Tutorial | Naval Warfare | Hearts of Iron IV: Man the Guns

hello my name is med like to welcome you to this tutorial of the naval mechanics in hearts of iron for which were introduced with man the guns first of all we're going to talk about the different ships and their roles in the game we're going to talk about the various orders which can give to your fleets and your task forces and what exactly they do and how they interact with each other we're going to talk about the Admirals how to upgrade them and who to assign to which orders and then finally we will touch on the different doctrines which are available so let's talk about the different types of ships which are available first of all we've got the screens screens are destroyers and light cruisers their role is usually reconnaissance its anti-submarine warfare its screening the bigger ships its escorting your convoys and things like that and then also potentially mine laying as well after that we have the capital ships these are the big boys of the ocean they are the heavy cruisers battle cruisers and battleships and their job is to go toe-to-toe with enemy shipping and potentially in the turf in the case of heavy cruisers and buff cruisers to sync enemy screens then we've also got carriers that's these guys up here they are the ones who obviously carry the aircraft in a enabled task force we have submarines their job is simply harassment they are tasked with trying to sink enemy convoys and just disrupt shipping and possibly hitting the unprotected capital ships if you come across any and then finally we've got the convoys their job is of course to transport goods through trade and also transporting soldiers but how exactly do these different ships and their roles actually work in the game well that's where the fleets task forces and orders come in at the high level you have different fleets so for example here we have the submarine fleet the submarine fleet is composed of different task forces as we can see here the submarine fleet has four different task forces and then each of the task forces has ten submarines in it so we have one fleet for task forces in each task force has ten ships as we can see listed over here each fleet can have one Admiral these Admirals should be selected depending on their skills and the role that they will be taking so for the submarine fleet we probably want to have somebody with the sea wolf trait unfortunately the United Kingdom doesn't actually start with one so we want to have somebody who can act in a similar capacity in the past I've used John Cunningham because he has the career officer which gives him leader experience gain which is very useful it just means he gets traits quicker and also upgrades his skills and then he also has the green water expert submarines tend to really struggle in shallow water so this can really help to mitigate an offset that penalty another thing you want to consider is submarines generally just want to do a lot of damage very very quickly so you might just want to select somebody who does a lot of damage and that's why the Netherlands has the most deadly submarine commander in the entire game conrad halfrek because he starts with like a level 6 damage skill it's potent so John Connon is in charge at the submarine fleet and then he has the different task forces the way that you deploy task forces is by giving orders or missions and that's what we have down here so submarines almost exclusively use the convoy raiding so if you just click on that we can then right click on the different sea zones and they will be sent out to that we have got 4 task forces so generally I would recommend 1c zone per Task Force for submarines it doesn't matter as much they will actually spread all of the submarines out over the different zones and then depending on where a lot of action happens the AI is actually pretty good about re-routing submarines to those areas where a lot of engagements are occurring but this is a pretty good rule of the thumb the other thing I would recommend is choosing how big your task forces are generally for submarines I'd go between 5 ships and 20 it really depends on how many submarine to using and how flexible you want them to be so here we are sailing through the North Sea English Channel Bay of Biscay and Western Approaches and we just unpause that real quick we can see that we are hitting 100% efficiency so then if we added another we can see that the efficiency goes down simply because we're asking our submarines to cover too big an area so let's just go and limit it to these three zones before we go further talking about the other missions available let's talk about how exactly these task forces function and the different icons here all of them looking a little bit scary so first of all let's talk about the automatic reinforcement which is this button here this is where you can tell your task force to get ships replacement ships so if you've lost submarines and this is especially important for submarines because you will lose something throughout the game this is saying okay we want to toss force of ten ships and the way that you can control the composition of your fleets is through this the composition editor here we can see that we have ten submarines out of ten we can change the maximum that we want with the plus and minus we can also change the category so you can assign different categories for different ships and when we look at the recons you will notice that I've actually assigned a bunch of the Destroyers to the Recon category specifically so that only that type of submarine is assigned to that ship and in fact let's go and click on it right now so I can show you so these three destroyers I've identified the ABCD class as having very good surface detection and good submarine detection for their level so I've given them in the fleet designer up here the recon role and then I can assign only recon ships to this task force so we have two light cruisers three destroyers those destroyers are only of the spotter class if you want to choose ships from any class you can just use this star here that's the wild card and it will just say okay recon yep whatever shield sure Gunners sure whatever it doesn't matter so that's a very useful ability to have and then you can turn off or on the automatic reinforcements reinforcements are pulled from the reserve fleet which is this one down at the bottom that's always there you can't get rid of it and so we have these eight