don't just infinitely sit on port in "Never Engage". Another thing to note: The more naval zones a strike force has to cover, the slower it is for them to deploy and engage an enemy. I tend to have 3 Patrol Zones per strike force as long as my Naval production supports it, but you can stretch that out to five Patrol Zones if you're strapped for boats. Convoy Raiding- This one assigns a task force to look for enemy convoys in the fleet's operational area. The raiding task force needs to spot the convoys before attacking them, which they will do on their own, unlike Strike Force- though at reduced efficiency from a Patrol. Each raiding task force can only efficiently cover 1.5 strategic regions. If a fleet does not have enough raiding task forces for the area it covers, their efficiency will be reduced. As well, the spread of your vessels is somewhere between Patrol and Strike force as far as where your task forces end up in the over-all fleet. If you just want your navy to be reasonably effective and don't want to deal with micromanagement of your fleet, separate your fleet into 4 or 5 different task forces and set them to convoy raiding. Convoy Escort- The opposite of Convoy Raiding, the fleet or Task Forces will protect any convoy ships you have out and about, from resource convoys to supply convoys to naval invasions! Something to note; if you aren't micromanaging your fleets to maintain naval superiority, Convoy Escort is what you want to use more often than Naval Invasion Escort- this is because Naval Invasion Escort does not project enough power most of the time to send off an invasion due to enemy fleets operating in an area. Convoy Escort means that your Task Forces are out and about doing things, and thus, you can get an accurate read of your naval supremacy in regards to an invasion (iirc, you must have 50% naval superiority to send off an Invasion Fleet. Naval Invasion Support- Covered above for the most part; it keeps your Task Force in port like a strike group until the invasion fleet heads off. If you CAN use this effectively for your invasions it's better than straight Convoy Escort since the Invasion Support will stay right with your Invasion Force, but not at all required to launch an invasion. Another couple notes: Superheavy Battleships are fun, but not worth building unless you REALLY REALLY like them. Their stats are only somewhat better than Tier 4 Battleships, and they cost just under twice as much as a Tier IV BB- 5,500 IC for a super heavy vs 3,600 IC for the Tier IV. Aircraft Carrier Air Wings can be adjusted during production by clicking on the little plane icon next to the Ship picture in the Production Tab- Do yourself a favor and ignore Carrier Dive Bombers in favor of Fighters and Torpedo Bombers. Dive Bombers on Carriers are stupid. After a Carrier is deployed, it's airwing can be adjusted via the Air Force Map Tab, like any other airbase. (Just look for an airfield out in the middle of the ocean.) Carrier Jet Fighters are a thing and worthwhile if you're heavy into your airforce tech tree. Sadly, Carrier Jet Torpedo Bombers do not exist. Convoys CAN actually defend themselves against air raids, amusingly. In game code states that Convoys have a machine gun that does 0.2 Damage to infantry with 1.0 Piercing, and .1 Anti-Air (meaning that it has an effective weight of .3 Damage vs Planes since Anti-Air is Inf. Damage +AA Damage, and can pierce 1.0 armor on planes.) 
Das Panzer fucked around with this message at 15:15 on Jan 11, 2021 |
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Jan 10, 2021 17:57
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Das Panzer posted:snip This is excellent BOTE science. I'll try to remember it for my own games.
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Jan 11, 2021 20:53
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Das Panzer posted:As one of the localizers for EaW going on three years now I'm pretty excited for when you eventually reach our corner of guns war circlegame mods.
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Jan 11, 2021 22:12
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Oh hey! I go by Tempest nowadays- SA is the only place I still go by Panzer. I don't talk much out of the Dev Channels anymore but feel free to poke me on discord if you just wanna chat or something!
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Jan 12, 2021 02:12
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I'll have to see if I can't get that advice to work in a game or something. Do you have a suggestion for a nation to sort of try things out with? I'm obviously not locked to vanilla, so if any mods have an interesting naval trainer nation, I'd be grateful for that as well. And yes, I absolutely plan to cover EaW. Probably after Kaiserreich.
