Hoi4 Naval guide

hello and welcome back to another hearts of iron 4 video so today this is a much requested topic that i've been wanting to cover for a long time now but this is going to be my naval guide for 2020 i've seen a lot of comments on my videos lately where people are asking me to what make one uh they don't understand how the navy stuff works and for the most part um this guide's really just gonna be about explaining what each ship does how you should be assembling your fleets in some basic terms and then just some general guides for what you can do in single player to win naval combat so without further ado let's get right into it okay so first things first here i'm just going to get out of the way this is not a fleet composition video if you're looking for one of those guys there's plenty of them online and you can also just research you know reddit and other forum posts people have posted that stuff for a very long time so i'm gonna stick away from that and focus more on just explaining what each naval option does so if we just open up the fleets here basically these missions i'm just going to be explaining what they are and then a little bit more about what each ship's role is in naval combat and then some general setup for your ships and what you should be looking at and paying attention to so first things first here i'm also just going to explain that each country plays a little bit differently in the game so if you're to compare someone like the united kingdom to germany or the soviet union both those countries have fairly small navies now it's not to say that they can't build up their navies it's just that in general they're not going to and it's quite difficult for them to catch up to any of the other countries especially the allies if they don't utilize a certain strategy and that strategy is using naval bombers fighters and close air support near their coastline so when they use their navy they can actually deploy a lot of their air force over the sea and in general the germans and some of those other countries are going to have a larger air force than the uk and the uk is also going to have airplanes down in africa or wherever else that they're fighting so in general they can get more planes into the channels and other naval locations depending on where their ships are at so it is important to understand that each fleet is going to be designed a little bit differently but there are still some commonality or some similarities between each one okay so first things first here what we're going to do just hop into our research and we're going to go into our naval tab and i'm just going to explain what each ship is good for and what you should be looking at so in general destroyers and cruisers your light cruisers here are what are going to be guarding your capital ships so capital ships are the big boys they're the battleships your carriers your heavy cruisers anything like that is the main battle line and the light cruisers and destroyers their only goal is to protect those ships that's it you know at the end of the day they're going to be fighting other light cruisers and destroyers maybe launching some torpedoes at the enemy ships but their main mission is to guard your big ships so how many of these do you need the general rule of thumb at a bare minimum you want anywhere from four destroyers upwards of six to eight per capita ship so when we click on this fleet here if we were just to pretend that there was only one battleship like i just mentioned the general rule of thumb is that you would want four to eight of these destroyers and we do that because when you enter combat there's something called screening efficiency so screening efficiency just means how effective your ships are at guarding the capital ships and if you have somewhere around four it's not a guarantee that your efficiency is going to be super high but if you have eight it guarantees that under most circumstances you're gonna have a hundred percent screening efficiency and that means that no torpedoes basically are going to get through towards your capital ships and any other attacks now it's not to say it won't ever happen there's a lot of variables that are going to change how the naval combat progresses throughout days or weeks or months but that's just a general rule of thumb when it comes to screening vessels and destroyers now light cruisers are also a different story because they're a bigger ship heavier in nature and they offer better screening capabilities you don't need quite as many so compared to destroyers you could get away with anywhere from maybe two to four if you were to build exclusively light cruisers but in general you still want destroyers because they are a cheap vessel you can outfit them with just about anything and same with light cruisers but again because of the heavier nature of light cruisers you don't need as many so moving on we're just going to open up the research tab one more time the next thing that i'm just going to talk about is submarines now what i've seen a lot of people do is they use submarines as if they were screening vessels and that's a huge mistake because submarines and i know i've done it in the past so i can't you know harp on anyone too much but submarines in general they're not a screening vessel they don't do that because they're not part of your surface level ships so basically what submarines are there to do is just launch a buttload of torpedoes or drop mines if you have the early submarine hull you can change them into mine layers and they are quite effective because overall early submarine halls suck they're horrible ships but if you just make them into mine layers they're a very cheap way of chalking the waters full of mines but as we progress down into the later stages submarine holes are very good as you get into like the 1940s and 1944 they're very good especially when you mix them with the advanced torpedo launchers and the reason for that is because they have so