actually ten ships in the reserves right now we have one aircraft carrier one battle cruiser six light cruisers and then two submarines so if we were to lose some submarines from the task forces here then they would be drawn from these two next up we have the automatic split off for submarines you probably want to have this one on so if a submarine is wounded it will detach from the main task force and then return to a port and start repairing this is really useful to do because it effectively allows you to just automate how your fleets are doing you don't need to assign where you want them to be active you assign who you want to be active within that task force then you just leave it it's really quite nice then you can just keep an eye on your reserves to see if you're getting too many or too few and you can also just see like the general strength one cautionary thing though if a group of ships gets damaged at the same time they will split off as a group so this is especially important for strike forces they will have all 55 of these ships if say both of these carriers were damaged they would split off together even if one carrier was damaged to 99 percent one to one percent even though the 99 repairs quicker it would stay in port with the one percent until the one percent is also repaired to the fullest so that's just one slightly mitigating factor which might be a caution against using automatic split off but if you don't want to focus too much on your navies you just kind of want to fire and forget it's a great option to use next up we have the repair priority this is telling your fleets how badly damaged they are before they head to port so never repair they'll never go back this is like fully manual and I've got to admit I am micro my strike fleets quite heavily and I leave my strike leads I'll never repair because what happens is when they get damaged you get an icon over here on these sides which replaces the upgrade and the just icon and then you just click on it and they will sail back to the nearest port and start repairing and then I just go through manually because if you do it that way they're not sailing back as a group and they will just repair individually and once they are repaired they will return to the fleet and active duty so you can be low medium or high repair priority so at high it's like if they take very little bit of damage they'll sell back whereas if their unload a need to take quite bad damage then they'll sail back and then finally we have the engagement orders ordinarily you want to keep your fleets on medium risk they will judge how strong the enemy fleet is and then decide whether they want to engage or not you probably could get away with having strike fleets at high so they can get involved in more sea battles if you want them to do that always engage is a bit dangerous because they'll be like oh there's 20 very well protected battleships and I'm just too light cruiser we should totally go fight them yeah it's a bit of a dangerous one and then do not engage do not engage actually has quite a few uses for example recon fleets you probably want to set them to do not engage they will just find the enemy fleet and then hang hang back at a distance keep them in view while the strike fleet comes in they're not actually built for combat they don't have the numbers or the leadership for combat so that is probably the best option for that the low and high risk generally is just how risky they judge the situation with the exception of submarines submarines actually functioned slightly differently so if you set your submarines to engage at low risk only they will only go off to convoys even if they see the opportunity to try and sink a capital ship they won't do it whereas you've set them to medium if they see an unscreened capital ship they'll take a couple of shots before retreating so medium risk if your opponent is using doom stacks for example this is a great way of just whittling them down just to deploy a bunch of submarines there and just let them have a go because if they're dooms stuck in there screening is almost certainly going to be terrible so you have the opportunity and then at high risk they will actually engage enemy escorts so if you notice that your opponent is not using any anti-submarine warfare no depth charges at all you might want to try this or if you just have so many submarines and you can afford to lose a couple you just need to do some damage there Navy as could happen late game as Germany trying to sink a bunch of British ships will just damage them like just damaging ships and making them go back for repair means they are not at sea they are not acting against you and that can be really quite precious so a high risk they will engage screens so that's just one thing to bear in mind low-risk convoys only medium risk they will attack capital ships if they see the opportunity high risk they will attack the screens as well okay let's talk about the next type of task force these are recon fleets recon fleets their job is to patrol around the different seasons in fact the order is called patrol is awkward recon and they will identify enemy fleets and then call in support now this is one of the things I absolutely love about the hot serve iron system you have a different interplay between the different orders so the recon fleets are just sailing around looking around for the enemy ships they go AHA enemy capital ships spot it and then they'll sit there and they'll just keep their eyes on it and they'll just watch it and they'll go hey strike boss you probably want to come over and do a strike force hello and they'll call in the strike forces who will then leave or and engage your opponent so that's just one I love the way that that works so your recon fleets you want to have them fairly small you want to have them agile one of their most important stats is speed and of course you want to make sure that they've got great detection abilities surface detection to find surface ships in the sub detection to find submarines light cruisers tend to do the surface detection the best because they have access to float planes which are these guys float planes as you can see how that surface detection +7 they do slow the ship down a little bit but that's fine and then also sub sub detection and then also radar which unfortunately we haven't actually unlocked yet I can't show you but float planes Blas radar on a cruiser makes them godlike at finding enemy shipping destroyers are