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Jan 13, 2021 16:41
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For Vanilla/KR/RT56 (anything that uses the vanilla map basically) I recommend the US/UK if you want a pre-built navy, though maybe not the US for a Kaiserreich run. (Alternatively Japan if you want to island hop!) Or someone such as France or Italy if you want to build up a navy from scratch. If you end up covering Old World Blues, any nation works for there! The naval tech tree for OWB is a touch more obtuse than usual, but the upside is that major rivers all count as naval zones. It makes for some very entertaining naval invasions. For Equestria at War I can recommend New Mareland- Equestria's colony and a mix between Australia and New Zealand culturally, and their entire shtick is naval invasions. Alternatively, you could play as any of the Equestrian Continent fascist paths (Changelings, Olenian Rike, Solar or Lunar Empire path for Equestria, Sombra, or Nova Griffonia), or the Stalliongradian Communists under Sinister Serov, who plays similarly to Trotsky in the main game -expansionist and warhawkish. And then if the Star Wars Mod ever releases anytime soon, it's main focus is going to be nicely split between naval and ground combat, with space fleets representing the naval tab.
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Jan 13, 2021 22:20
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New video! It's time to stop screwing around and commit to a big push. Will it work?
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Jan 15, 2021 10:48
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Maybe you can have your own Operation Overlord in Alaska.
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Jan 15, 2021 23:31
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New video! With the Soviets now out of the picture, we start working on mopping up some different areas of the map.
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Jan 23, 2021 01:06
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Are there no airfields in the Middle East? It looks like a large segment of the map is undeveloped.
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Jan 23, 2021 05:51
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Scalding Coffee posted:Are there no airfields in the Middle East? It looks like a large segment of the map is undeveloped. Yeah, vanilla HoI4 has basically gently caress all going on in Africa and the Middle East. No real resources (beyond oil in the ME) and no real infrastructure. Makes fighting there real fun.
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Jan 23, 2021 12:37
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I am curious why you do not invest in radar around the English Channel. Wouldn't it help with both air and sea superiority?
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Jan 23, 2021 16:11
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Delvio posted:I am curious why you do not invest in radar around the English Channel. Wouldn't it help with both air and sea superiority? Because I'm stupid and didn't think of it.
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Jan 23, 2021 16:14
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You could've switched those Mountaineer templates into basic infantry. That way you could#ve kept their experience. Iirc, clicking the double arrow besides the button to delete 'em does the trick.
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Jan 23, 2021 18:51
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Lynneth posted:You could've switched those Mountaineer templates into basic infantry. That way you could#ve kept their experience. Iirc, clicking the double arrow besides the button to delete 'em does the trick. I could've, and I'm totally aware of swapping templates (I did so in the first or second episode, even!), I just couldn't spare the brainpower to make that move because there aren't many things I could give less of a poo poo about at that point than some infantry divisions that weren't going to be going anywhere anyway because everywhere they could have gone already has their supply fully clogged.
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Jan 26, 2021 00:03
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New video! We make our move towards trying to invade the British mainland. Either way, the campaign ends here. Will it be with victory or failure? Only one way to find out! Next week will be the beginning of our Kaiserreich game!
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Jan 29, 2021 13:04
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I'm not sure if it's come up before, but the previous and this video have a weird background noise occasionally. This one has it at 2:27-2:38, among several more occurrences. I think it might have to do with echoing?
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Jan 29, 2021 20:04
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It has to do with Ibble using a different mic in that session which picked my voice up as well. Then when I ran leveling, it amplified my very quiet voice into loving demon noises. I of course only noticed this after getting rid of the source files so we're stuck with it. I think it might also possibly be in the next episode, since those were in the same recording session, I think? But then it shouldn't be a problem anymore. This LP has been a continuous adventure of audio fuckery, let me tell you.
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Jan 29, 2021 20:15
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You can build a bridge to England on top of all the ships and planes that sunk.