many torpedoes that they can fire in combat and they do a lot of damage so why i was mentioning screening vessels are so important first is because if you have enough screening efficiency and you're able to keep your screens alive throughout the entirety of combat and you also mix that with something like say 30 submarines in your main battle fleet or 40 in that case as they start to lose their screening vessels the enemy does your submarines are now going to be focused on firing their torpedoes at their capital ships and as their capital ships die you can kind of get a sense of where this is going everything starts to just compound your fleet is going to be doing a lot more damage more and more submarines are going to be firing off torpedoes and breaking through that screening line so submarines are highly effective the other thing that they're used for is convoy rating the reason we use the submarines in convoy rating if we just go into production here i'm just going to show you the reason we use submarines like i was saying is because they're super cheap they can be outfitted with a lot of torpedoes and in general convoys um if they're guarded submarines are the type of ships that can actually sneak in and fire off a couple shots and then get away so in that case what you're doing is you're taking away your enemy's ability to resupply or trade at a very low cost so it's better than using something like a destroyer which is three times more in production and ultimately is just going to hurt you in the long run because you don't want to lose all your screening vessels that's not what they're there for they're there to protect ships yes but at the same time they're better suited for your battle fleets um and if you want to guard them destroyers are still the way to go don't get me wrong but they are the best ships and light cruisers as well for guarding so submarines are really just a mixed bag honestly they can do a lot of things but they have to be used the right way you don't want to be filling up your fleet and the composition that you have with just a massive number of submarines without any screening vessels because now your capital ships are just completely unguarded and your submarines themselves will do nothing they will do nothing to protect your capital ships so we're going to move on a little bit here i know that's just a lot of me talking and information but that's kind of what we have to do here just under the circumstances so next thing i'm just going to break down a couple of these before i get into the heavy ships and my last tip here for naval combat so first up we have patrol this is simply as it sounds your ships will stay in the region and they will look for other task forces or fleets whatever you want to call them so the biggest thing is you want to have ships that are high in spotting so if we just open up production once more and let's just see we'll hover over this one uh if we just look and you see the surface detection and sub detection on an early heavy ship it is 20 and one if we go down to a cruiser so we'll go with this one 20 and one and then if we go to the destroyers it's twenty and five so basically you want to be using your destroyers again and cruisers basically for patrolling you don't want to be using uh heavy ships because if you're patrolling with heavy ships and you don't have them screening uh or you have a very small fleet it's a good way to just lose expensive ships okay so what we're going to do here now is we're just going to open up the early cruiser hall this year light cruisers um they're the cheapest variant 2900 so if we just open these up you can see we have mine laying but what we're looking at here is the aircraft aircraft facilities so surface detection just went up by eight and sub detection went up by two and a half it's not quite the same as a destroyer but again this is a heavier ship so you're gonna have more survivability when they get found or if they find another fleet and the surface detection is the highest out of any ship it's at almost 30. so that's why these are great ships to use for patrol you don't want to use those heavy ships again because they can be destroyed very easily if they're not heavily guarded and if they enter combat against a main battle fleet it's just a horrible situation so you don't want to be wasting these ships trying to look on patrol you're better off making a separate task force putting them on patrol and then setting the bulk of your fleet on to strikeforce which is the next one that we were going to talk about here this is a strike force so it's exactly as it sounds they will stay in a port whichever one you assign and then as soon as your patrol finds another navy the rest of your fleet is going to come out to battle as quickly as possible and they will engage the enemy ships if they find it desirable uh even if that's not the case it depends on what you have them set to um so repair priority and then just how aggressive you want them you can engage at medium or high risk and that's something you have to be paying attention to so the next one we're going to talk about convoy rating this is simple it's entirely built for submarines convoy rating is exclusively submarines if you're using any other ship you're wasting your time and you're wasting your production i don't need to explain it any other way again a good fleet for convoy rating though should have anywhere from 20 to 50 submarines and you can even throw a couple of destroyers if you really want to only a couple and the reason i say that is because it brings up the surface detection values and that's what's going to allow you to find the enemy's convoys very quickly so if you want to do it that way you can but you can still get away with submarines just fine again only use around 20 to 50 but you can also push that number higher you can also break it down into multiple fleets of 20 and have a certain general that is good with submarines so it makes it even better if