also decent destroyers can use just radar and if you have the shipboard radar that can really help but they cannot get flow planes only light cruisers and above I think everything else can have them except for our submarines another thing which can be useful is to have recon ships just finding enemy convoys and then have submarines on convoy interdiction convoy rating so submarines aren't actually the best at is detecting enemy shipping unless they have their own radar so this can be useful you want to have them quick so if an enemy fleet goes oh there's recon over there we should probably sink them then your recon strangers run away so all of my recon for example have at least 27 nautical miles usually you actually want to aim for a 30 plus so these destroyers being 35 knots are a lot more effective I have a couple of newer cruisers which are 35 as well so these two recon sea are probably going to last a lot longer than these recons expect to lose a few enemies love shooting them and they are great target practice but they just serve such an invaluable role for summoning in the capital ships so who should you assign as an admiral well generally you want to have a spotter because they're more likely to actually detect an enemy ship you probably also want to have blockade runner blockade runner increases your retreat decision chance they're more likely to run away and when they are running they go for hosta so blockade runner plus spotter would actually be the best combination and you probably want to try and get concealment expert for them and probably destroy a leader and/or cruiser captain so there's a couple of different trades here which will be great we'll talk about that a little bit more in the future but the Recon Admiral that I tend to use we need to try and remember now is as it Forbes might have in Forbes Tovey not Toby Toby has a high chance of running away himself which is sorry not running away which is bad for a recon summer bill it might actually be something well I say it Somerville we'll put him in in charge of the recon pleats so recon pleats they have just detected an enemy fleet and they go hey capital ships Trek force come and help us so let's talk about the strike fleets the strike fleets are the heaviest arm of your force these are where your capital ships are this is where your carriers are and it is definitely going to be the most numerous for strike fleets you want to have either an aviation enthusiast if you have a lot of carriers or you want to have gunnery expert for Ironside if you have them so Andrew Cunningham is probably one of the best Admirals in the game because he is gunnery expert for Ironsides he also has bold to increase naval speed so that the strike fleet is quicker at reacting to a call for help and he does more damage and he's also a career officer just for the extra leadership gain so that's super nice so cunningham putting you in charge so how exactly should you organize a strike fleet well there is a golden rule for this which is just as important as the combat width on land battle so in combat with you always want to have 10 20 or 40 combat with this just like the golden rule for land war at sea you want to have at least four screens for every one capital ship four screens always a minimum of four screens for one capital ship so we can see here the first stalks toss course that we have for carriers sorry two carriers for battleships at battle cruiser for heavy cruisers that's 11 capital ships all of those are 11 capital ships and then 44 destroyers if my math is correct 4 times 11 is 44 so this is a properly screened fleet and this will be very very effective in an engagement the reason for this is there are effectively three different positions in a naval battle in the front row by the ruled of screens if the screening efficiency is below 100% then some of the damage which the screens would be taking would actually go to the second row second-row were in your capital ships it's that's where the battleships battlecruisers heavy cruisers are and then finally if that row starts to falter a bit then the damage will go to your carriers and your convoys this is especially important for torpedoes because a torpedo can thread through a leaky screening leaky screen and then start hitting the capsule just behind it should be noted however that any heavy weapons can shoot over the front row so battleships will shoot our enemy battleships while their secondaries or their light guns start shooting at the screens so that's probably why you want to have a bit of a mix of different weaponry but especially in terms of torpedos destroyers tend to have a lot of torpedoes equipped on them if you have a leaky screen and those torpedoes are going to start hitting your capital ships and torpedos do a ton of damage to the heavier ships so you want to try and avoid that wherever possible the other thing that I should mention with screening efficiency is your ships will arrive over time and it takes them some time to get organized particularly in larger fleets so you want to have somebody with a good positioning skill so the superior tactician on Andrew Cunningham is super helpful and then fleet coordination and fleet positioning both also super super good in terms of that so initially you will have a couple of problems with screens but the longer the battle goes on the more cohesive the screen will become depending of course on any losses so actually in a fleet like this you probably won't have about 50 destroyers just so you have a bit of leeway the other rule about this is carriers you can have up to four carriers before they start to take penalties and they take some pretty hefty penalties the exception to that is if you have the base strike doctrine they can actually have five carriers so in this instance I have two carriers I actually have two large strike fleets so if it ever came to the situation where we needed to doom stacked against the enemy both of these strike fleets could be called in - ball carriers but that situation is quite rare in fact I would even argue that you probably want to have even smaller strike fleets because they will be called out to hunt down like enemy recon pleats or submarines they get detected and that can be pretty fuel intensive the reason that strike fleets are so important is because they sit in port if they're not called into action and while they're sitting in port they don't use fuel fuel is kind of precious I mean for the UK you can buy it