Hi everyone! I'm home from vacationing in the US now and visiting the Battleship USS Iowa in Los Angeles. So I thought talking more about navies would be appropriate!Sadly the class was refitted for the cold war era and lost its bristling of AA guns for Tomahawks. Luckily FDR's bathtub was still there thoughWe have previously covered the actual naval combat here so read that again if you need a refresher. Today we will be looking more at the big picture stuff.Just like the strategic air war navies spend most of their time on missions in strategic areas, but are also able to move province by province. When in a strategic area each fleet has a value indicating how spread out it is. In general a more spread out fleet can cover more area and have a higher chance of finding the enemy, but will take time to concentrate its forces and bring them all to bear. Things like how fast fleets of a certain composition can converge and how well they can search in an area is controlled in large part from Naval Doctrines. We'll cover those in detail in a future diary, but as an example if you pick the Trade Interdiction doctrine you can unlock Wolfpack tactics which will make sure your subs find more targets and can all get together and strike more often.There are several missions available:- Focus on finding the enemy as efficiently and as spread out as possible- Much like Patrol but less efficient at searching while keeping the fleet together more. Suitable for trying to force large fleet vs fleet battles, say like the Battle of Midway.- Focus on raiding convoys and avoid engaging warships.- Protect any convoys in an area from raiders.- used to control large scale land invasions. We'll cover this in later diaries.- Not really a mission, but can be useful for ships like Carriers that you want to just position like a floating airfield.When fleets find each other or convoys of the enemy naval combats will trigger. Depending on how spread out the fleet is, doctrines and luck its going to be a smaller part of the fleet that makes initial contact. Naval battles in HOI4 can simulate longer affairs where ships join over time as the rest of the fleet rushes to help.While you need to actually directly conquer an enemy to beat them, doing so after they are weakened is always better and easier. Production in HOI4 requires resources that gets convoyed from trade, or from overseas territory so a good way of weakening an enemy is to hurt their ability to produce equipment and reinforce their armies using convoy raiders. In HOI3 it never really felt like submarine warfare had enough impact and we want to fix that in HOI4 and force nations to have to spend resources to counter it. The way the strategic area mission system works also allow you to use surface raiders, like how Germany historically used its few heavy cruisers to tie up and frighten the British navy.Convoys are extremely important and transport both replacement equipment to oversea battlefields, supplies and resources so hurting them will have a large effect, sunk convoys can't be instantly replaced either so active defense is necessary, you cant just try to outproduce the enemy's sinking. Lend lease of equipment and tanks to allies also use convoys and this material can all be lost to the bottom of the ocean when faced with an efficient submarine net.