they're specialized next one's convoy escort this is again designed for destroyers and light cruisers this is where you're protecting your convoys from being raided and that way you won't lose all of your trade and supply as you play the game which is very important um in some cases if you look at something like the uk if we were to convoy raid around their entire island they wouldn't be able to receive resources so their production would drop they wouldn't be able to send resources away so their production and economy would drop and then any troops that they try and actually bring back to their territory or leaving their territory can also get convoy rated so they can lose a lot of supplies and a lot of manpower that way as well so convoy rating is um really good if you do it that way and convoy escort is a necessity if the enemy is using a lot of submarines and raiding your convoys you will want to set that up if they are doing that if not you don't need to worry about it there's no situation where you're really going to lose everything all at once the effects from convoy rating are pretty minimal if you're paying attention to it and not leaving it for months or years on end and then the last one here is just naval invasion support this just tells your ships that as you conduct a naval invasion the fleet will move with your convoys and protect them and ensure that they reach their location safely so a lot of the times the ai is going to have ships in this channel here and if they get stuck by a large fleet you can end up where your troops are landing on the shore with half supply they're lacking organization and other things like that so it does pay off to use the naval invasion support option throughout the game okay and so as we hit the 10 to 15 mark in this video i'm gonna try and wrap it up around 20 minutes total so i'm gonna get into the last couple things here so open up our research once more and we just open up navy uh we're gonna talk a little bit about carriers so carriers are also a part of your capital ship line so again using that four to eight destroyers two to three two to four for light cruisers and that will make sure that they're protected so carriers are incredibly expensive in the game uh one of the most expensive ships to actually build and they need to be used smart they need to be used in a smart manner um basically a rule of thumb is carriers when you're using them depending on the location you can actually avoid using them at times so if we're looking at the english channel here and we're the uk and the germans have a lot of planes covering that this stretch of territory you're going to want to avoid maybe using or not using your carriers and instead just deploying your own air force because when that happens if the germans end up with more planes and you send out all your carriers and for whatever reason they have more ships than you or more screening vessels and their battle line survives longer what can end up happening is your carriers now have lost their entire purpose and that is to give you air superiority and naval bombing when the enemy doesn't have the capacity to do so that is what they're used for so if you deploy them in the english channel you have to be careful about your air force if you deploy them over here maybe you're going to get away with it a lot more because the enemy can't really deploy their air forces as far again with italy down here you can generally get away with it in these regions but if they have a lot of air force over here maybe you want to avoid that because again if your ships are getting bombed by naval bombers and you don't have the air superiority you're going to struggle and your carriers are at risk of being lost and you really want to avoid that as much as possible so you're better off losing a battleship even though it's not ideal sometimes it's better to lose a battleship than a carrier because you can recover it a lot quicker than something like a carrier would and i know that's just a really brief overview of what they do but it really doesn't get any more complicated than that um a general setup that is pretty good if you want to specialize you can have carriers you can have two carriers one with exclusively fighters and then the next one with exclusively naval bombers um and that basically allows you to just maximize what each ship is doing it's not necessary and it doesn't really change a whole lot you can still keep it split evenly but the most important thing here to remember here is that you don't want to over supply the number of planes on a ship so as you go over this number you're going to get a crowding penalty too many planes at once so basically you're hurting yourself and taking away the air capabilities of that carrier so it's important that you avoid doing that although there is ways to reduce that so you can reduce [Music] the carrier penalties in certain focuses and you can also increase the deck size so if we go into something like this and we just look around real quick i don't know if we have one here okay but this one doesn't exactly show what i want but if we look at this one you can see carrier production cost is 25 percent lower but they lose 50 of their range and 20 percent of the deck size so that means deck size you would lose 20 of the planes that you could put on that carrier without incurring a penalty so um in general that's something you really want to avoid otherwise your carrier has completely lost its capabilities and the other thing here is carriers should never be used on their own if you're only using carriers and you only back it up with maybe one or two battleships or one or two heavy cruisers i can tell you right now you're going to lose those carriers because as soon as a large task force shows up and they enter combat [Music] they're going to wipe you out because the way combat works when it comes to heavy ships is heavy ships are going to target other heavy ships first before they move on to screening