from America but that's still civilian factories that you're using for the US it doesn't matter so much but for like Germany you want to keep your capital ships safely in kiel as much as you possibly can because they're going to be so fuel intensive otherwise so you only want them to sail out when they are summoned and then they'll sail out because of the strike force or mission and they'll fight at that point so how exactly should you deploy recon fleets and strike forces well recons work a little bit differently from these submarines in that you can only assign one recon fleet per sea zone so we have got eight Recon fleets here so we can effectively cover eight different seasons so we can see zero of eight if we unpause this we can see that we have two recon plates per zone at the moment because we've only covered four five six seven eight so that would now have a recon fleet in every single one of those and if we did another one we would find there's no recon data available for this you can actually assign recon fleets specifically for a different zone you just order it in the same way but generally for recon czar just say it to whole fleet and then it will automatically assign task forces depending on theses owns you have selected and they should fully cover that if you hover over the area you will notice that Intel efficiency that's how well screened for well reconned reconnoitered each sea zone is the bigger the sea zone the more more resources that we require so for example here in the English Channel it's a pretty small sea zone you're not going to need a lot of ships detecting enemy shipping their Western Approaches you'll need a bit more than if you out in like the Mid Atlantic gap of the mid-atlantic you're gonna require even particularly because it is a deep ocean and you have a much harder chance to find other ships see visibility minus 15% subs in particular are very effective in the deep oceans there are a couple of ways of increasing your vision of enemy shipping first of all aeroplanes if you assign in particular heavy fighters of which we don't actually start with any which receives fighters for now and set them to the air superiority order then they will get a bonus to detection anywhere within their radius so it really depends on their mission efficiency heavy fighters do this even better they actually have a higher weighting so where possible use heavy fighters instead of regular fighters for fleet detection and then also tactical bombers and naval bombers if they are doing naval strike in a region then they will also be contributing detection so we can see their aircraft detection total 5.6 percent so that's additive to the regular detection so we've got a hundred percent Intel efficiency here but that's gonna be a lot less further out then finally radar will also increase your intelligence II the more radar that you have overlapping in one area the effects are cumulative so that would be better rather than just having one radar detecting you want to have multiple with multiple coverages over for example the North Sea or the English Channel or wherever it is that you may be finding ships this is especially true in the Mediterranean we can get an awful lot of overlapping radar and you can constantly be detecting enemy ships and sending out your strike forces and blowing them up which is always good fun all right let's go back to the strike force another thing I should point out is that a destroyer counts exactly the same as a light cruiser for screening so don't think that you could say I've got one cruiser that's going to count for more destroyers no it doesn't so if you want just pure screens just get a bunch of very cheap destroyers as all you need and then rely on your battleships and your carriers to actually do the damage itself all right next up we are going to talk about submarines or rather how to counter them I know that submarines are a big deal particularly in the current multiplayer meta we're particularly players who don't like using navies or don't understand how the navies work we'll just BAM out submarine of submarine after submarine after submarine or if you watched the paradox game or I played as Greece and I just locked down the whole of Africa that was because my opponents didn't really understand how to counter submarines well there is one very easy solution to this which is also why Greece did not suffer a single casualty to convoys from Baku and submarines from Australia and that's because I had destroyers on the convoy escort order and you can assign those just like any other order and you will see this efficiency the higher the efficiency the more of the convoys they will actually protect this is purely based on the number of destroyers you have in your fleet so you probably want to have task forces of at least 20 destroyers and they will protect you all of this so I have just 10 destroyers building up to 20 as we get more in the reserve they will automatically fill in to this because automatic reinforcement is on the way that this works is when a convoy detects a submarine or gets fired upon by submarines they are then into stress they will then put out a call for convoy escorts then depending on your convoy escort efficiency your convoys will arrive so destroyers should a be very quick because they'll be faster responding if they're very very quick and then also if you have escort efficiency this is primarily gained through the doctor into fleet in being escort efficiency is extremely high weight and being have great submarine warfare protection based strike also pretty decent just a little bit shorter than fleet being trained interdiction doesn't have any so if you are planning on using convoys as trade interdiction and somebody else is using trade interdiction against you prepare to lose a lot of convoys cuz it's gonna be a lot more difficult to protect against them you're gonna want to try to find overland routes or use synthetic refineries if it's an oil situation Germany so fleeting being is just super super useful for that just for the escort efficiency so what exactly is escort efficiency well this is a modifier on their speed to react to a threat so when the convoy says okay I'm in danger I need help your destroyers then - aha okay we're on our way and then there reaction time is modified by the escort efficiency and their speed so the higher the escort efficiency the quicker they can jump in and then just like the screens in a regular battle it works