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Jan 30, 2021 02:04
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Scalding Coffee posted:You can build a bridge to England on top of all the ships and planes that sunk. you still have to plow through those hot blooded americans once you reach land and the only way past that is to disrupt their oil and hamburger supply lines
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Jan 30, 2021 10:34
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 What's all this then? This is Kaiserreich, the most popular mod (that doesn't just enhance the vanilla game) for Hearts of Iron 4. It started out life as a mod for Hearts of Iron 2 / Darkest Hour and has been in development for ages. What's it about? Kaiserreich is a mod that sets out to answer the question "How would WW2 look like if the Central Powers had won WW1?". And as a result, a lot of things are different, even if we end up seeing a lot of familiar faces. We go more into what's going on in the world of Kaiserreich in the first video before we make our choice of country: The Socialist Republic of Italy. How will this go? In this game, Ibble will be taking over as host and making more decisions while I take more of an advisory/guide/military commander position and go over some more things as to how playing a minor power in an alliance is different to playing a major power. Let's see what happens! 
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Feb 5, 2021 17:33
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That certainly is a lot to digest, but there is no gameplay to see any other changes.
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Feb 5, 2021 23:29
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Scalding Coffee posted:That certainly is a lot to digest, but there is no gameplay to see any other changes. Well, there's not really any gameplay changes in KR. It's by and large vanilla with some minor changes at the edges maybe. This video was half "give people not familiar an intro to what's going to be going down in Kaiserreich" and half "give Ibble an idea of what's going down in Kaiserreich so he can pick a nation for us to play and I figured I might as well record it". And it's not like most things I went over won't be unfolding slowly over the next seven episodes or so. TheMcD fucked around with this message at 12:15 on Feb 6, 2021 |
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Feb 6, 2021 12:11
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Yeah, thankfully KR is pretty easy to get into as far as mods go. The myriad of new ideologies can be a bit off-putting at first, and getting advisors can be a bit confusing, but it's pretty tame as far as gamely changes go. OWB took me some time to wrap my brain around, for example, because of some of the really neat changes they made to combat in that mod, but KR just takes a little bit of reading to pick up on. Once you're in game and playing it, at least for myself, it's a lot more intuitive.
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Feb 6, 2021 12:31
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I really ought to play modern Kaiserreich one of these days. I used to play KR in Darkest Hour quite a bit, and from what I'm seeing moving to HoI4 only seems to have brought improvements.
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Feb 7, 2021 14:45
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KR looks pretty impressive and that first ep has me pretty hooked.
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Feb 8, 2021 08:21
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Lynneth posted:I really ought to play modern Kaiserreich one of these days. I used to play KR in Darkest Hour quite a bit, and from what I'm seeing moving to HoI4 only seems to have brought improvements. Well, it has gotten a bit less "fun". They've been axing some of the more crazy things that KR had, so no more Genghis Khan II or Papal Italy. Of course, then there's Kaiserredux, a mod made by a bunch of loving meme lords that may or may not be terrible people, I haven't checked yet. It brings back all the classic bullshit and just adds on from there.
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Feb 9, 2021 14:58
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How different is Kaiserredux? From the very spotty descriptions I'd heard on Kaiserreich before it sounded sophomoric, but what you've shown off here is fine and interesting in its differences from OTL. So maybe I was hearing about the other one?
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Feb 9, 2021 23:46
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NGDBSS posted:How different is Kaiserredux? From the very spotty descriptions I'd heard on Kaiserreich before it sounded sophomoric, but what you've shown off here is fine and interesting in its differences from OTL. So maybe I was hearing about the other one? It depends on what you've heard. Kaiserredux's starting position is mostly the same from Kaiserreich apart from Italy being the old HoI2 version instead of the reworked version and some changes in Central Asia and Mittelafrika, but none of those are what I'd call "sophomoric". It has some crazy poo poo that can happen as the game goes on, but it also just has a much larger breadth of options, adding to most nations in some way or another.
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Feb 9, 2021 23:56
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I've never played Kaiserredux personally (it's on my to-do list but I've been busy with dev stuff) but I'm pretty sure it's just considered Sophomoric because on the main, KR's fan base (and this is true for any large game mod's fan base, and why I don't venture out of EAW's dev channels anymore) thinks anything that is different from the main mod and it's choices is inherently bad. Of course I could very well be wrong but McD says it's pretty not terrible, and McD is pretty smart when it comes to mod shenanigans.
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Feb 10, 2021 00:46
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