vessels so the way to look at this carriers are at the top they're the most sought after but they're also going to sit technically guarded by other k um other capital ships but if you don't have a lot of capital ships and the enemy has maybe twice as many your capital ships get wiped out your carriers are going to get wiped out real quick i can tell you right now that's what's going to happen because heavy ships do pour in targeting small vessels that's not what they're designed for they can't adjust as fast and that's how the game essentially forces them to behave they will not do a good job at targeting small vessels it doesn't mean that they can't it just means that they're not as good at it they're best suited for fighting other capital ships and if you back that up with a lot of screening vessels that's where the screening vessels shine the screening vessels are going to engage the other screening vessels and then afterwards they're gonna focus on the capital ships um so it's really important that you pay attention to that uh general rule of thumb two capital ships to one carrier that's how i've done it in the past uh if you follow that rule your carriers are really never going to get sunk and then you back it up with all of those screening vessels as well that forms a very strong and well put together task force and for those of you that watched this far into the video congratulations you've just learned something other people are probably not going to watch as far so they might miss out on that information so last thing we're going to do here for a single player that is i'm going to tell you basically one of the most broken ways to defend your country and that is with mind layers so in single player for whatever reason i don't know why the ai does not build mine sweepers they don't use them basically at all they might have one or two ships out of hundreds but they just don't use them and mine laying itself the ai really never uses at most you'll see maybe a hundred mines by 1945 in a region but they just don't do it so because of that if you remember at the start of the video i was mentioning submarines can be the early submarine models can essentially be switched out for mine layers if you use those and you chock full these waters the ai will never deploy their ships and if they do 2 000 mines which is i believe the maximum number in the game it's going to cause mayhem if you send your fleet in you have a bit of an air force and 2 thousand mines they're going to lose a lot a lot of ships so mine layers are a cheap way of doing it if we just go to production and we open this up and we scroll down so this is the early submarine hall if we were to swap out these torpedo launchers for mine laying tubes oh and we just leave that on torpedoes now we can start mine laying in the channel for the cheapest cost possible essentially this is the cheapest vegetable in the game maybe this one here you could use but you could just take the torpedoes off if you really wanted to but otherwise that is the best way to take away the ai's ability to engage you in naval combat and if you lose those really cheap submarines it doesn't matter if you're right because the longer you wait if you give it a year um to accomplish your goals and actually fill these waters up with mines the ai is really going to struggle you then just have to put together your big task force and move it through those waters and if they engage anyone they're going to take a large penalty the enemy will because of the mines it restricts their movements and deals a lot of damage essentially so that is one of the most broken ways in single player that is um according to the rules i've seen for a lot of multiplayer games they banned them because of that reason nobody wants to waste their time having the mine sweep in the ocean although it certainly is a fun thing at times and it adds a lot of chaos i see why people take it out but for single player you don't really have to worry about any country removing your minds and even if they do they're not going to allocate a lot of resources to it so generally you can out produce them and outlay mines in the ocean faster than they can take them away so that's really the basics and what i wanted to cover for today maybe in the future if any of you guys really want to see a fleet design i'm thinking what i'll probably end up doing for that is i'll make one for each country probably five minutes in length and that way you can get a general sense of what's possible for each country so maybe i'll do like the 1940s mark 1942 even and that way you can see what you should be producing and actually putting together for fleets by that time period and again each country is different in what they can achieve in that time span so that's why i would need to make one for each country because again certain countries have more naval dockyards and some are going to have less so it is important that you understand each country is going to be different anyways if you guys enjoyed the video smash that like button and consider subscribing for future content and as always if you have any comments concerns or things that i can work on for the next video or maybe another video that you'd like to see in the future just leave a comment down below or you can join our discord channel using the link in the description uh we host multiplayer games and try and provide as much help as we can for anyone who asks for it so without further ado i hope you guys enjoyed the video i'm signing off for now have a good one

Channel: ScumpyDawg

Views: 51,396

Rating: 4.943038 out of 5

Keywords: hoi4 navy, hoi4 fleet, hoi4 fleet design, hoi4 naval combat, how to win naval combat, hoi4 gameplay, hoi4 uk, hoi4 germany, hoi4 france, hoi4 usa, hearts of iron 4, hearts of iron 4 guide, hearts of iron iv, singleplayer, multiplayer, hoi4 how to, hoi4 tips, hoi4 strategy

Id: j3hvN1vDJQQ

Length: 23min 35sec (1415 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 13 2020