exactly the same way the more the screening percentage the less torpedoes get through and this is a direct correlation so if you have a 50% screening efficiency 50% of the torpedoes will get through and hit you 50% chance to him he have a 70% screening efficiency then is a 30% chance to hear for the submarine if you have a 100% screening efficiency those torpedoes can't hit you you are safe so as long as you just have a bunch of destroyers that can be very cheap destroyers doesn't matter if they're very good at actually detecting the submarines you just want to brute force this and just have a wall of iron to stop the submarines firing upon your convoys of course this is not cast-iron submarines will still get a couple of shots off it does take time for your ships to recover to respond especially early in the war or if your trade interdiction so you probably will want to have some anti-submarine methods but just as a straight-up protection this is how you want to do it you want to have as high escort efficiency as possible and very very fast submarines don't equip them very much take off the torpedoes make sure they've just got a tiny little popgun great big engine they have sonar and what they call depth charges and there should be enough I would then recommend that you create submarine hunter fleets submarine hunter fleets are basically destroyers souped-up for submarine warfare so give them extra depth charges make sure they have the most up-to-date sonar and then have them in small fleets of maybe ten and strike forces so make sure the these are assigned to the areas where you know enemy submarines are and where you are less likely to come across enemy surface fleets and they will go out as soon as submarines are detected they will sail out and they will engage their submarines and try to sink them whereas in convoy escort will screen the convoys until they run away and then they leave they won't actually try to do damage their fire they'll have a go but they're not going to be actively hunting the submarines whereas a strike force with destroyers with anti-submarine warfare equipment is and will try to sink those subs so that's just one thing to bear in mind when fighting against submarines just destroy us lots and lots of destroyers is the counter to submarines it's it's actually a relatively simple counter it's just not a lot of people realize this and not a lot of people focus on the doctrines I mean honestly all you need to do if you have problems with this and you don't to invest too much just get these yeah these for all four of these have escort efficiency and at that point just keep spamming out destroyers and your anti-submarine will be fine probably but Mordred's how exactly do naval battles work in this game well using a little bit of console magic I have made a war against Germany I've turned off the AI so I could actually control the German fleets and I've sent them into the English Channel which was rather silly for them so if we switch over to these naval map mode we can see that we actually have a little bit more of an overview of the English Channel we can see here that there is an enemy fleet present we know that there are four capital ships and twenty screened the less Intel information you have it will then be arranged I would say like one to seven capital ships and like four to forty screens the other thing which is notable is this bar here this is the progress bar that fills over time as your recons basically narrowed down and home down upon your opponent by it skipped a little bit of time so that has already happened but we've detected them we now see that our strike fleet is sailing out and sailing to the sea zone or the sea area region where the enemy fleet is known to operate and then boom we have a battle we can see the progress or rather the the victory chance blue is you red is the enemy and then the number of capture ships on your side their side screens on your side and on their side then if we actually click on this icon here we get the battle overview first things first we noticed this screening efficiency that is this Golden Shield our own screening efficiency is a little bit low its 91% and that's because we have bad positioning because our fleet is just that big it takes some time for this to tick up whereas the German fleet being a lot smaller and commanded by doughnuts who is very good at positioning yeah there they've got into their positions a lot quicker positioning skill yeah larger fleet - 43 % so just being this big compared to them has a penalty so smaller strike forces rather than what I've been using here can actually be more effective or using like the hunter submarine packs that I was talking about earlier can also be effective next up we've got the light guns the light guns will be position one firing on position one this is screens versus screens effectively I can't remember if position two light guns can fire in position one they might be able to but I don't think so I think it's just position one to position one the next up we've got the heavy guns these are position 2 to position 2 I'm possibly position 2 to position 1 no I'd represent sure on that one so if anyone wants to clarify this in the comments please do let me know I'm putting my hands up and saying I'm not hundred percent sure on this bit next up we got the torpedoes this is the sheer number of torpedoes that you have got active and their accuracy of course is based on the screening efficiency so even though we have a lot of TP torpedoes thanks to the large number of destroyers we have we're never going to hit anything because of how good they're screening efficiency is so if we can knock out a couple of their screens then we can start targeting their capture ships or the torpedoes until that point is just going to be capital ships and planes versus capital ships next up we have the fleet anti-air so every round aircraft will fly in our a a shoots at them and then any planes which get through the anti-air screen will drop their payloads and do some damage any planes which are here from a carrier as opposed to land-based will actually do a lot more damage to things like a five hundred percent modified so having carriers is really effective for that but the damage they do is then further mitigated by the AAA so the AAA is a chance to damage the aircraft as they come in and then also reduces the amount of damage done and then finally we have the depth charges which is your anti-submarine option and then submarines will appear down here in the blue square so unfortunate we don't have any active at the moment there are two stances for submarines there's the visible and invisible they're invisible they just shoot and they just keep on pinging away until they are detected or they decide to run if they are visible then enemy depth charges can start to target them and start doing some damage possibly sinking them probably sinking them subsequent quite weak for that however one big change which they made with man the guns is once a fleet starts running away they actually keep shooting so as you're turning and running you're shooting which is extremely important for submarines fighting against convoys because even if an enemy escort arrives to protect the convoys and the subs are starting to run they can still get some shots off which is why that screening is so important because if they don't have enough destroyers to properly screen the convoys then some of those torpedoes will still thread through and will still do the damage so let's go ahead and unpause this we will see some damage being done and possibly see some of them running away so you notice now that we have got the arrows here that's these guys trying to run we've actually done some critical damage against the admiral scheer which is their heavy cruiser and our own ship seem pretty much unaffected noteworthy we have organization and strength just like on the land except organization works slightly differently the more organization you have were actually the less organization you have the less damage you do so if you are on 50% organization you will do something like 50% less damage I don't know the exact curve if there is a curve but this is why naval doctrines are important because we want to get more organization so that your ships can stay in a battle for longer and lose less of their battlefield strength organization in this is more like ammunition than actual morale although they obviously do have a chance to retreat but i don't think thats related to organization that's just how likely they think they are to win this battle also noteworthy we have a bunch of reinforcements on the way so this is the second and possibly even third strike fleets on the way in because I just assigned all of them to the English Channel and they've all gone Oh big battle we should probably get involved so you can see that other strike fleets will be called in from the area around though they will be move slower to respond so let's just go ahead and unpause this we can see the rest of our strike fleet has arrived - you've even got some submarines coming in to assist they've still got a full screen so not much that we can do against it and our own screen is now really getting quite leaky simply because there are so many ships present here compared to the enemy so we are suffering a pretty hefty positioning penalty plus because new ships are joining it disrupts your organization even further which means that you do take an even bigger positioning penalty would convert into a screening penalty but that will go down over time and there we go we are starting to sink their heavy ship so this is my capital ships shooting over their heads over the screens and doing some damage to them plus is probably also the carrier aircraft targeting them because they don't have particularly good fleet anti-air and now we're starting to sink a couple of the screens this is probably just overwhelming numbers may be also the cruisers and cruisers tend to have more guns than destroyers do and now we can see that our screening efficiency is going up as the positioning starts to increase so as the organisation gets better and better we bring in more and more and this is a very very one-sided battle and we sank basically everything there two battleships two heavy cruisers six light cruisers 10 destroyers for a cost of just three never bombers from our carrier very very good result for the British they're also slightly one-sided because I totally sketch back to that against the Germans but I think that does a pretty good job of showing you just how those naval battles work I'm sorry that I don't know the exact mechanics behind positions firing your positions I have a pretty good idea generally screen shoot screens Capitol shooter capitals Perry issue everything submarine to shoot everything if they can depending on the screening all right so now that we've talked about the naval battles let's go and discuss the Admirals and how best to assign them we did kind of go over this while talking about the various missions and the Admirals that you want to have in them but let's take a look at the traits very quickly here there are at different traits that you want to be taking into account so for example submarine capped at Murrells will want to get sea wolf that increases the submarine attack simply by 20% and that is done just by having a lot of submarines in the fleet you then have a choice between silent hunter and lancer silent hunter means that your torpedoes are less likely to reveal you so you start firing on the enemy they don't know where you are or Lancer which is screen penetration so if their screen has a couple of holes in it this makes it more likely that your sheet that you will shoot through those holes so particularly if you're using your submarines and an anti capital ship roll Lance it can be good and also if they just have very very good escort efficiency then lots of escorts sorry then Lancer could be really really good then after that you can actually get both torpedo expert which is your torpedo to charts which actually works very nicely were to be the reveal chance if you have both of those they kind of stack together you shoot very accurately and you don't reveal yourself when you do shoot or loading drillmaster where you just shoot more torpedoes more quickly which again kind of goes well with Lancer you bust a hole in their lines and then you just exploit that gap the other one which you may want to look to get is concealment expert which just outright reduces your visibility and honestly I find that once you get this your submarines are extremely difficult to detect particularly if you equip your submarines with snowballs yeah so snorkels will reduce the visibility even further but there is a choice you can either have radar or snorkels so do you want your submarines to be harder to detect which can be useful if you're in shallow waters for example so if you have submarines specifically operating in the English Channel then you may want to give them snorkels or if you have submarines which are out in the deep ocean you probably want to give them radar so they can find those convoys and sink them more effectively ok so we talked about the submarine officers let's talk about the capital ships capital ship officers most important for them is definitely iron sight which will increase the amount of armor they give to their fleet you can then get big guns experts which increases the capital ship attack marksmen which increases the chance to score critical hits safety-first reduces the damage from crits so especially if you have a bit of a leaky screen then safety first can be very effective to mitigate the damage done by torpedoes likewise with crisis magician of their marksman and crisis magician are mutually excuse mutually exclusive ground pounder is a naval and vish naval invasion ability this just reduces the number of guns that you require to get the maximum bonus this does not increase the maximum bonus that you get from Shore bombardment so if you have ships sitting right on the shore so imagine there's a battle going on in the hague for example you have capital ships parked in one of these two tiles they will give a short bombardment bonus in The Hague that bonus is not increased by ground pounder or naval liaison which is the general equivalent but rather it requires less I begun so if you have a lot of battleships is irrelevant if you have just like one or two heavy cruisers it might be useful but honestly it's very very limited to you so much rather see that trait actually increase the amount of damage done by Shore bombardment and actually this does lead us on to another point there is actually another order here which is naval invasion support if you toggle this then your ships will sail to whichever port you're using to launch a naval invasion from and then when you launch it your fleet will actually esque or your Army's tile burt i'll so it means that they're much less likely to be intercepted by submarines and like and then any planned battle going on in an adjacent province so for example if we just clear that we set you to naval invasion support in the english channel any battles going on in the dutch coast the Belgian coast of the French northern coast northern French coast they will provide a short bombardment bonus to I don't know exactly how that is done in regards to how many guns are on that battle how many guns are in that battle it does seem to spread them but that can be really really good if you know you're fighting a lot of battles on the shore stick a couple of ships and naval invasion support and that can be really really effective though of course bear in mind that enemy ships might also be trolling around in the area and you may well need to consider that another thing which I've just noticed is we do have a couple of ships here which are damaged so whereas before I was talking about having the automatic split off to repair this is how you would do it manually so we've just sent all of these back home to repair and then once they are repaired they will join the fleet automatically so that's really a nice thing to have then we also have mind and minesweeping so we have one cruiser here which does have the mine-laying kit and with that you can assign them to be mine laying mines can do damage to ships sailing through that region so if we plaster the English Channel with mines enemy shipping that goes through there has a chance being here I admit that chance is fairly low you will not do a lot of damage with this the real threat offered by mind says it would reduce the speed of all enemy ships in that area so for example if they are a bunch of submarines causing you mayhem and you mine it then their submarines gonna move slower meaning that your destroyers can react more quickly and sink them likewise if you're being hit by a lot of surface Raiders so if Germany is using the battle cruisers to do hit-and-run surface raids if you lay a bunch of mines you're gonna have a lot more chance to catch them or conversely if you are Germany and you're using mines against the Royal Navy they're going to have a much more difficult chants or much more difficult time to actually catch you so if you mine everything around say the Eastern North Sea then they are going to struggle to really control the Eastern North Sea because you'll just be able to hit and run pretty much at will and these be penalty is offered by mine laying can be pretty potent that was again one of the things I mind the whole entirety of the Mediterranean during the paradox multiplayer game and that really stymied the effectiveness of enemy submarines in that area and really allowed me to counter that fairly easily so yeah not very often use I admit I'm probably not the best example of using mines because that's the only time I ever really use them but I do know how important they can be particularly in those strategic instances where you want maneuverability and speed to really count against your opponent so the final part of this tutorial is going to be talking about the doctrines I'm not going to do this on a blow-by-blow account of what exactly each of these upgrades does rather just give you an overview of what to expect from the different branches so starting with Fleet and being this is the most generalist option they have really good escort efficiency abilities their surface fleets are excellent they're by far the most powerful battleships in the game although actually trade interdiction doesn't pull that far behind in that they're carriers however are awful fleeting being carriers not great one exception is they actually can detect enemy submarines very effectively these last two technologies increase the sub detection of carriers so it is possible that you could create small fast carriers which are only there to bolster recon and anti sub I have not tried this but theoretically that's possible they also have decent submarine abilities there they're just really good all-round they are also the only ones that bolster mine laying efficiency as you can see down here next up we've got trade interdiction trade interdiction is all about hitting enemy convoys shipping they have bonuses to submarines in fact all of this chain right here are these submarines but also their surface fleets they have bonuses for all ship classes particularly nope just yeah cruisers battle cruisers battleships and submarines have a very hefty convoy raiding bonus this effectively reduces the number of ships that you require to cover a region and therefore just have a high efficiency their surface fleets are pretty good at fighting not as good as the fleet in being but decent but the really big problem that trade interdiction has is they just have no escort efficiency whatsoever so although they do have the ability to detail no their 5% I think that's literally a yep five percent so they struggle to protect their own convoys their main role is just hitting enemy convoys but like I said the surprise bonus is these two this one where they're light cruisers heavy cruisers battle cruisers then over here they're submarine but elipse are also really good at raiding next up we've got trade interdiction which are all about doing damage to enemy convoys they have a lot of bonuses to convoy raiding four cruisers battle cruisers and battleships so even their surface capital ships are good at raiding their carriers are decent not on the same level of space strike but definitely superior to flea in being and even their surface ships can probably go toe-to-toe with Lee and being they certainly won't win it but they have a lot of bonuses which are in common for example the capital ship armor here so trade interdiction again another generalist option however they really struggle in terms of protecting their own convoys so whereas fleet and being has quite a few options to increase the escort efficiency trade interdiction has a precisely five percenter score efficiency bonus they are very very bad at that so if you're expecting to need to do a lot of overseas trade than traded interdiction is probably not the choice for you if however you want to really cause a lot of damage to enemy shipping and bring them to need their knee is particularly like I know the UK or possibly even Japan trade interdiction could certainly be your option there then finally we have base strike which I will admit I have had the least experience with because I don't tend to use carriers but they are by far and away the best carrier option their carriers are really quite obscene getting more than double the organization of any other ship in any other category so even the fleet in being battleships pale in comparison to the base strike carriers they are incredible the other thing which are extremely strong for bay strike are light cruisers far more so than basically any other ship so base strike you just want to use light cruisers and carriers which will actually result in extremely quick hit-and-run fleets they could do an awful lot of damage they have a pretty good balance between trade interdiction convoy rating from their submarines and then also the escort of their own convoys so I quite like the balance from this and then finally they have kind of a hidden bonus where land-based naval bombers are more effective so if you're not really planning on doing much at sea and instead are going to be using land-based aircraft to counter enemy naval activity base strike could well be the option for you so for example here we have plus 50% port strike efficiency that's for everything that's not just carrier aircraft that's land-based too and then also I think they have another one somewhere the final bonus for bass strike is they can have an additional carrier in battle so whereas the other two trade injection fleet and being can have up to four carriers in a naval engagement before they start taking penalties and that's regardless of the size the carrier by the way it's just a straight-up penalty per ship and its hefty it's like 20 percent penalty per ship over base striking can have up to five carriers in an engagement before they start suffering penalties so there you go if you like carrier space strike if you like using submarines and just sinking their shipping or you just like using ships as hit and run in trade interdiction if you're trying to do anything else fleeting being and if you're worried about your own convoys being here fleet in being or base strike steer clear of trade interdiction anyway I think that is gonna be it from me for now there are many other things I could talk about for example ship designs but honestly this was more about how to use the ships rather than to create them once you have a role in mind you can usually design a ship to do that so if you are trying to have really good escorts then you probably be designing destroyers with try they're very cheap or very good at anti-submarine warfare if you're doing hit and run tactics then you're going to be designing ships for speed probably at a sacrifice of armor whereas if you're just line of battle trying to do as much damage slugging match then you're going to be piling on the armor piling on the guns I would say that's rather more clear on a surface level so you can make your own decisions within the ship designer and it's a really cool system by the way I don't really want to like hash over just the opportunities you have in terms of equipping ships and choosing exactly how you want them built and coming up with your own designs this is really cool but it's a lot more self apparent and exactly how that all works anyway I do hope that this has been of use to you be sure to hit that subscribe button if you want to get more information like this I do play rather a lot of hearts of iron particularly in Kaiser AI so if you are interested in checking that out or if you just want to see naval engagements actually done a lot I tend to play very very naval heavy countries like the UK the nether and the USA Sweden Greece Italy Japan then come along and say hi you could usually find me on Twitch which is twitch.tv slash moderate Viking and it'll be an absolute pleasure to see you there otherwise we have discord if you have any questions for me personally you can find that in the description below be great to you see you there as well new faces are always welcome anyway thanks everyone for watching do have you've enjoyed this I'll catch you next time [Music]

Channel: Mordred Viking

Views: 69,105

Rating: 4.9728508 out of 5

Keywords: Strategy Game (Game Genre), Strategy Video Game (Video Game Genre), Mordred, MordredViking, Viking, Let's Play, Lets Play, LP, Game, Computer Game, PC, Gameplay, letsplay, Single, Player, SP, HOI4, Hearts, of, Iron, Man, the, Guns, Naval, Tutorial, How, To, Learn, Learning, Navy, Ship, Ships

Id: OLGeVlMQOfo

Length: 51min 44sec (3104 seconds)

Published: Sat Nov 02 2019